Ren'Py - Life in Santa County [S1 v1.1] [Bold Bash Studios]

nice visual, boring story

it really wants to take itself seriously when it comes to the story but the writing is like high school level. criminal activities and stuff don't really have anything to do with the visual it is presenting. seems like it's trying to draw it out using the story instead of a story interesting enough to keep you going.

Review: Life in Santa County [S1 v1.1] – Style Over Substance

Rating: 1.5/5

Life in Santa County by Bold Bash Studios is the kind of adult visual novel that makes you question why you started it in the first place. It has all the surface-level appeal — sleek visuals, high-quality renders, and a polished UI — but fails almost entirely in delivering a coherent story, engaging dialogue, or satisfying character development. It’s a game that looks good in screenshots, but the moment you press “Start,” everything starts falling apart.

A Prologue That’s a Total Trainwreck

The game opens with a bloated, confusing prologue that tries to dump too much exposition on the player too fast. Rather than gradually introducing the world and its characters, it throws everything at you at once, breaking immersion almost immediately.

I couldn’t even figure out the basic setup. What exactly is the MC’s relationship with Lauren? Is she his mother? His boss? A landlady? Why is he living in a house with all his coworkers? The story just doesn’t take time to establish anything clearly. And when your first 30 minutes are that disjointed, it’s hard to get invested in what comes next.

Weak Writing, Worse Dialogue

The dialogue feels flat and robotic. It lacks personality, flow, or purpose. Scenes skip awkwardly from one topic to another, and instead of building tension or intrigue, the narrative just stumbles forward with no momentum. I found myself skimming through large sections of the script, hoping something — anything — would hook me.

Spoiler: it didn’t.

No Romance, Just Instant Gratification

Despite being tagged as "story-rich" and "romance," this game delivers neither. Every female character seems to fall for the MC instantly, without any kind of buildup or emotional depth. There’s no progression — no flirting, no tension, no sense of "earning" the romance. You just wake up and suddenly every girl in the house is deeply into you.

As for the sex scenes? Rushed. There's zero anticipation or pacing. The MC jumps into lewd scenarios with little context, and most of these moments happen without player input. It often feels like the dev just wanted to check a fetish box rather than tell a meaningful or arousing story.

Dual Stats: Wasted Mechanics

The game implements a stat system — intimidation vs charisma — but it’s mostly underused. While it suggests you might shape your character’s personality or even change the dynamic with certain girls, in practice it rarely impacts the game. Usually, it just determines whether you see the full lewd scene or not. Again, wasted potential.

Fetish Overload with No Focus

Let’s address the elephant in the room: this game has an obsession with foot fetish content and underwear sniffing. It’s everywhere — exaggerated to the point where it feels like the developer’s personal kink fantasy rather than something integrated naturally into the story. If you're not into that specific fetish, expect to feel alienated very quickly.

Visuals Are the Only Saving Grace

To be fair, the renders are excellent. The characters are well-modeled, the lighting is clean, and the environments look good. If all you want is eye candy, there’s plenty here. But great visuals without compelling writing are like a beautifully wrapped empty box — pretty, but ultimately hollow.

Final Verdict: A Mess in Designer Clothing

Life in Santa County could’ve been something. With the resources and visual polish it has, this game had potential to be a standout AVN. But it collapses under its own lack of narrative focus, shallow romance, and repetitive, one-note fetish content. The gameplay elements are underutilized, the story is a mess, and the dialogue ranges from forgettable to cringeworthy.


If you’re looking for meaningful storytelling, engaging romance, or well-developed adult content, look elsewhere. This one’s a bust.

Would I recommend it?
Not even to my worst enemy.

Probably one of the better Ren'Py games I've played in a while. Seems there's been changes with the game from its initial. Best parts to me are the characters, the design, and the animation. Bonus is the story. The chjaracert and design are the best and not over the top too much. Animation is good quality and all of this from an S01 release.

What a mess in prologue. If you somehow go through it you'll possibly can have fun and interest in it but not me. I was bored not so far from the prologue and thanks to gallery unlocker i watched all scenes in gallery and dropped it.

