Ren'Py - Space Journey X [v1.30.15] [y.v.]

Best game I've played on f95. Best game I've played on f95. Best game I've played on f95. Best game I've played on f95. Best game I've played on f95. Best game I've played on f95. Best game I've played on f95

Normally I skip Sandbox games, because I prefer continuous plot or storyline. However I really like this one for a strange reason. It is very well balanced and keeps me interested with everything that's going on. It is crtainly grindy , but only for the start of the game where you have to build up the cash to develop further. After that it's just good management that keeps you afloat / aflight.

PROs
entertaining clicker
kinky outfits
cash mgmt + minigames
lot of content in game time
visually stylish
good sandbox

CONS
still a sandbox
characters could have more depth
lacking on story
a bit grind-y
repetitive and limited lewd content

Despite the cons I still reserve a special place for this one. It is clearly made with love and is aesthetically very pleasing.

You have to grind a lot, but the art is good, and the story is getting better. Lol, I hope for a lot more story, more women, more sex and more adventures. The art is better than in Stationmaster. It is pretty original. Too many recycle art from other games.

It is a great game with several key aspects to take into account. The progression has been taken into great care, there's a lot of content in the form of quests that are well mixed.

Combat is quite simple once you get to understand it, but it grants satisfaction when you are progressing and killing those crafts that previously where demolishing you.

The sexual aspect could be improved in my opinion. Even though that the unlocking/progression is quite nice, the actual scenes are severely lacking in erotism. This also makes the characters and their relationships fall quite flat. In any case, I guess this could always be improved.

As it is, I am having fun and I haven't even finished the content.

Love the game i actually spent a lot of time in it. extremely entertaining for me.

Gameplay:
Solid gameplay ,mechanics might be a bit grindy ,but over all breaking that threshold the game is really appealing. The combat is entertaining, money is well balanced to some extent, and adult content is good too.

Story:
The story is very consistent, funny at times. It matches the porn scenes. I am personally not a fan of ren´py games but this one actually made me read the story for once.

Art - CG:
Renders look extremely good. Would love to see a bit more animated cgs. Background places ,cities ,ship, and the others are easy to understand where are you standing.

BGM - Sound:
Sound is descent, maybe a bit flat in some cases but it matches the esthetic. Personally i would love to have some voice actors but is not that the game needs it.

I quite like this game, as a TL;DR I'll say that the game has good presentation. it makes the most out of RenPy's rudimentary framework. Although the models are a matter of taste I find them appealing, unique and with a good amount of eroticism. Writing is above average for these type of games. And the cherry on top is the Dev's work ethic. My one pet peeve however is with the porn side of things which I'll elaborate further down.

Presentation
Dev puts great effort into making this look and feel like a proper videogame, menus and interfaces generally feel snappy and have distinctive flare, you can tell right away that thought and care was put into them.

Gameplay
Probably one of the more divisive parts about Space Journey X, I think the game systems play off each other well and don't overstay their welcome, as you recruit crew you can delegate tasks to other people and hold more of a management role which I quite like, do keep in mind that I'm quite tolerant for grind and for me this game is almost right on the edge of being annoying but I enjoy it for what it is, I find it gratifying when number go up. My one minor complaint is that I wish it was a bit more integrated with the narrative, mainly how the crew involve themselves with the gameplay and the story, which there is some of that but I wish there was a bit more.

Sound
Serviceable, doesn't stand out in a negative or positive way. The music and sound effects fulfil their purpose and they add to the overall presentation

Visual Art
Models look good, they are unique and I like the lewd costumes the cast wears, especially the default starting ones. Nudity comes rather quickly and abruptly, I would've liked it to be a bit more built up, but that's just my preference.

Writing
Story follows a typical space adventure set up with a comedic tone and it's fairly consistent in that regard, it's very cliched but I think that's a good thing, it's fun to see how the erotic beats tread on familiar territory. In western erotic games sci-fi is not done that often so I appreciate seeing it when it does show up. Writing's biggest strength however is how it reads with no issues (like it was written by a native speaker or someone with very fluent English) which is always nice to see. My one complaint is with characterization (mainly with the female crew), although the girls have different personalities they share common traits, they are all somewhat taciturn and they express themselves in a very similar manner

Porn
I think porn scenes are y.v.'s biggest weakness as a creator and the one thing holding him back from being a top 5 developer (in my eyes). I'll start with the good, I enjoy the light BDSM theme that the game has, I feel indifferent for it most of the time but I can enjoy it sporadically, out of everything I think this is the one thing he really excels at. I enjoy the transactional and emotionless nature of some of the scenes... up to a point. The scene structure usually goes something along the lines of: MC convinces girl to do sexual act -> Sexual act starts -> 3 second animation loop back and forth -> MC cums -> End, this makes it feel like you are watching a guy fuck a blow up doll which is also something that happens within the game, so the contrast is more stark when the girl has the personality of a dead fish throughout the whole thing. There are a few exceptions to this and these are the scenes that I like the most where there is a set up, different scene transitions, dialogue between the characters, different emotions, etc. I'm the type of guy that prefers still images with dialogue and writing to carry the scene and in this case the animations are not that spectacular to carry the scenes alone

y.v. as a creator has huge potential (imo) he has made huge leaps from his past game and even in Space Journey X you can see growth between each update. Whatever direction he decides to take I'm eager to see what he has in store in the future.

