Ren'Py - Life in Santa County [v0.11.0] [Bold Bash Studios]

A good-looking package, with nothing inside.

To get the good out first, the game looks really good. You can tell there is a lot of effort involved in the visuals. Too much effort even, since it even has details like animated blinking. The UI is sharp, the sandbox is not overbearing and it does have some of the best daz models out there. Some of them look very familiar but that's to be expected at this point.

But when it comes to the meat, not much to go on. It's yet another i-story, with landladies and roomies inexplicably breaking every social norm to jump on MC's dick. Why? Because. There is no rhyme or reason, just like every other game of this type, MC just gets everything handed to him on a silver platter. An inexperienced dork with max charisma, max fighting skills despite being a midget and a sex master with a huge dick that hypnotizes every female in sight.

That bitchy cousin? No problem just order her to do anything you want and she will do it. Why? Because. And it gets even worse when it comes to the landlady. This is a mature bombshell of a woman, who apparently saved herself untouched for years to wait for her tenant's dick. That partner of hers she starts with? We get rid of him right away no problem. And to make sure we don't hurt the sensitive psyche of the anime pillow-humping crusaders, he was gay too. And probably an eunuch asexual just to make sure. I'm surprised we don't find out MC just willed himself into existence to make sure landlady is a pure waifu.

The game gave hints of a smarter plot at first, with landlady seemingly being a closet perv who would risk her job for some fun with young bucks in her workplace. That would at least somewhat justify her willingness to break every social norm in her eventual relationship with MC. She's fucked in the head like that, can't help it. But that would be too smart and grounded for this type of game, so that plot practically got rebooted to appease the same crowd.

In the end, if you 've played one of those, you 've played all. If for some reason you aren't sick of that same recipe, knock yourself out. At least it looks good.

Story/ - 1/5 plot sucks, for some reason everyone likes the mc, why they like him ? if you want to add incest at least give a backstory believable enough

Hud/Menu/Map/Navegation - 1/5 half of the rooms are point and click and other half trhough menu thats suck

Sandbox - 1/5 feels weird and don't have a track of lost scenes, easy to miss scenes, freeroam ends with no warning

Renders - 4/5 good shit

This game has great potential, excellent modeling and scene setting. The author has done a great job of organizing the storyline, and it would be perfect if it had more efficient updates. But time is exchanged for excellent quality, and in my case it's definitely 5 out of 5.

Well another visual novel , that has some NSFW elements. Graphics are awesome and visuals are good , some work needs to be done on soundtrack and some characters are the neighbour, as well as some other side characters.

Extremely attractive models, appealing story and secondary characters, good backgrounds, great game mechanics ( Mc routes and sandbox are much appreciated). Very fun to play and decently immersive. This game is going places.

This game is a hot fucking mess. I finally managed to crawl through the prologue after several patient attempts due to how insanely creepy the MC looks (literally like a future molester), the little rat friend who I just wanted to shoot, and terrible writing. Not to mention all the dumb scenarios that could easily have been avoided by anyone with an IQ above thirteen.

This game is 100% style over substance. The women all look pretty great, the animations are top quality for AVNs, everything is all flashy and crisp...but it's put together nonsensically. I don't mind the sandbox aspect at all, which I know is an unpopular opinion, but the problem with those is that even if a player does something out of order it still needs to make sense--otherwise there's zero point having a sandbox. This game doesn't do that at all, and it's worse on top because the scenes that do flow outside the sandbox are jarring and feel as if they've been built by random contractors reading off an outdated spec script. I mean whole conversations about events that hadn't happened yet, and then I'd accidentally stumble across that scene later and think "oooooohhhh, I was meant to do this first." It just defeats the whole point of freeroaming.

...not that a spec script would have helped, because the dialogue and descriptions have definitive machine translation stink all over. Lines make actually no sense sometimes, and even when that is the case, the things characters say are so utterly dumb it made me physically angry.

Also, I don't like feet. At all. Every kinky scene involves feet. No option to skip it either: you will see the feet and enjoy feet. Every woman also has pepperoni nipples but I like that; still, all the tits look identical.

The overproduction ends up being a curse too. Why can't I quicksave? Because the dev made a flashy menu instead. I constantly got locked out of rolling things back because of how scenes are designed, and if there's an animation you can forget it altogether. Which led me to restarting the whole game, but then half the time autoskip wouldn't work. Why? No clue.

Don't bother. Just look at some screens or check a playthrough on xhamster.

This review was made after playing the 0.4.3 version.

