Ren'Py - Love & Sex Second Base [v24.11.0b] [Andrealphus]

Excellent pictures and great game mechanics. Beautiful looking characters. Unique story that will keep you involved and make you really think about some of the decisions. This game is one of my most favorite games...

Review for v21.9.1

I have probably spent well over 50 hours playing this game, maybe even more than a hundred. I have started several times, unlocked mostly all content, and I am finally feeling like I have my opinion set in stone now.

The good points:
1. This is NOT a visual novel, this is a sandbox, a dating simulator, and it is what you would expect from one. I would say it is mostly true to the genre, but I will talk about the details later. It has one significant advantage over many other games though - it does not pretend to be something it is not.
2. The content. It is simply massive. Going through every girl takes more than 20 hours, even more if you decide to do roots.
3. The art is pretty good, there are many well-made 2DCG art pieces of varying quality and complexity.
4. The game has several routes for each girl, allowing for replayability.

The bad points:
1. The sandbox design. It is good to have it, but here it is just too much. What am I talking about? The stats of cource. The character has several different gauge-like needs like in Sims game, each action, just like in this said game, increases certain needs and decreases other needs. BUT this is not a Sims game. This is not a real-life simulator. This is not a game we come to play to be a hardworking person or to go cook lunches. This is the game we play to try the "dating simulator" experience it is labeled as. And all the needs management simply gets in the way. Don't get me wrong, they are flawlessly executed, but it is just not the game for them.
2. The stats with girls. Oh boy, they are terrible. You see, the game started with only a handful of girls, and stats were adjusted to those particular girls, to make the gameplay enjoyable. I am talking about Bree and Sasha of course, as the girls it all starts with. Why are they so different? They live in the same house as the main hero. They sleep, eat, take shower, watch TV in the same house. If you want to talk to them, to interact with them, they are mostly always there. BUT it is not the case for almost any other girl. You either turn on girl schedule (which is incredibly bad as half of the times girls are basically MIA) or you turn on complete randomness to gamble. Let me give you an example: you need to decrease Harmony's purity stat from 100 to 0. This takes some set actions, but other than that about 80-90 individual interactions in exact same order. Yeah, lets speak about food 70 times in a row! 70 days in a row! Oh, wait a bit, want a present? I have just bought 50 romance novels which I am giving to you one at a time for an entire year. And yeah, this girl only appears like 1 hour a day. Looks balanced, right? No, it isn't! And this is the point is that most of the interactions are like this. Stock up on hundreds of slave stories, prepare for the dread of grind if you want to get anywhere in this game. The stat system is incredibly unbalanced and some girls are easy to progress through while others require a lot of time for almost nothing.
3. The ingame guide. The sole purpouse of it is to be helpful. Is it? Hell no it is not. The code of the game is so bad that the guide not only does not represent what you actually may find helpful information, it even misguides you most of the times. Yeah, a misguide! That's the name. See, each event changes certain triggers. The triggers are in hundreds in the save file, provided you are crazy enough to look in there. And the guide should track those and make it easier, right? WRONG. There are different triggers for guide and for the actual game. Sometimes the guide does not update. Sometimes the guide does update, but the game doesnt, sometimes the guide shows entirely different action instead of the one you are on. I cannot underestimate how frustrated I am with this stupid game mechanic which is supposed to be helpful, how much time spent in attempts to fix it, I have evem written my own python scripts to fix certain triggers to get the guide back in line. And only for it to fall again because I have forgotten some unknown trigger with generic name somewhere, and the dev has too. I can only imagine what kind of nightmare it is to maintain this game and to release at least semi-stable builds.
4. While we are on the topic of guides and misguides, let us introduce the wiki. Yeah, the actual wiki hosted on Fandom and run on MediaWiki engine. Ever seen a porn game with one before? Well, here you go. The funny thing, it is only the complexity and the flexibility of such an amazing platform such as MediaWiki to carry out how hard the game is in terms of its events and progress. Prepare to have the wiki always opened on the second screen, guiding you on a thin line of not screwing up your save. This is NOT normal. This is NOT ok.
5. Now, the difficulty. I have played a fair amount of time on all 3 difficulties, and I can confidently say: everyone chosing something other than easy is a complete masochist and needs to get a job. Even on easy the game is so incredibly grindy you will feel like playing smth like WoW or EVE Online sometimes. And normal doubles the grind, while hard - guess what - quadrupples it! Cool, right? See you in 50 real life hours once you have leveled your stats high enough for Aletta to "notice" you on hard difficulty.
6. The dialogues: they are anonymous. They are legion. They do not forgive. You do forget. I am not a huge fan of walls of text, but can tolerate them if the text is well written, has some jokes, broken by some art or animation etc. Here the text quality is solid, but it has a plenty of mistakes, and there is oh so much of it you will spend a couple of hours reading through it thoroughly only to realise you haven't progressed that much (by wiki standarts). You start skipping these walls of text and all of a sudden you don't know what to do, unless you go look at wiki. And you do look at wiki anyway, so you just continue skipping these walls of text and chosing the highlighted answers just because otherwise you ruin your save and you dont understand anything anymore.
7. And then the walls of text step aside and you get to see what you have struggled for: a sex scene. Yay. And it is lame... No animations, the art quality is rather low by today's standarts, and not what you would expect from all these beautiful sprites of girls and background. You start digging and realise there is like 3 pictures to do with each girl. All static. All generic. All average-quality at best. With absolutely no way to rewind them. You are disappointed. You return to reading walls of text.
8. Questionable content. Yes, you know the one. Kylie. Chibi pics instead of normal ones, ruining the mood for a girl. Questionable sprites (like one of Kleio's sprites was literally her showing middle fingers 24/7). Brutality, murder, gore. Imagine yourself sitting playing the game with a half-erect dick in hand just because you had a sex scene 5 minutes ago and been reading generic text since, and you are suddenly greeted with a torn head of one of the girls as a present. Killer of the mood and killer of the experience.
9. Every. Goddamn. Update. Breaks. Your. Save. Want to spend 50h grinding out stats, maxing out girl relations? Do not update. Once you do, the game realizes you have skipped a recently added event, and it plays out, all your triggers are now messed up, the guide is dead, the girl stats are ruined, you are softlocked. There is absolutely zero beckwards compatibility. Every save. Every update. Every time something new gets added you have to start anew.