Story isent bad but there really isent much, you could proberly read all the text in 10 mins if it was a normal novel.

To me the grind is just to crazy, it takes forever to get anywhere with anyone, first you get them to use one dress and make them to 50 things to then move on to another dress where you again need to do alot before getting to do a ton of handjobs then a ton of bjs, then force the one virgin into a fuck machine to get used to being fucked before MC gets the chance, i know there is no virgin tag but tris comes from a planet where they never have sex....so yeah....missed the chance of making a virgin scene which could have been a fun one, with her getting her very first orgasme experince and so on, but shes calm and just takes it like its nothing but a job.

Getting the AI cores for the ship always takes forever, everything just takes to long.

It proberly has something to do with the lack or personality since shes a clone of spock from star trek which is also meh, out of the 4 girls 2 has that kind of boring personalilty.

Then there is the sex scenes where the animations are just really boring and very short and camara position is really bad in most scenes, so you play for hours with little to no reward....not even the girls show any emotions when they have sex, it just so very weird.

Then where there finaly is a princess aka spoiled brat, you get quest to bow down to kiss her feet so she can have her bathtub and a servant????????
please someone explain to why MC dosent punish that bitch and put her stright like he does with all the other crew.......so bad.....

The girls are close to the same build seen one nude seen em all, i wasent really a fan of the looks either not ugly but not hot either, i did like Nimhe a little but thats about it.

So the general premise is pretty good. Like it's a fairly understandable story.

The only issue I have regarding the story is when the story updates and I have a bit of a time looking at any thing I might've missed or seeing quests that aren't finished - but the game is updating quite readily, so you can't fault it in that aspect of the game.

The art is pretty alright, I feel like the animation could be smoother or something, but the nsfw bit feels like it doesn't get sidelined and is actually a part of the gameplay and story itself and, generally, fits kind of well into it.

And, for some reason, even though you can't repeat saves in the game, I'm actually pretty content replaying some content and even, on occassion, grinding back a chunk of my stuff if I don't use the item-save mechanic in the game.

It can be better, sure by a bit, but the fact that it's still getting updated so fast makes it worth a better rating in the near future.

Space Journey X is an extremely frustrating game to play, because it feels like one of the biggest displays of wasted talent on F95Zone.

There's so much skill on display in the art, programming and to a certain extent even the writing here, that it makes the central issue of the game all the more glaring: the sex-scenes are perfunctory, anodyne affairs which run directly contrary to the themes of the plot as well as the conventions of the genre.

Space Journey X is, ostensibly, a trainer game. The structure of the game is the same, with the main character progressively corrupting the crew members into wearing ever skimpier uniforms and engaging in progressively more involved sex acts - standard trainer game fare. The main character also refers to training the crew members multiple times, making it clear that this is the intended thrust of the game.

However, the heart of the trainer genre is just that - corruption. The progression of the characters is such that they come to enjoy and even desire more "depraved" acts as the game goes on, demonstrating the effectiveness of the training from which the genre takes its name. However, none of this is ever present in Space Journey X.

None of the women in this game ever express any actual affirmative interest in sex. The "main girl" T'riss views it exclusively as a scientific endeavor or a chore undertaken to further her mission. That's a very reasonable starting point for a corruption plot, but practically speaking, the character never progresses in her training. As the game goes on, the main character manages to convince T'riss to engage in handjobs and blowjobs. She also is put into an "autotrainer" - a sci-fi fucking machine that's supposed to cure her frigidity (in service of the mission of course!) and then later submits to "Krell pet training" - but it never amounts to an actual change in her character. Even after training her to the full extent that the game allows, actually having sex is still rejected by default as not advancing the mission.

Further, almost all the "good stuff" in terms of the training happens either off screen or completely interactively. The autotrainer stuff happens without the main character's input at all, and amounts to exactly one animation of T'riss in the machine with no dialogue. For the Krell Pet Training, she's literally sent off the ship at the start of the day and comes back in the evening, then refuses to tell you anything at all. The only indicator of progression we get is an integer for submissiveness increasing.

