Ren'Py - Another Chance [v1.43] [TimeWizardStudios]

Version: v1.16

Review:
I like art-style games and I also like to play sandbox games that have a comfortable gameplay even if there is a grind, but this game is not the case. Another Chance looked promising, as there is a dating sim that choices matter during the conversation and some of them you will gain stat points, love and affection with the characters. But unfortunately the game as a whole turned out to be boring to play, because there are too many tasks for too few satisfying rewards.

History:
At a certain point when looking around the scenario I realized that following the story and dialogs would waste my time, so unfortunately I ended up choosing not to follow. I love games with a school setting, but if the game was a little more objective like some games of the same style here on the site, maybe I would care more.But if you like to follow and be entertained by the story, it is a good alternative for you and you will definitely enjoy spending some free time. However, it's not a bad story but unfortunately not for me.
Gameplay:
POS:
Fortunately the game has an easy way to play, this is a positive thing. You can select a task and the game will show you what you need to do, it's good for those who feel dumb or are confused about something, but during the game, I missed more text info, because at one point an NPC was not in the place that the task was saying, I would have to do other tasks to get the NPC to appear again. Another positive point is earning money in the game, an easy and useful way that other games should have, the simple mechanics that for me are to be congratulated, you find money in places around the scenario.
CONS:
You do too many tasks and the reward is not worth it. I didn't expect something like, help that girl and get a blowjob, no, but you do so many things that there comes a time when you get bored, I took hours of gameplay to get only two pornographic scenes because the rest of the game is very weak eroticism, because X-Ray mode doesn't count for me. Another thing that has become tiresome is a large number of items in the game, you have to fetch an item and then craft it and then go back to that same cycle, fetch an item, put the item in a quest, craft, etc. For a porn game it depends per person, I don't see a problem but at some point it gets tiring.
Graphics & Sexual Content:
The graphic style of the artwork is good, although some girls have similar faces that change in appearance because of their hair and eyes. But not all. The bodies are also a bit similar, but nothing that is bad to appreciate.
Talking about the sexual content, it's disappointing to be honest, if there are 4 pornographic scenes its too much because most of them are erotic scenes and not very satisfying, maybe some but I think the game should focus more on that. I spent +4h without following much of the dialogs or the story, played hurriedly and only got 2 sex scenes, a blowjob and an anal. For a game that could have great potential, it ended up being a bit of a disappointment.

Why I did gave 1 star?
Unfortunately, this game did not impress me. I had played this in the past. The game does not have a comfortable gameplay, something that even if there is a grind you enjoy playing, that you feel the game is progressing as you advance through the story, but this is not the case with Another Chance.
There are three pillars for a successful game, a good story, good gameplay and good sexual content. Most people opt for the game to have good sexual content, I opt for that and also to have good gameplay. So, At a certain point the game seems to be fun, but you get scared by the amount of things in the scenario, I usually don't like point-n-click games very much for the reason that I have to click on everything to know if that item is useful or not. But, the reason I give this game a low rating is because the gameplay is tiring (not bad) and also because of the lack of sex scenes. I wish the devs luck, I'm not trying to take all their merit away, it's a good game with good management, but it lacked even the reward that was supposed to be a dating sim more summarized and not too long.

I really enjoy the characters, I don't know that there are any that have already been added that aren't charming in there own way. It's still in development but I'd recommend it regardless. The quest may be a little confusing at times but a guide is included in game which is convenient and makes it difficult to ever be completely lost.

Played v 1.14

This game hits the ground running and attracts attention just with its premise. Then it keeps you around with its hook of an introduction. A one-two punch of solid writing that hits close to home and a plot with intrigue that leaves you asking questions and wanting answers.

Not to mention the art and music which are both exquisitely well done, just on the fundamentals I can already give this game a recommendation.

That being said, the game starts slowly losing steam once the premise fades into the background. The mystery elements occur more and more sporadically as the game shifts into fetch quest hell. Completing the episodic side quests with the in-game guide feels tedious and hand-holdy, but doing it without help feels like running around like a headless chicken.

The game takes on a very surrealist, and dare I say random, tone as it goes along but I can't fault it too much because I feel this surreal writing style does meld with the central supernatural theme. It's a story that thrives on redefining what's normal to the main character. At its worst it reads like an overly cheesy tribute to 90s point and clicks. But at its best, there's some emotionally powerful moments in here. God knows there's people in my life long since gone that I'd love to just hang around with again. I just wish this game hits those emotional highs more often, because even it knows it can.

All in all, I can recommend this game only if you like a good story-driven adventure, and even then I'd probably bow out once the sidequests start getting a bit much. But I'm keeping my eye on this because I firmly believe in this game's potential, just based on the strength of its fundamentals. If it sticks to its main theme of self-improvement and getting the best out of life that you can, this game can potentially be an all-time great. For now, 4/5.