I have spent so much time on this game, giving it second and third chances, and so on, repeatedly realising I have screwed over some particular event and have to reload a save several hours ago. I have lost several endgame saves to game updates, I have broken like every possible girl somehow over the course of all my attempts (I think, only Hanna has never been bugged for me yet). I know this game has great writing, interesting events and it is becoming bigger and better. But I just cannot go anymore. I cannot force myself to go through another playthrough to start anew knowing it will break for sure, knowing I will never likely get to experience all new stuff being added. Maybe this game is just not for me, but after having played significantly better games on this site I cannot think high of this game anymore. I wish it had a fresh start, a lite version, from the code side, from the text side, had stats reworked and guide fixed (or maybe incorporate wiki in the game?) But it will never happen.
I hope you know what you get yourselves into, and if you want to enjoy the game, have fun! Just dont try to get serious with it, like I did.

Very grindy, tiring and boring dating sim with a few lewd catoon pics that aren't worth the grind. This game isn't fun and the payoff for all the effort (even with the cheat mode on and a walkthrough) is lacking.

I wanted to like this but it is surprisingly boring. There is so much grind for a few lewd pics. "Gameplay" isn't fun and the payoff for the effort is lacking. I prefer unique art games and this had that but the overall experience is tedious and about as enjoyable as IRL chores.

Even with the cheat mode on and a walkthrough, this game is stupidly grindy and will lock you out of certain characters without warning. It is simply not fun, even if the art and writing is good. I have played about 20 other games on this site and simply gave up on this one after 8 or so hours.

Quality of art is great but I cannot said the same for gameplay. Gameplay is too grindy to be fun. Gift provide little to almost no improvement to the relation.

Play the game with and without cheat and both eventually encounter bug that stop your progress. Then you have update which introduce more content and bug.

I honestly wanted to give this a 5 but the amount of bug and grind is driving me crazy. Imagine some play that took several hours have to be delete cause it isn't compatible with current version.

Very grindy game, its very tiring and boring. Also I noticed most of the scenes have been rushed, the quality of the images took a major dive. You spend so much time just trying to improve a single stat and you have to keep the Wiki close by just for one scene. If you're unlucky, you get one of the rushed images, that look very off-putting. Faces do not make sense, body parts look weird. Really not worth the grind only to get one or two pics.
Unless the devs are actually making it a little less grindy and more flexible I'm afraid this game will stay bad.