The sex scenes that do happen on-screen are, as mentioned, very perfunctory. They generally involve the girl dispassionately giving a handjob or blowjob, or getting in the position and saying "I think you're supposed to move now" or something to that effect.

At no point in the game do any of the women verbally express any sexual desire or pleasure. It's implied that they do have sexual desires - many of the characters have dildos in their cabins of the ship, and one of them frequently masturbates and even does self-bondage on the ship. But during the sex scenes only the main character ever expresses pleasure by going "aaaaaah" like fives times then jizzing all over everything.

This is a big issue for a trainer game. The gameplay loop of a trainer game is to do some gameplay activities in order to increase corruption, which then rewards you with character progression. The trained character falls gradually into corruption, and the dialogue reflects how the training has changed their view of the things you're doing. Without this progression in the characters, the game becomes essentially the quest of one guy to find progressively more convoluted ways to pester women into having sex with him until they reluctantly agree with a sort of disinterested shrug. This very much undercuts the enjoyment of playing the game, end leaves one feeling kind of cheated at the end.

The developer's last game, The Princess and the Tower, had the same issue of the main girl just never really seeming into any of the sexual stuff in any meaningful way.

There is one exception to this in the later updates of the game which added a discipline minigame which does, at least in principle, address the women in the game enjoying sexual acts. Gameplay-wise it asks you to balance sexual pleasure with stress in the disciplining. This is a common conceit in games like this and works well, however even here there is a missed opportunity. The women only comment with a single line at the end of the disciplining, and only one of them ever expresses approval, no matter how high the pleasure meter goes.

Even so, having the disciplining game does provide a ray of hope that the game could come to actually incorporate the women in the game as actual characters with sexual desires rather than hard done by sex dolls just trying to go about their day and handing out quick blowjobs to the annoying ship's captain so they can get back to their work as soon as possible.

Grindy but decent game mechanics. However, the grind is simply not worth the reward. There are few sex scenes with penetration, and they're WAY too short (few seconds, one angle, one position) . If you're looking to fap, this game isn't it atm and not sure if it ever will be as sex content doesn't seem to be a priority

Good:
- plot
- graphics
- gameplay
- no bugs

Bad:
- very, VERY grindy
- combat is rather hard, requiring to use lots of expensive consumables - making for more grind
- the price of some items is very high, again, making it even more grindy
- sex scenes are very brief
- older save games not compatible - this is a big NO, NO (even with the quick start option at beginning of game)

The lost on a spaceship start is a bit tropey but the game has plenty of great plot threads and each character has its own interesting story. Space Journey plays like a trainer but with a ton of gameplay systems and progression to break things up.

[v0.9c1]

I really liked The Princess and the Tower, and this follow-up builds on that for a game that is more ambitious in almost every way. A lot of effort has clearly been put in, and there a lot of good parts (the unique graphic style being the standout) and nothing that's particularly bad. It's a competent and professional production.

And yet… for me it does not come together as an enjoyable game. I think that comes down to three or four things:

1. The gameplay loop isn't super fun, with a lot of different systems to learn and things that need to be upgraded by grinding before you can play effectively. Then once you get a grip on things, a lot of it has already become irrelevant because you're earning so much money that you have no need for it any more. (An example is Transport Missions: I don't think there's ever any time in the game when you have the capability to carry them out and they're still worth doing. Another is the sex bot designer: you can spend hours messing around with it, but by the time you can access good components and have figured out how to get the most out of them, there's no longer any point.)

2. The story is pretty unfocused, without clear stakes. The basic premise is that the MC is stranded in another galaxy and wants to get home, but there's no indication what makes this galaxy (which has humans) different from ours, and he seems to be fitting in just fine and living his dream life, so why? Anyway, most of the game is only very tangentially related to this goal.

3. The sex scenes are extremely brief (literally just a couple of seconds in many cases), emotionless and robotic, and several seem to reuse the same animation. They almost all follow a format where you pester or bribe some woman to have sex, she says OK, there's a single loop of pumping, a cumshot, the woman asks if you're done, and you go on with your day. Not particularly sexy. (A small handful of scenes that tie into the story are more rewarding.)

I think a lot of the problems come down to the fact that the characters are very thinly sketched (the MC is a blank slate with zero personality), and there aren't a lot of personal interactions between them, so the sex scenes and story developments feel meaningless. The Princess and the Tower, with its smaller cast and more streamlined story, took the time to build fun dynamics between the characters, which Space Journey X sorely lacks.