Great art, no sex.
The developer doesn't realize that the story they are building up + the quest system are boring, shitty, and outdated cliches of a bygone era. I wish they would stop focusing on a story that can only be described as mundane and focus on actually creating sexual content that doesn't involve pouring milk onto an inflamed vag.

PLEASE NOTE: I'm coming back to edit this post just to add in this warnjng. The review I wrote was for a version of the game as it was over a year ago. I have no idea how much the game has changed since I wrote it (have not played the game since the review was made) but I am leaving it AS IS since it is still my honest opinion of the version I played. Good luck to the devs, hope the game has improved since my last time here. Loved you art, just not the game play.....


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Rating ver. 1.12.1

Seriously mixed feelings about this one.

Love the art. Top notch stuff there. 5/5
Great characters. 4/5
Funny writing. 4/5
Decent enough story telling. 4/5

That grind though. Oh man. Negative 1000.

Normally I love sandbox games. They're easily my favorite genre. That said everything in "Another Chance" is tied to doing endless laps around the map in order to find, collect, craft, and deliver quest items just to get a couple paragraphs of story progression and/or the occasional short lewd scene.
Basically it's just tons and tons of legwork for minuscule payoffs.

The sad thing is I really could see this actually being a great game if some different design choices had ben made.
And who knows, maybe someday it will be.
There's definitely a LOT of talent on display here with the art and the writing.

But before this game has any chance to become great the dev(s?) would need to start cutting out a ton of the excessive fetch-quest padding and start spending more time focusing on the parts they're doing best: storylines and art.

I really wish I could rate this higher because so much of it is awesome. But videogames are supposed to be about having fun. And right now in it's current state this game just wasn't any fun at all.

Version Played: 1.12.1

I'm guessing the art is going to be the primary element to draw people's attention to this game, and I reckon that they will be very happy with what's here as said art is absolutely fantastic. However, what will keep them here is the writing. While the game contains a substantial amount of laugh out loud snark, there are some moments as you progress in the girls' stories that are genuinely moving and special and those are all due to the quality of the writing. All is not perfect however: while there is a substantial amount of playtime, there is very little smut at this stage and the gameplay systems are quaint if I'm being charitable, annoying if I'm not.

Positives:
+ Beautiful girls
+ High quality writing that can hit multiple ends of the spectrum
+ BUSH!

Negatives:
- Gameplay systems aren't really that fun (to the game's credit, if you turn on hints, you should be able to perform the next task to advance without too much trouble)
- Barely any sexual scenes at this stage
- Your "roommates" are clearly meant to be your family. I get that Patreon etc have regulations, but either do a better job of writing around it (or hey, just remove it. not every game needs incest) or at least have the decency to provide a patch.

The only thing really holding this game back at this point is the dearth of content and cumbersome game systems. The former will hopefully be mitigated as development continues, but that latter might be a bit harder to refine. Honestly, I don't think the latter is a dealbreaker by any stretch, but, for the former, if you're not willing to commit to watching the game develop and just want to quick click for a wank, you might want to bookmark this one and come back in a few updates. For my part, this game is in the higher tiers of my watch list and, once the game gets a bit more content, I will happily be chucking the devs some money via itch.io.

Like This? Try: Love & Sex: Second Base, Dandy Boy Adventures, Fantasy Valley, The Big Beyond
Note to Devs: This is a really fantastic project and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next! (Also, the nurse should totally have bush. Just sayin'.)

It's you're average 2D Renpy game with decent graphics.
So : Takes hours to finish with a guide, a lot of teasing, and few sex scenes.
The in-game guide is one of the best I've ever seen, but even then you're taking too much time to get one picture where you'll be happy to see a little of skin.
So 2/5, it's like so many games of this kind. If you're searching a 2D game, just download a translated Japanese VN.
It's good as a game nevertheless, the interface is good and all, it's just not fun to spend hours without being truly rewarded.

Think this game is great. Fun puzzles, funny and sexy scenes. Enjoy the x-ray mode. Wish the thread would show the changelog for more recent versions so I could track and know when there's enough updated to download again.

- good graphics and character designs
- refreshing and witty plot lines
- point and click...with in game guide

a rather interesting found to me, will come back in a few months for the updates

(hoping there's a bit more kinky stuff by then

This is a amazing game. There is plenty of content to explore and do have one or the other tricky excercise where you need to think before you do stuff. Its not just a game where you click on anything just randomly, you need kind of a system to achive your goals.

All in all its a very very goood game, keep going like that!

I really, really like this game! Took me one and a half days to finish everything, and I was so desperate to unlock the gallery. Seriously, I love the vibes, the story, the sci fi/fantasy second chance concepts, the art styles, the humour, the dialogue, the pop culture, references, interesting mechanics, basically almost everything!

