Ren'Py - Fetish Locator: S&M Studio [v0.3.15] [ViNovella]

After the original fetish locator game this is kind of a letdown - good animations and renders but really grindy. As others have said, the excessive use of directional arrows and highlighted zones together just makes for a cluttered and tedious navigation system. And then there's the grindy work puzzles that although not terribly difficult don't seem to do much but clutter up the game. And then the delivery job is also tedious. And then the magazine discovery process which looks accidental and random and for which you gain one point each time in a large array of characteristics you're supposed to improve on. Not nearly as polished as fetish locator. Needs a step back and re-evaluation about excess widgeting for widgets sake. Not worthless mind you but I'm having doubts about continuing this one.

The game isn't quite as bad as most people are saying. I have played way worse games in my time. However it is the typical dead sandbox game, where the enviroments are large with nothing to fill them with. Take the house for example, it has 7 zones in it. You only really use 2, the bed and the room your quest is in.

That is the design philosphy that's all over this game. Go to area. Click around till you find the right area. Then talk to someone or a thing happens. If the game just cut this BS out it would be a good game.
I don't care if I can see how many rooms a building has, take me to the place the content it.

The dev clearly wants to develop in a new way and it could be good but they need to keep it simple.

Scrap sandbox bull$hit and it ll be 2x times better game.
Renders are good, animations too. Music/SFX very pleasant. Sex scenes are hot. More scanes with Stacey would be nice.
I just dont know why dev putted dumb sandbox in this game. Fetish locator was perfect without sandbox.

I am only a few hours in, however...

Jiiimmminy Crickets. The first part of this game is bad. Like bad bad.

The relationships you know are fucked, and not in a fun way. The new ones they are trying to introduce are REAL not fun so far. The story progression is slow and boring. I am being forced to step away from this game to breathe some air because this game so far is so fucking dull.

I intend to finish the game at some point, but phuck. If you're going to get started really, seriously, be prepared for a slog to start. They really need to rewrite this garbage sometime soon. Because its awful. All signs point to the update being good, so something has been figured out. Figure out how to unfuck the first part.

Alright, I really disliked the minigames, but without the minigames it's not bad... and the storytelling/characters from FL are excellent. If they dump the minigames and such then I could see this being really good in the future. I hope they stick with it and change all the mechanics people hate.

Well story is alright, maybe a bit on the boring side but if you there for the girls its ok.

The sandbox that so many is complaining about with arrows and shit, i dont see the issue i never used arrows really, maybe the menu type thing on the left side is new or someting but it makes it fast and easy to get around maps/areas.

The grind is a bit boring but that seems to be standard for alot of sandbox games, depending on how it goes i hope you can make more money faster so you dont have to constantly keep watch if you can afford the weekly rent shit, its not really fun to grind more then reading story or being with the girls so that needs to be improved a bit.

Girls look great as always, many is from their older games so cant really complain about them.

Animations looks very nice i would say 4/5 on that part.

Music is about average nothing special 3/5 i would say, i dont really care much about the voice stuff when its just "huh/yeah/no" single word stuff to me its more annoying then good.

Mini games, grind and sandbox... The perfect combo to ruin the game. Way to go ViNovella. Everyone loved FL for being simple, but extremely sexy. This one is not entertaining, not sexy enough (yet) and full of unnessesary mouse movement

Cant agree with all the negative points, except for the arrows. Those seem kinda pointless right now. Lots of clicking. Maybe that gets better with more content, otherwise I would scrap them.
The minigames are ok, the nonogram one I found to be kinda fun. But an option to skip them is always a good idea, even if you like them sometimes you dont have the time.
But modders will surely help with that in the future I think.

It's good, not grindy, coding is a little confusing, but I picked it up pretty quickly. The models are fine. I wish there was a little more to it. I don't know what money will be used for, but 50 for the first job may be a little thin depending on what happens.

So this is kinda funny, I received quite a lot of likes for my rather harsh review based on the first release, just before I decided to change my rating after playing the new version. (I'll leave the original review below for reference)

I still think the sandbox is rubbish and not necessary, Fetish Locater did just fine without it, but kuddos to the team for making good improvements for version 2, so at least it's playable now.

All the points about time- energy- and money management still stand but the endless clicking and the minigames have been fixed:
- They added a location menu on screen, so no more endless arrow clicking to get to places your desk at work or to the kitchen in the studio. (I did not find any 'random' events and I hope they stay away from those evil time wasters)
- The quest system works well and quite clear (it could use a few tweaks perhaps some colour changes and a clear indication that all content is finished, not just in the quest log)

So let's be fair and talk about the things I like and not just the dislikes

* I can't get enough of Stacey, she was my favorite girl in FL and also in this game so far, so thanks for the Stacey content.
* The other girls are interesting and varied in character and body, that's one thing they did very well in FL and it's great to see they continue it.
* The hints they have dropped so far about various fetishes are good, can't wait to get nasty and wet with Nari
* A certain blue haired lady is back

So yeah it's starting to come together slowly as a real FL game and I am looking forward to the nasty scenes we will be filming in our little studio!