Impressive visual quality, stunningly beautiful girls, very nice story, tits...what else can be said?

It needs some minor adjustments, but nothing major. I'm positive about those adjustments being made soon.

Brothers, heed my words: Bold Bash Studios is going straight to the top!

Played version 0.4.2
Qualities:
-the female models are sexy to very sexy, especially the Mom, the Sis and the Aunt
-the story is good and engaging
-the seduction process of the Mom and Sis is well constructed and not rushed
Problems:
-the free roam mode breaks the story and one needs a walk through to advance faster
-for many choices it is not obvious what the best alternative is so one needs a walk-through
The game is very pleasant to play when in story mode.
Unfortunately the free roaming mode breaks the story which requires a walk through.
Because of the problems above it's a 4.5 stars game in my opinion.
I'll give it 5 stars because it has a lot of potential.
Suggestion for the developer: reduce or eliminate the time spent free roaming.

Best game I’ve played. Potential to be amazing if the developer keeps this up. Updates have a lot of content and the renders are absolutely outstanding. Great characters and models as well. And the plot is nice, not like a lot of the other VN games I’ve seen out there

So, first of all, english. Yeah, you know what i am about to say soy, please be comprehensive


In general terms the game is "Good", that's why I give it 3 stars.

To justify this score I am going to basically analyze the story, the gameplay and the renders.

Story and plot.

-Pretend to be something complicated and stick to the basics.

-The prologue with Dave is, in my opinion, ridiculous and doesn't make any sense.

-The MC's relationship between schoolmates and with his "family" is very unnatural.

-Everything happens too fast and in many moments there is a lack of context and it even makes you think that you just missed something and that you need to go back.

-This also happens during the sex scenes. Some start very unexpectedly.


Gameplay

-The different answers during the dialogues are very confusing, and many times they do not correspond to what you supposedly expect to see.

-Sometimes you can skip dialogues and other times you can't. Sometimes you can go back and sometimes you can't ... so....

-The selection of your skills or perks is too simple. The developer has spent time on those cards but are always the same.

Renderings

-Without any place what saves this project.

-Very good quality and careful in the details.

-Has a pretty decent variety of optionss during the sex scenes.

-Animations are very well implemented

-As a personal opinion. I don't like the disproportionate bodies of either the male or female characters. Breasts so big and dicks that look like legs

wow wow this game is fucking amazing. The artwork and the posing of the models is some of the best I have seen on this site. I have two complaints though. Sometimes the dialog isn't clear like if it were written by someone who isn't entirely fluent in English. Second, I think moving around the free roam map can get kind of awkward. Overall I think this game has insane potential and excited to see the future of this project!

Jesus fuck. I'm not sure how anyone could give this less than 5 stars. It's probably one of the best adult games I have ever played. The writing is leagues above most of the material found on F95. The models are meticulously designed and very unique to one another. The scenes are amazing with a lot of interactivity. The posing of the models in scenes even outside of sex, is incredibly erotic. Super impressed with the whole package.

The one criticism I might levy is that it's kinda of unclear how the points affect the story and the lack of things to find in the game. What does the trophies do? Or money? Would like secrets that open up scenes or new art.

Amazing game!

The game have a lot of sexy scene and the design is so perfect ı love it.I
In the game you have a lot of choices and the choices affect your opportunity ı love that feature the best sex game ı have ever seen. I hope it will continue.

What a mess. Everything is all over the place. The story, the coding, so many repeat dialogues like dev doesn't know what to say, the pacing and especially the continuation of story lines. As it's sandbox one must go from place to place looking for interactions, might be easier with a WT, but who wants to read the WT, play 2 minutes and then back to WT, all that with one hand to click and the other to fap. It's a mess. It wants to be Milfy City but it's NOT. Hell it even uses the Daz3d character for the mom (Lauren) and all the body shapes remind me how much I miss MC and curse that asshole Icstor. 2 stars for CGs and effort. Dev should really refine his coding and scriptwriting. For the effort I will come back when it's completed and will review the rating then. Really hope dev makes a better game if only just for the mom..

One of the best games I ever played (i played thousand of f95 games already) and what i can say this one will be in my top 10 I hope the author will non stop updating the game true 10/10 so 5/5

This game is too good to not have sex sounded effects such as moaning and Butt slapping etc. I see the butt slapped and it gets red but no sound I see awesome renders Great animations and I love the story. Plz, allow users that want it to have it and for those that don't let them mute it. No matter what I will play this game but it would take it to a whole other level if that was added. Great game dev

Far too flawed.