The girls are holy smokes, extremely cute af. Nothing beats Isabelle, Flora, and especially Lindsey. Mrs L, the nurse, Kate, Jacklyn, Maxine, they're all hot. I mean, is there too much to ask for a harem or just all these singular routes we're all gonna come close/down to? Who knows, wait till the end. I've always wanted to find a free one like this and the Internet has graced me...(maybe Steam will help concurrently as usual).

System is flawed with time and bugs, nothing's perfect. Ok. Heh, at least you can cheat for a gallery, stats, money, love, lust and whatever you're doing with console commands. H scenes are great but not sufficient, you get pegged and receive some femdom treatment--which is dope and I'm not complaining or kinkshaming, it's done pretty well. I'm hoping romance and get into these feel good, cuddly wholesome romantic stuff with each girl. At least it's a second chance. I will give mad props to TW Studios for the work, having seen this on r/ForeverAlone, a great post which I stumbled despite 3 years ago. I look forward to fixes and final completion. God, the feels...

This game has extremely good art and writing, definitely one I reccomend. The characters are very well made in both senses.
Even though it is still very early in development, the author seems to update it frequently enough.

great art even if the h content is minimal.

repetitive fetch quest style gameplay and plenty of waiting around for the appropriate time to perform the next step. absolutely bonkers logic to the quests. playing without the guide on is impossible. and even sometimes then it's not always clear from the guide what you're supposed to do.

in the end negatives outweigh the positives and i'm done with this one.

Minimal romance and h-content, despite there (relatively) being a large amount of very repetitive "gameplay" and chore-running and quest-chasing. Game used to be far worse, at least it's remotely playable now. Sadly, just no relevant content. I don't know why games like these are allowed on F95. It isn't a porn game or h-game. It's a chore-running game with a few little bits and pieces of no substance here and there. Like many other weg, it has some potential, but, that's it.

This is legitimately masterful. The art is beautiful, the overall premise is neat and lends itself to a lot of great moments from the narrator, and the writing manages to be funny, erotic, and genuinely touching, depending on the occasion. All of the characters feel fleshed-out and human, instead of caricatures, and I actually really like how much effort it takes to get H-scenes—it's a lot more realistic than other VNs where every love interest is jumping to get into your pants, and makes the effort feel worth it. My one nitpick is the adventure-game moon logic required for some puzzles, which at some points can get into the "Gabriel Knight cat-hair mustache" territory, but the addition of the hint system has greatly mitigated any potential frustration from that, so I won't knock the game any points for it.

Overall, I await updates with bated breath. Godspeed, Time Wizard.

[1.10]

The art is great. The writing is charming. The gameplay is easy enough with how hand-holding the in-game help is. The characters are all appealing in their own ways. It's got everything you could need to be a good time. I appreciate that your not-mom starts with a negative opinion of you and seems to act with caution, as you are supposed to start out as an utter failure of a human being.

The one pitfall that proved enough to make me drop the game was the internal logic. Puzzles, decisions, and even the sequence of events follow a thought process that is random at best and nonsensical at worst. Proper context improves the quality of the fun times when they come, and only once have I come across any "content" that didn't seem to come out of left field. As we are 10 builds in, this seems to be a stylistic choice instead of a quirk of a game still in-progress.

Regardless, I'd still recommend giving it a shot and seeing for yourself if the logic is bothersome enough to get you to stop, instead of just discounting it from the get-go. The fundamentals are all here and they're all solid.

The gameplay is way too confusing even with the tips. The game doesn't have enough content to keep my interest alive. Some events (like Flora's chili quest) have way too much unnecessary clicking. The logic of items, craft system, and their use are often too unclear (let's again consider chili quest: we need to take the cutting board, ketchup, and a knife to make a distraction. But think about it, if there were no tips - would you guess what items you should use? MC could've said the next line: "I need to come up with some sort of distraction. Maybe imitate a cut while cooking?", or something like that and it would be at least more logical.) If the author wants to make a click-based puzzle game then they need to make it more logical and reasonable. If they want to make a visual novel then there're way too many unnecessary gameplay elements that simply stretch out the time with no purpose at all.
The art is gorgeous! Quite appreciate the work of the artists for that game, as character designs actually look very good, alive, and sexy at the same time. Probably when this game will reach its final stages of development, there would be animated scenes as well - with that art style it will be wholesome.
The plot, although, has some issues in my opinion. The first questions that appeared in my head were "why MC even got traveled back in time?". We don't need to answer that question at the very beginning of the game, though, but from this particular one we can go further and ask other questions: "MC wanted to go back in time and appear in his 18s? Does he want to redeem his life with which he clearly wasn't satisfied before? Why?". The stranger's 'proposal' felt came out of nowhere for me as MC didn't even make any statement about his past, only frustrated hate-speech towards his current condition. These questions certainly should be answered at the beginning of the game as they will make it have more sense because now it seems that MC got appeared in past "just because". These answers will also help to find the path to move for MC. "Does he want to redeem? Fix the mistakes of the past? Just to have fun?". The scenes with throat-raping Kate and killing poor beavers made me believe that MC is just a selfish asshole, but there's not enough evidence in the game itself to prove it. If he got in the past to fix mistakes - I don't see that too (poisoning a river in the forest and blackmailing a poor nurse only makes mistakes, not solving them). The plot should be more comprehensible at that point.
Another part of the plot is the characters, and I think that they are alright. For the current amount of the content, they seem to have personalities and traits that help players to distinguish them from each other. I can't say more because there's an obvious lack of content with the girls. With more effort getting put into them I think we'll see a very solid porn game with various characters.