In prologue nothing is clear, it's very long and boring. Frequent flashbacks make it even more confusing and text is full of idioms and slangs make it impossible to immerse in story and that's why many players drop it out after 1hr of play.
Girls wanna make love with main hero even if they hate him. Every one of them has huge breast and butt. Not bad but nothing new and interesting in it. Many models you've possibly already met in other vns.

Graphics and visual have decent level but space between eyes of girls often changes during dialogue and looks creepy. Girl in the attic has unique style and looks like turned out from other game or made by different artist.

Sound and music. Nothing extraordinary. Few samples during scenes and they are very quite. There is no any sound during sex scenes.

Devs should rework at least prologue and rewrite a lot of text to make this game enjoyable now it's just a stunner girls in sex scenes in unlocked gallery without any sounds.

The renders are good, animations too, but man, the grammar issues AND the story jumping all over the place (while also not keeping consistency [boss/teacher, landlady/friend, etc]) is annoying, ngl. maybe I'll revisit this once all these kinks are fixed.

Also, tone down on the whole "nine yards" thing, sheesh.

v0.11.0
Its so bad I couldn't finish it.

I came to this game with high hopes due to the number of positive reviews. The start of the game is incredibly frustrating and disheveled. Its nearly all about events that occurred before the game, and they don't give you much in terms of details about what actually happened, just vague references and thats a theme you need to get used to. There are lots of vague references to seemingly big important events, alongside flashbacks to awkward and not really justified sexually tense encounters between characters you either haven't seen together before or have just barely seen together. Its missing ALL of the buildup you expect to care about characters relationships and is just trying to force it down your throat as already understood and important. The story just keeps jumping all over the place without justification or any sense of continuity.

The renders are decent for quality, but quite frankly most of the characters are kind of ugly despite having aggressively overdeveloped features. The animations are not awesome. The motions being made are always quick, kinda choppy, and moving like 1/4 of the distance they should be.

Also, its freaking huge! I wish I could have my 15 gigs of bandwidth back. I cannot begin to understand how this game has received so many 4 and 5 star reviews.

The remake killed the game.

no more incest.. but the writting still thinks it has it.. So you get weird sentences that make no sense whatsoever. The renders got uglier aswell.. it simply wrecked the entire game out of nowhere and for noreason...

This game in a vacuum isn't great, the narrative is stupid and the layout and structure of the game is irritating.
The writing is also often stilted in a really peculiar manner.
The renders however are excellent and the sex scenes and animations are well done. The characters too are decent, though they run a but tropey.
I'm personally giving it 4 stars because it ticks a lot of boxes that i'm looking for in these games.
However if you aren't a fan of the tags this is probably a three or maybe even a 2 star game for you
Recommended for anyone who is a fan of incest games

Liked most of the models, some could be better, but some details and physics are mega nice addition that you cant usually see in most of VNs. This is not perfect but still i think it has great potential

This game has a great cast of characters, all with such good and naturally erotic designs that it’s a huge plus. It understands something that many H-games don’t: having a strong roster of female characters is essential, and not focusing on that is a mistake. This game gets it right, as almost all of its content revolves around them, which I think is a great decision.

However, the impact of your choices is quite mediocre. You can just install a mod that gives you the best options to unlock scenes, and that’s it—there aren’t really alternative paths if you choose a different route. The only difference is that with certain choices, you get content, and with others, you don’t.

And to conclude, the story is pretty mediocre, but in the end, what really matters to me in this type of game are the scenes. In that regard, this game truly stands out with an impressive level of quality.

Review of [v0.11.0]

Nice game with a little bit FREEROAM

The story is quite typical, you are at home living with your mother and your sisters and little by little they become corrupt or fall in love with you. There is also your cousin and your aunt, and your best friend's mother.
Come on, it's typical that you want to fuck everyone.
There is a bit of FREEROAM and click&point.
Oh and I forgot your teacher and students from your class.
Then you get involved with some kind of bully, who tells you to get some panties from your best friend's mother since he's in trouble too.