My old review for the first release:

Loved Fetish Locator, and I like Vinovella University a lot but this is a waste of time, unfortunately.

The renders are top notch, better than in FL and that's great.
It's good to see some of my favorite FL characters return.
The setup is interesting and might be fun actually, too soon to tell.

Gameplay is absolute rubbish.
I admit I am not a fan of sandbox, but there are some out there that are quite good and make for a nice game (for example Mystwood Manor and The Patriarch) . This is not one of those.

The worst things you can think of in sandbox are here:
endless clicking to move around,
annoying energy and money management,
having to forward time to get to stuff,
unskipable minigames (if I wanted those I would download them from the App Store, 1000s to choose from) I just cannot like 'games' that waste my time.

Sure I get it, later on in the game you might need some aspects of this to manage the studio etc., but for now it's super annoying. Just make it a VN completely or at least till you have the studio up and running.

It would be 4 stars for the renders alone and with even ok gameplay it might become 5, for now I cannot give it more than 2.

What the hell is this? I love Vinovella and FL but this is crap.
Silly minigame thats impossible to solve.
One have to wait for friendly genious who solve it for us.
But the whole idea about driving around for the Wurst company is just boooring. Shape up Vionella and get back into the kind of game we learned to love.

This review is after the first release, so not much to go on yet. Good start. Has great potential, but we wil have to wait and see how grindy the sandbox aspect is, and how annoiying the minigames are. I'm not opposed to either if they are done well, so I will happily give it the benefit of the doubt for now. The render quality is what you would expect from fetish locator, no complaints there. The story is developing nicely already with some potentially interesting characters and relationships, but if Fetish locator is anything to go by, this is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure there will be many characters yet to come and many love interests.

Well this has to be the most annoying sandbox game of all time.
And it is topped by unskippable minigames and puzzles.
I really looked forward to this new game of them, but i couldn´t stand
these minigames/puzzles. If the dev´s decide to switch to vn and get rid of all the unnessasary stuff, i will try it again.

Just terrible gameplay and with no purpose. It actually made me quit the game before getting to any of the juicy stuff and it's just not worth to waste your time doing that for a few seconds of animations.

Terrible sandbox.

This is textbook how to not do sandbox. It's like the dev put together a list of every annoying feature any sandbox game has ever had and put it into his game.

Unfun minigame, terrible navigation ARROW ARROW ARROW ARROW, pointless clicking.

Dev if you read reviews do us all a favor and just make a VN.

v0.1.17
Vinovella made an, erm, interesting choice with this game. Its sandbox. I suspect that'll not go over too well. I can definitely I'm not a fan. And, so far, its totally unnecessary. All that said, there are good things to be had. The renders are a step up generally from FL. There are lots of animations. Like alot alot. Most are of the non-lewd variety. Speaking of, there is very little lewd content so far. There are mini-games now. They so far are harmless and very easy, but add nothing. Plot-wise, there really isn't any yet, but the writing is quite well done.

You can tell the dev has vastly improved from when FL was first released. Its much more professional looking. Good job there. I'd highly recommend dumping the sandbox. It adds nothing to the game. It is nice to see characters from FL back in a very different setting. I'm hopeful, but this can be wildly improved.

Content: Very little content at this stage (0.1.17).

Visuals: Visuals are up to the level we've come to expect. Stacy and AmRose both look as gorgeous as ever, and the MC still looks like a bit of a tool.

Gameplay: Absolutely rubbish. The sandbox feature is absolutely pointless - it could very easily be streamlined in to the standard VN format, and not lose anything. Pointless navigation, considering it's basically "Open map, click location, do X, open map, go home, skip time, sleep, repeat".

Minigames: Yeah, not much to say there. Minigames generally suck in VN's, and these aren't any different. Absolutely pointless, add nothing to the game, or the gameplay, and will just frustrate players.

Overall: The game HAS potential, but dev needs to rethink the sandbox and minigames. Whilst the former could be made to be fun/useful, the latter will almost certainly fall flat, and players will just mod them out.

Current Score: 5.5/10

For V0.1.17

Decent start to a new game in the FL universe. Great renders as always and the writing is good. So far there is not much story ~20 minutes I guess padded by other mechanics.

It is unfortunate that they went with a sandbox game. If they make the studio management strong enough it might warrant a sandbox but for now the story is entirely linear. So the sandbox is only meaningless clicking between story.

On the topic of pointless clicking: why do I need to press 6 buttons to start working the delivery job when it could have been done in 2 or 3. (Yes that does not look like a lot but multiply this across all locations and an entire game and you are clicking 100s if not 1000s of times unnecessarily.

Finally the game contains minigames. This is not everyone's cup of tea so a skip all would probably be good to enlarge the player base. They have been implemented well however and work without any bugs, delays or other annoyances.

Overall I would still recommend the game based on this first impression. That is why I decided to rate the game 4/5 rather than 3/5 for the pointless sandbox.