I Love Daddy Review

Title: I Love Daddy
Release date: 2017-07-28
Developer & publisher: Flamecito

Patreon really has a thing for incest porn games... Clarification - it had a thing for incest games, before the recent change in guidelines, which banned incest from the platform. Nevertheless, eight out of ten adult games on Patreon include incest in some sort of capacity. I'm neither a huge incest fan, nor do I put much faith in Patreon creators, so I was understandably skeptical regarding a game from a first time developer Flamecito, called "I Love Daddy".

When I first heard of "I Love Daddy", I completely dismissed the visual novel as a shovelware. Frankly, it didn't look pretty and it was yet another game centered on a daughter trying to get in her father's pants; as if such games are not dime a dozen. I finally decided to give it a chance, and I'm so glad I did, because otherwise I would have missed one of the best OELVNs I have ever encountered.

Biggus Dikkus.

Now, to be fair, graphically the game is definitely not that impressive. The author started the development process on RPG Maker MV and later shifted to Ren'Py. This resulted in a very weird and way too small for a modern game resolution - whoever heard of a recent game running in 816x653. It's not even a round 800x600! That at least would have made a certain amount of sense. The GUI is also very plane, and the text box appears to be the default one of Ren'Py. You would be surprised how important a custom GUI can be, and maybe less people would dismiss this brilliant gem, if it looked better to the spoiled eye.

Just like majority of a recent boom of Patreon-funded VNs, "I Love Daddy" uses 3D renders instead of drawn art. That in and of itself is not bad, as people nowadays can create VNs without knowing how to draw or hiring a dedicated artist. Not to mention that with time and effort, really beautiful scene renders can be made. The renders in ILD do not look beautiful, nor do they look particularly terrible - they simply appear to be mediocre. Sometimes I encountered graphical flubs, where the character expression was made unintentionally funny, but otherwise there were no particular issues with the game. Well, except for the fact that Anna's render looks so young, that she might be a sister to the protagonist, rather than a mother. While many incest games have that problem, portraying the mother character as particularly beautiful and younger than expected, "I Love Daddy" takes it to the eleven, which becomes unintentionally funny as the game progresses.

I love your geeky shirt, Daddy.

On the other hand, the way the renders were made is also a strength of the game's presentation. You see, there are a few different methods of rendering. The most popular is to render characters and backgrounds separately and then combine them within the engine, the other method is to render the full scene. The former method is quicker, but there are only so many ways you can position the rendered sprites within the same bland background, while the latter method is very time consuming, but it creates much more realistic scenes. "I Love Daddy" uses the latter rendering style, thus, while the renders themselves are not very good looking, the scenes look much more alive than in many other games, and the character expressions are more realistic, thus pulling you into the game more easily.

And Flamecito does know how to pull the readers in with his unconventional writing style. At first glance the VN appears to have a fairly cliche plot. Our female protagonist (who can be named however you wish) spends a holiday in Venice with her father, who is only ever called Daddy in the game, and whose real name shall forever be a mystery. In fact, it was his wife Anna, who was supposed to go with him to Italy, but she has been both physically and emotionally distancing herself from her family for many years now, and refused the invitation. Hence daddy invited his little girl, without realizing what he is gonna unleash onto himself. One night, the protagonist woke up due to a faulty A/C unit and was greeted by a sight that simply mesmerized her - her father's big dick.

What a sight for sore eyes.

Upon their return from the vacation, the protagonist spends all her time thinking about her daddy's big tool, masturbating to her fantasies and gearing herself to jump her dad's bones. What is a girl to do, but seek solace and advice from her best friend Catherine, who is a known and notorious slut. Catherine is more than happy to help her friend in winning her daddy's "arm-dick", as she names it, the only question is if the sudden appearance of the protagonist's estranged mother Anna will ruin her endeavour... or move it along.

All of the female characters in this game are crazy to the n-th degree. Everyone is a cheerful bisexual polyamorous slut, even if they are still a virgin. The game doesn't tease us for too long, and very quickly the VN evolves into a bizarre carnival of couplings, threesomes and foursomes. Yes, ILD is unashamedly a nukige, as sex is a major focus of the story, but the game also doesn't forget other sexual aspects. If someone isn't having sex at any given time, they might tease each other sexually, try to seduce each other or simply talk dirty.

Whoever guesses that dad throws his daughter under the bus, wins.

Dirty talking deserves its own honourable mention, as everyone does this in this VN to great effect. It's especially prevalent during the sex scenes, as ILD completely does away with usual bad porn moaning and rather substitutes it with really dirty conversations. Sometimes they are arousing, sometimes simply funny, but they always work within the context of the game.