PROS

• Excellent Renders
• Very good animations with good movement
• Some animations have SOUND
• Story it's OK
• Details of the House are very good
• Female Carachters are very HOT

CONS

• It could be more developed that women want sex with you
• Most animations do not have sound

RATING :

Content: ⭐⭐⭐
Sound: ⭐⭐⭐
Renders: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Characters: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Animations: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Final conclusion: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ NICE GAME RECOMMENDED

Epic! The intro got reworked, which is fine, but language is kinda butchered in it. But after the intro, the flow and grammar is quite good. Story is good, another glorious incest tale. Some gaps here and there, but it makes sense where it needs to.
The models and animations are out of this world. Good work! I have heard some little dudes complaining about boob size here. Say what?! Whats wrong with yall? I dont understand why would you prefer smaller? You should get checked, might be low T. Love the big tits in this game, I d go even bigger. Dew it.
All in all, good game, steamy lewd scenes. Keep trucking, Bold Bash Studios!

This is not absolutely sandbox. Bad tags so u r scammed. It's just a visual novel with a few choices that u aren't really playing. The graphs are incredible but i would never have downloaded it if i knew that this was not a playable game.

This is a solid 3 star game. It has nice renders and a little better than average animations. The characters are not really interesting, so I stopped playing about an hour and a half into it. Pretty forgetful story and the incest is boring. This is one of those AVNs that is in the same mold as most other incest AVNs.

This could have been a decent game. However imho it is not.

Unfortunately this is another sad example how a game can end when you invest your time in nicely rendered females only and seemingly don't really put an effort into the rest of the game.

However the worst is choosing the lousiest available male model as MC. Who wants to play a MC looking like a teenage cuck full of pimples? No ... don't answer that.

Better luck with MC model selection next time.

This game could be much more than it is, but it's heavily drawn back by it's plot. First of all, it's full of porn logic and all the girls just love you because they do. It also wants to dangle some plots that are hard to pull right in a game like this, with a crime plot that is randomly advanced or put on hold while the MC goes around fucking everyone, or the university plot which does the same. There are lots of choices and they do impact the game, which is great, but I lost interest in the plot and characters none-the-less.

Render quality is pretty high, which is great, even if facial expressions are sometimes strange. Animations are pretty decent as well and sex scenes are well built. Music is pretty decent as well, for once I did not turn it off. But the game does have some bugs that can force you to load older saves or get stuck without being able to progress.

So, all in all, a pretty decent game, pity it's plot can't carry it to the higher stars.

This "game" should be used as an example for other devs on how not to make an AVN. If you're going to give players choices and branches, do it right, plan it out in advance, and give them an ending that reflects their decisions. The fact that the game behaves the same regardless of your previous choices is a waste of time for the player (and also a deception, because at the beginning the story promises different outcomes based on the choices made). The only thing that "saves" the story are its beautiful renders and good animations, but that's about it...

tldr: impressive models, but uninspired use of them.

The good: Flawless graphics, great diversity in settings, likeable girls. good adult scenes with swith in positions and some kinks covered (though a lot of foot fetish, too much for me^^)

the bad:
the bland story and writing. though the game is trying it just doesn t work, the wimpy MC just doesn't give the "mafia thug" vibe.
The humongous tits on all girls, not a lot of variety in body shapes.
The bugs, content still in dev.
The lack of feedback, some event will not proceed and you won t know why, makes for better replayability but also will waste a lot of your time.

conclusion: great graphims and models, that could benefit from a greater focus on the writing. The game is worth playing, although the 14GB can be a hurdle if you don't have a great internet connection.

This is a very good game. It has some very nice character models, some very good animations.
However I do understand the frustration of not knowing the certain required levels need like intimation, charisma, ... to see certain scenes or to go down certain paths. It is frustration not knowing it , but it makes it more challenging to even personal since every run is unique to an extent. But using of a cheat would make it very more easier to see all scenes.

Love the game. The graphics are great.. A good mix of young women and sexy milfs... My type of game.

The story is not to too bad, with the usual School, and Home, but there are too many characters that you get lost.

Def a top 10 game for me