The prolog had a lot in it I didn't like.... but I played through it anyhow, because I understood it was there to set the stage for the story. That choices and direction would be yours once things were established.
So, despite many issues with it, I understood it for what and why it was. My rating is not because of anything in the prolog, and if you played and didn't like the prolog, my first piece of advice is to go back to the game, finish the prolog, and then get into the game proper, to see if it is more worth your time.

So, that said, why only 2 stars?
Well, the renders are great, and the story has room to be very interesting. The MC has some depth, and some characters are great.
Those are the pros, and they should be good enough for a higher rating, right?

Well, here are the cons:
1) disabled scroll back. believe it or not, all this does is piss off players and waste their time. They'll just save before choices or events, and reload. Or rely on autosaves. It doesn't encourage us to play any differently.

2) lack of choices. So, here's a scenario that may be very uncommon, but not unheard of. The player decides they are not interested in romancing the aunt. The player decides they do not like the cousin. The player gives his aunt the information he got from his cousin's phone. Aunt now has the chance to fix things. Cousin pays for being a cruel bitch. Both paths are closed (though may effect the story).
Some people would bitch this is NTR. Well, it isn't. You'd literally be turning them away as LIs, and thus they can't cuck you. Aunt would only go back if given the info, and if not, wouldn't, so any path with her wouldn't have NTR.
See, a choice like that allows the player to decide who he is interested in, and what to do with info he has been given in game. Instead, we get this info, we never use it, and we talk to the aunt about what a shitty guy her ex was.
That's a lack of meaningful choices, in my book.

But the bigger issue with choices is... they don't carry over chapter to chapter. I ended chapter one with just a massage. Chapter two is very clear that, canonically, more happened.
In chapter one, I did not talk to the guy playing guitar in school. In chapter two, he comes to talk to me right away about the conversation we... actually never had.
That is a disaster in games like this. Either follow our choices, or don't bother giving us choices.


Those two issues could be the only cons I see, and still effect the game so much, in both technical and story telling ways, that I feel warranted in giving it a low rating.
Add to that some very bizarre dialog choices that read like 90% native english speaker and 10% google translate, and a lot of story inconsistencies, and you have a game I got no enjoyment out of playing.

Which is a shame. If the aunt hadn't been manipulated out of her relationship by her bitch daughter and instead was just single, I would have been into her. The chemistry behind you and your mother (and the quelling of a concern about her behavior in the prolog), I would have been into her. I genuinely like Iris as a character, and would have loved to love this game, just for her.
But I ultimately think this game is a highly-polished looking.... but awkward and mediocre, game... that seems to utterly forget that you are making choices towards your own end, and railroads you into the scenarios it wanted you to play.

Incredible Work.....ONLY STANDING OVATION for This Game. Every aspect of the game is very high Level.
Very Interessant Story, Gameplay and litte elements of a Sandbox are very functional and they make the playing experience very Enjoyable. I really enjoy this game.

This needs to be way higher!!
Renders look amazing, animations are VERY well done and even the story keeps you interested. I can see 2 path unfolding, which is a great promising start for a relatively 'new' game. Not sure why this is 4 stars while other games with lower quality renders, animations and/or story content seem to be better rated.
I will say that I don't like this GUI, it is the same pain as "Deliverance", for those who know the game...

Good Points
+ Story feels kind of interesting.
+ We have good looking animations and a lot of animated position for sex scenes.

Bad Points
- Thanks to weird IU sandbox feels pretty annoying and its tied with other things aswell. This game IU and menu design is kind of annoying with couple of different ways.
- Menu changes have unnecesary effects only makes things slower and thats just makes things annoying. Classic Renpy menu style is far more better and easy to use than this one.
- In Renpy games right mouse button nearly always opens save section which makes saving pretty easy but here its not...
- Thanks to custom IU and Menu even some basic things like skipping text feature sometimes not works and thats kind of annoying.
- Art style need improve and can be lot better than current one, with current style girls/women looks kind of unattaractive while they can look far better than this with couple of changes like smaller heads suited for their body size, little bit change on their facial features or maybe little bit more firm tits instead of shaggy ones could be good. Currently we have good amount of positions/angles for sex scenes and animations for them but because of art style being not good they do look bad and thats kind of waste their potencial. Espacily Camelia looks awfull... I mean look at this face: whats wrong with this face? LOL

For The End
I can see DEV done a lot of thing for this game but couple of bad points kills game joy, while others can bearable i cant say having unattaractive characters are not bearable, its just makes whole lewd part unenjoyable and kills all fun.