With how much sex everyone is having in the game, you might be excused to think that the developer simply threw in the kitchen sink without any thought, but that is decidedly not true. It's quite apparent that a lot of thought went into every aspect of the game, the H-scenes notwithstanding. Depending on the route you get on, not only the plot, but also the sex scenes might take a completely different turn, and if you play your cards right (or wrong), you might finish the game still being a virgin... Well, OK, a technical virgin, because everyone knows that blowjobs and anal sex do not count.

Just look at her facial expression... LOL

When it comes to the sexual content itself, "I Love Daddy" is not a disappointment - it's a celebration! It's definitely not yet another "he put his sex inside her sex" vanilla fare; almost every single sex act, that is not on the very edges of extreme content is featured within this visual novel. With a particular focus on anal pleasures, there is "vanilla" anal sex, anal toys, anal fingering and anal licking. All the female characters are kinky as hell, thus you are gonna experience many different sexual positions and gonna see characters playing with the particular protein shake excreted by males, in every imaginable way.

However, the greatest achievement of "I Love Daddy" is that all the sex doesn't get in the way of plot. And the plot does have everything and a kitchen sink in it. The game has completely unique routes, which branch very early on. The very first decisions already start forming the path you will be traveling while reading the novel. In some routes the whole game is a feel-good romcom about the family rediscovering itself through finally communicating with each other, and, of course, hot sex. However, just a few decisions away it suddenly turns into a high-adrenaline heist VN, but take a sudden turn and it's a gangster thriller. Gangsters not enough for you? So how about the game suddenly going completely science fiction on your ass. And if you are particularly jaded and nothing can surprise you anymore, the high-fantasy invades and carries you away on fairy wings.

Best friend ever!

The plot of ILD is a complete lunacy in the best positive sense of the word. It's like the developer threw everything at the wall, looking what's gonna stick, but he noticed that everything sticks and left it like that... and it fucking works! You know what else works? The writing, which only shows how important the good writer is even for games that focus majorly on sex. Flamecito paints every character in overexaggerated tones, so that they come across as mental cases, however those characters flawlessly fit in a game, where the whole world seems to follow completely unconventional logic. Moreover, the developer doesn't just rely on weird and strange to keep the interest of the players, as many of the conversations within the novel are very poignant. For example, the chat between the mom and the protagonist, regarding why the former was completely okay with her daughter seducing her husband comes away as very heartfelt and important within the inner narrative. It also shows that the author really understands his creations, even if we are sometimes left baffled.

Some people just have no appreciation for public sex.

The writing has a pervading sense of dry humour going through it, with the characters deadpanning conversations that make you alternatively go "wait, what" and roll on the floor laughing. I don't remember another VN, where I honestly laughed so much throughout the whole play time. And the game isn't even especially comedic, as it also has plenty of drama, and action and everything else.

While the writing is awesome, it still lacks some proofreading and there are quite a lot of grammar mistakes and weird sounding sentences. That is no surprise, as Flamecito is Puerto Rican, hence he is probably a native Spanish speaker. After finishing ILD, he started another title centered on a post-apocalyptic world with zombies, but the development is currently stalled due to literal post-apocalyptic conditions of his homeland due to "Maria". At least the developer jokes he will have experience of living in a post-apocalypse and will be able to implement it in his games.

That might just be TMI for your parents.

"I Love Daddy" is quite a lengthy visual novel and it took me exactly 12 hours to fully complete it, mostly without using a walkthrough. I say mostly, because I still needed some help with a few endings, like No. 10 or No. 6b. There are ten endings in total, with some of them having serious variations, and the number rises to 14, if you count every variation as a separate ending. Not to mention that all the endings are very different and pull different emotional strings. They range from complete happy feel-goods like 1b, to terrifyingly bittersweet (7), to complete WTFs (6a).

Ultimately, almost every reader of different tastes can find something to like in "I Love Daddy". They just need to appreciate the really quirky writing and legitimately insane characters in order to get the most out of the game. The game looked almost specifically tailored for me, as I fell in love with its quirkiness from the first lines and basically finished it in two sittings. Everyone should give it a try, maybe you'll even like it as much as I did!

Hello! Has anyone seen my fourth wall? I seem to have misplaced it.

P.S. I encountered a minor bug, while playing the game. Just before the 4th ending, I got an error message "Image 'ed44' not found", though it didn't crash the game or impede my gameplay in any way. It seems that there is a missing or corrupt graphical resource somewhere.

Links of Interest

Visual Novel Database
Developer's Patreon
Download the game from F95Zone (the game has been removed from the Developer's Patreon page)
"I Love Daddy" walkthrough (refer to the link above)

Final Verdict: 83%