Space Journey X, as well as Princess in the Tower (same developer), are absolute gems. I thought I was ambivalent to this style of game until I tried these. The gameplay system is easy to get used to and understand. The characters are phenomenal - they each have their own personality and intrigue that draws you in and you really feel responsible for their “progression” and ultimate fate. Also the art style is just super clean and appealing. Everything from the actors, textures, backgrounds, down to the smallest objects feel like a cohesive part of the game’s stylized aesthetic. On top of that the developer is an awesome individual who creates every aspect of these games and posts detailed dev tracking logs while developing projects and has helped give me some tips when I reached out.

Great game. The sci fi nature of this one has opened up all kinds of imaginative mechanics that make the story progression super fun. 10/10, I’ll play every project from y.v.

I normally do not write reviews but I just had to for this one.

Game Concept:
At its core a trainer game but on the surface an well designed space exploration, trading and combat gameplay loop. A complex sexbot construction minigame keeps you motivated as player even when the main quest/content is done to get that one awesome sexbot that has eluded you so far.
If you want gameplay on rails with just a string of sex scenes this game is not for you. You actually have to play the game. And there is a lot of game.

NSFW
Animations are rather short and seem to use looped frames, but are well placed. Excellent renders and unique character designs loosely based on existing sci-fi lore. Reasonably challenging training mechanic with attributes to raise and humorous dialogues leading up to the "event". Niot to forget the lewd uniform trope being used gratuitously...

Stability / Design
For the complexity it is offering very stable despite its regular content and gameplay updates.

Summary
All in all a game I have been looking for since the days of playing content like Elite and X.

The concept allows for many more quests and alien races as the crew travels towards home and I sincerely hope it will use this potential to the fullest.

Great Game!

This would be a 5+ stars game and could actually be fun to play.

But.....

-With the walk-through and grinding/repeating actions in specific day time and place you'll manage to proceed.

-Without the walkthrough (and even if you take in consideration the hints inside the game)... good lack unlocking the quests.

V.0.9
Gameplay Excellent
One distinguishing feature of this game is that it is a ''actuall game'', unlike many others.
it has everything from space combat, economy and trading, to making your own sex bot factory.
It's not perfect and can be a bit a grind, but it's far from the worst. There are areas that could use improvement, but overall it earns top marks.

Story - Good
It has some of the typical ''porn-game tropes'' like the crew having to wear sexy uniforms for contrived reasons and other contrived reasons for sexual activities but nothing too ridiculous.
the plot and story are quite good, the protaganist adventure to find his way back home, while trying to get rich, uncover the mysteries of the galaxy and score som hot alien booty along the way

Art style - Good+
Love it, it's unique and frankly I was a bit skeptical at first but grows on you fast and it's really refreshing to see something new and of this high quality.
the render quality itself or graphics if you will are extremely high, top marks

Sex scenes - Lacking
This is where the game falls a bit short. I won't complain too much about the amount, there is a decent amount at this point and the chase for the ''grand price'' is part of these games.
but what's there ''lacks impact'' for the lack of a better word it looks good but is in desperate need of ''expansion'' some choices, a few more angles, and maybe more than just one position, and a proper climax/some more reaction from the girls would do the trick

A fun game that lacks leud content

The Good:
I hated giving this game 3 stars because there is a lot to love with the gameplay. First off, it's actually a game. Many in this genre are not. It has similarities to the great Treasure of Nadia. The concept of upgrading your ship and crew, trading, and space fights are very cool. Not to mention the sexbot building. A very cool feature with one VERY big missed opportunity I'll address later. I also love the art. The women are sexy... they all have a similar look but the other unique characters you come across the galaxy are cool.

The Bad:
Holy grind. Don't play this game if you're not prepared to play for a while or if you're eager to get your rocks off. Way too often you complete a task then have to go to the other side of the map just to get a license or something else that won't allow you to move further. Luckily, the gameplay is pretty fun.

Easily my BIGGEST gripe with the game is the leud content. The scenes are few and far between, too short, not good quality, and there is a lack of choice and nuance. No position, camera angle, when/where to cum, etc. Also, you have the whole sexbot building system... WHY NOT USE THAT TO YOUR ADVANTAGE!? Let players customize the bots and choose which ones they want to fuck. Boob size, butt shape, hair color, race (maybe even include other alien races), body type. There is SOOO much missed opportunity there.

This could be the best game on this site with a few of these suggestions implemented. Not only that, it could be fun without the lewd stuff.

It's a great game with a nice Star-Treky storyline. There is also quite a game underneath it with a fighting and trading system. Frequent updates and a developer who is involved in the community also is a major plus.

I'm really enjoying this game. Lots of subplots, great graphics, great girls. It can be a little grind-y to get the money and equipment you need, but there's a lot to keep you amused. I think my only request would be more (and more varied) sex scenes, and maybe the ability to 'test' the sexbots before sending them out to work. Hopefully there'll be more training for a couple of the girls in future releases too.