What does a butler have to do with a young man who travels to a big city in order to live with a woman and her daughter? We don't know yet either, but The Butler does it's best to lure you into the path of a special young man, Ethan.


STORY
The premise seems fairly standard - a young man moving away from home to live with his tenant. Both the journey and the settling in are not without hiccups, but there’s a certain charm in the game that keeps things light and interesting. The MC seems like an introverted virgin, who along his way has to navigate around hot women. Nothing fancy there, but the game is dialog-heavy and the characters weighted, which make for believable conversation.

Rebeka and Tracy are among the first women teased in the intro who Ethan actually gets to meet during the first episode of the story. Rebeka is a sweet but overloaded mother trying to make ends meet and Tracy is her smart, but daring daughter. You end up making conversation and becoming closer to them, in ways that spell fun things for the future.

There’s a bit of a surprise at the end of the first episode, which shows us the developer DonQuit has a bigger story in mind for the unaware characters. The landlady seems nice enough and her daughter might come off a bit too strong, but it works in the end.


PRESENTATION
Ethan, the MC, looks like a typical 16-year old introvert kid. Not an MC to my heart, but the presentation from the developer has me thinking there is a good reason he picked this specific character. All the other characters seem pretty well-crafted, which leads me to believe something will be going on with Ethan. While the world isn’t hyper-realistic, it’s believable enough to lose yourself in - especially with the attention to detail this developer has made for the game. As long as you don’t mind a horse-schlong MC, you will be fine.

The interface is something special here - while the gameplay is a highlight, everything is meticulously designed in a way to make it work. The contextual interactions, the dialog initiator - it’s all intuitive and gives promise for a lot of big, fun things the developer could be hinting at.

As of 0.1, there is one intimate scene in the game which feels far too short and out of focus due to the depth of field used. There’s an animation and it works, but it just doesn’t translate the interaction between the characters involved. Hopefully in the next updates, such interactions will be given more time to expand.

The Butler is one of the nicest presentations I’ve ever seen in a Ren’Py game, and not necessarily due to the 3D rendered graphics. The interface just works well and the added detail of Ethan visibly carrying his backpack while moving around until he gets to his room is just more immersion. This game is definitely something to keep an eye on and take notes from.


GAMEPLAY
Where this game surprises is the amount of effort that went into creating clickable elements in Ren’Py. This is a story based game and you’ll mostly follow the story, but the developer made an effort to deepen the game with various extra functions. There’s a dialog wheel where you can choose what you want to ask a character. An interactive map that can send you in between places. A character stats screen and an objective tracker, that pops in on your screen to let you know where you need to go.

This is a great experience, because it actually helps build the world as yours instead of just following Ethan along for the story. Contextual actions help give The Butler the feel of a connected world, where every scene is just an extension of the next. While in the basis the game is a novel, the extra gameplay elements do give it an element of exploration. There are multiple women to meet and looking at the interface, each woman has three levels of love they can build for Ethan. There’s a dedicated gallery per character in the works, but this wasn’t implemented in version 0.0.1.



OVERALL
The Butler surprised me with the way it tells the story. That story itself is not so remarkable yet - a young man with his hot tenant and her daughter - but it does seem like bigger changes are happening on the horizon of new releases.

Rating: 7/10 so far
Developer: DonQuit