(Currently v21.9 build)
This is one of my favorite games on this site. It's full of content. You can shoot for non-harem love, or you can build a few different harems, or you can fuck and impregnate just about every character without even building much of a relationship. You can be a toxic asshole or be a phenomenal lover.
Your choices matter, and girls can and will leave the game for mistakes. There is an in-game hint guide in the top right corner of the game. There is also an official walk-through to achieve anything you want or if you get stuck.
The MC needs aspect can be annoying. It makes it so you have to plan what you want to do. New game +, which is unlocked upon marrying anybody, carries your stats which adjust your needs. It also carries over your learned skills. This makes your next game easier (and in a few small cases actually little bit harder). I enjoy the planning aspect. I find it's nice to have to work for relationships in some adult games rather than just being handed it to you on a platter.
While there are some bugs, bugs are generally fixed pretty quickly. There are monthly updates for more content. Monthly updates sometimes bring lots of content, and sometimes they are just a few scenes. Saves are compatible with going into the next update. The only things that I find annoying about updates is they remove the ability to skip through scenes you've already done until you do it again.
I only have three real complaints with this game, and eventually one will be completely addressed. The others may not.

1. No ability to fast forward through seasons. This is my real complaint after playing it multiple times. More than a few characters require certain seasons to progress. Quite a few require it to be Summer, but if you start in the Summer or even Spring, you may not have progressed in the game far enough to do the season required events. On the other hand, a few require Winter, which makes it impossible to progress every girl in the exact same season.
2. The Female MC (Bree) rarely gets updates. I enjoy playing both male and female MCs.
3. Some characters have hardly any content. Due to Patreon voting for who to focus on, some girls haven't seen new content in many updates.

I personally think the game would be more interesting if the women you knock up gave birth after 3 seasons rather completing a route by marrying a women/harem. To see what your kids end up like, you either have to save-scum to marry everyone, or you have to do multiple new games. I personally don't do the latter option after doing one or two New Game+ because some routes take a long time and a lot of effort to complete. I'm fine with how it currently is, just think it'd be more interesting to see your kids running around and/or mentions of them.

Very good game. Interesting story, a lot of interactions and many scenes. Graphics is also of a very high quality and great art style. There are also a lot of choices which have heavy consequences on the story. Interesting dialogues and variety of constumes as well.

There are some annoying things though:
- Season can't be changed from the cheat menu and there is a lot of season dependent content
- Often its not clear how to progress with the story
- Some girls have only a few scenes (Hanna, Harmony) in comparition of others having a lot
- Optimization isn't that good, the game is much slower than in previous versions.

I also dislike the addition of Bree MC, it adds a lot of complexion and drawns the focus away from more interesting things.

Overall i would rate the game 4/5. It has good chances for improvement and becoming one of the best games on the site though.

For beggining become interesting but after you play some hours it become less and less interesting and more of boring, the mechanism to collect points for some scene it's fucking tired system it kill all fun...at some point you will lose interest in story and drop the game sadly because I like a the art style of this game conception of story is good to but the grinding it kill all vibe of this game.
I can tell it's old style "reward system" that I hate so much it's just consume your time to become game much longer than it is...
1 star for art style I really like it and 1 star for voice of character this 2 points it's only lesson for other devs to take serious of their game, a game is not complete if you don't have voice...

This is a great game and I've played a lot of it through different versions.

Pros:

• Huge cast of girls with different personalities and appearance
• Fast updates, usually once every couple of months
• A lot of content with plenty of different kinks served
• Interesting dialog, although it can get repetitive at times
• Voiced dialog and the voice actors do a decent job. Each character has a unique voice which is nice
• Enjoyable gameplay, it's basically a time management/life simulator. The gameplay can get grindy at times but that's life

Cons

• You have to play the game in a very specific way to get the outcomes you want. There is a wiki so figuring out what to do is not that hard but you have to follow it very carefully which is not fun.
• There seems to be multiple artists working on this game with different artstyles. Can be a bit offputting especially since there is one artstyle that is better
• the grind can get really bad sometimes. For example, for one character you have to give them $10k to progress their story and that can literally take weeks in game to get.
• No gallery. There are plenty of repeatable Hscenes but the story events are not repeatable so you have to save every story scene.
• The game can get laggy, especially the further in game you get.
• The in game quest tracker is messy. After playing the game for a while, you'll just have a list of storylines, half of which you've already done.

Overall, I would recommend this game. There are plenty of issues with it but with the variety of girls and kinks there's bound to be something in there for you. I would recommend playing this game for about a month in game with the wiki close by to see if you like it. You'll be able to progress through a couple of the storylines that way.

Pros:

•Wide cast of romance options with decent amount of content for each of them.

•Diverse fetish and scene options, something for everyone.

•Good art and music

•Romance routes with some characters are satisfying and super cute.

Cons:

•Very easy to screw up and lose events or
character paths with no warning. Feels like you have to play perfectly which is weird for a sandbox game.

•In game walkthrough is inaccurate, requirements to advance with each character is unclear.