Summing everything,
+ Amazing art
+ The game has the potential to grow into something good
+ The variability of characters and their personalities is promising
± For now, MC's motives are way too unclear. Need to put more effort into building a reasonable leitmotif, which also will allow players to get more emotionally involved in the story.
- Gameplay is way too confusing, filled with atavisms, and often just seems to be more frustrating than entertaining
- Playing that game for 2-3 hours led me only for a few gallery scenes, which is disappointing
- Killing those poor beavers is a deadly sin
P.S. - I haven't noticed the rating system before so I guess I'll need to copy myself.

Really nice art and slick presentation for complete tedium. I think the devs got lost in the idea of a 90s style point and click adventure game and forgot to make it fun or sexy or interesting in any way.

The issue is the sheer amount of point and click adventure nonsense you have to go through for any hint of a sexy scene. It's not engaging and it only vaguely makes sense-- if any. So you just have to follow the prompts and do a bunch of busywork. One "quest" has you grabbing about 30 items from the same set of cabinets, and that actually paid off with about the spiciest scene in the game. Most of the time you're lucky to get a girl bending over in a short skirt for your trouble.

I could put up with all this if there was at least some decent writing payoff, or meaty character moments. However, even that is in short supply as you get maybe 3 sentences of okay story or a couple character quips per 50-step quest while the rest is just exposition about the current nonsense you're working through.

In summary, this is the sort of game you get suckered into playing for 4 hours and wish you hadn't wasted any time on it. Give it a pass, for your own sake. It gets more than one star because boy is that presentation slick.

Another Chance works to achieve a setting where a young man with no direction in life is given a time-travel powered second chance at his senior year of high school. Instead of an earnest young man who attempts to make right his wrongs, the MC comes across as an angry incel loser who now just has a chance to take his frustrations out on the people who wronged him. A more apt title would perhaps be "Temporal Revenge".
The writing, while not stricken with poor english or grammar mistakes, still takes too much time making jokes that don't land or describing things the player can see.
Every choice the player makes has influence on stats and relationships, but because it's all visible as soon as the choice is made players are incentivized to choose the option that gets them the desired effect rather than the response they may have preferred.
If you like playing games through with a walkthrough, another chance has one built in. Don't worry about exploring or thinking, bc you'll be taken on a tour anyway. You can try playing the game with the quest guide off but because there are often 5+ quests on at once and each one requires specific times/places/people/items to advance, you'll find yourself using it regardless.
The art is Another Chance's strongest point. The characters are well put together and the game isn't drowning in buxom bimbos; their design is fitting. The settings look good as well and the player doesn't often feel like they can't understand what they're seeing. Credit to the artist(s).
The sexual content is reason enough to knock off four stars. While the X-ray mechanic is cool for the player, it wrecks any potential buildup for the characters involved. There is a scene early on where the main character quite literally sexually assaults someone who had hurt a friend of his ( and had bullied him in the past) as revenge. The scene isn't that good to begin with, and that compounded with the fact that it is rape just put the nail in the coffin. If Another Chance was about a young man getting even with those who wronged him, and/or had darker themes to begin with, perhaps it would be easier to overlook. It's hard to love the player character and hope he'll make the most of his second chance when he's such a vile person. Instead of being happy for a chance to grow or change, he just revels in his chance to see the young hot girls again and laments the loss of his porn collection.
Perhaps there is more room for character growth as the game continues, and maybe the mechanics will gain some degree of coherence, but until then I cannot recommend. While being nice to look at, the stilted writing, unfocused mechanics, and gross player character drive this down into the "tried it but won't likely try again" pile. If you're an incel you may dig this tho

Very fun adventure game.

While there aren't a ton of adult scenes quite yet, the ones that are here are very very good. I definitely recommend a play. Game is just fun overall.

You'll probably want to enable the quest hints. Game's kinda difficult w/o them.