•Super grindy, need to juggle multiple daily and weekly requirements, along with saving money. Cheat mode alleviates this but base game is very slow. Having specific events and character requirements tied to in game calendar dates with no way to advance days quickly is painful.

•Laggy interface further increases feelings of grind.

•Untagged graphic violence and super fucked up scenes with no warning about them or way to turn them off. Can technically be avoided through gameplay choices but these scenes do not fit with the rest of the game. Seeing these and the sudden tonal switch afterward is frankly a huge turn off for the game as a whole.

A pretty good game that still has someway to go in terms of development. There are plenty of girls in the story each with a different amount of development put into them. Scenes involving them are a mix of some good and OK quality art. When I originally played this game I had to do a lot of grinding but the cheat mod took away that hassle. The gameplay now still needs improvement, as I have to continuously check the wiki on certain things to do added with the problem of bugs still being around. Overall pretty good, if it wasn't I wouldn't have sunk in the dozens of hours I put into it.

Version Played: 21.8.0a

This is going to be a hard one for me to rate; for everything it does right (a lot!) it does something else wrong. I think the best example of this is the art, which is overall gorgeous (I'm a fan of the pseudo-anime style), but it's sadly inconsistent with characters looking wildly different between scenes. This isn't the first time I've encountered something like this (Taffy Tales has a similar problem), but it can be very off-putting. On the flipside, the gameplay systems are universally not fun; any time I have to grind for stats or points or affinities of any kind, I lose interest pretty quickly. Fan patches to the rescue! The story itself is pretty standard, but at least you aren't god's gift to the female sex who can do no wrong, so it's slightly more grounded than similar games.

Positives
+ Great Art
+ Tons of girls
+ Game has voice acting and it's actually pretty good!
+ Several fetishes represented (though nothing too extreme or in abundance, aside from lez)

Negatives
- Grindy with systems that aren't really fun
- Off-model art is commonplace and distracting
- Game can get a bit wordy

Overall, I think the positives outweigh the negatives, but unless you're really someone who enjoys playing around with systems and working to get off, do yourself a favor and install the cheat patch.
The last thing I wanna do is consult a fucking fan wiki article to figure out the next trigger for a character.

It gets a 4 but ONLY with the mod, otherwise it's a 3.

Like this? Try: Summertime Saga, Taffy Tales, Fantasy Valley
Note to Devs: Great game overall. A lot of time and effort clearly went into this. I think toning down some of the grindiness or at least making in-game hints crystal clear would remove some of the frustration experienced while playing.

I love the complex narratives and images.

The overall length is very long, even with cheats turned on. They should definitely play with cheats unless you have a week to play this game.

The story have long term choices and turn limited choices. The graphics is wonderfully made and well detailed.

I only have high hopes for the rest of the game

A lot of this game is really good, but it's really dragged down by the insane amount of things required to trigger certain events. Progress will be locked behind fulfilling 20 different parameters with no indicators at all as to what they are. You can brick entire routes without knowing why or that you even did. The needs system is over-tuned and annoying. If you don't play with cheats the tedium will kill your will to play.

If you don't use a guide you are going to miss 50% of the game easily before you give up. IMO if a game needs a guide to play properly it's a poorly designed game.

It's just a shame they chose this super convoluted path of progression.

+ Solid art.
+ Many characters with a good amount of personality.
+ Generally hot situations that aren't terribly repetitive.
= Grindy
- Scenes could do with a few more images if not animation.
- Very buggy especially when backtracking.
- It's possible to completely brick routes without making a reasonably obvious decision to do so. For example, MC's friend stopped showing up for D&D after the 2nd session because MC's sister, who just entered the story and wasn't there for the 1st session, got salty I didn't choose any option that focused on her. She said she wouldn't participate again and I thought ok cool I'll just keep going with the other roomates, but no. MC's friend never showed up again without saying shit. Makes me wonder how many other routes I'll never see because of some seemingly small decision.

TL;DR - The pieces are there for this game to be one of the best ever but in its current state it's pretty underwhelming.


v22.12.0 Update

Still suffers from many of the same issues as it did a year and a half ago. It's still needlessly grindy even with cheats, it's still littered with bugs, and it's
still possible for routes to get stuck for no apparent reason. The new map navigation is nice but even so I'm gonna drop my rating down to 2 stars until the game gets some polish. Seriously, just spend 3 months fixing bugs and making sure all routes behave correctly then this will be a 4/5 easy.

When reading the reviews, I didn't think that "contains a bit of grind" meant that the grind is the basis on which the rest of the content was attached. The gameplay feels like a walk through a swamp. A swamp of grind and random.
Still, game has good art and normal writing (at least for me, who barely knows english).
But...

This game surprised me. I don't like sandbox games in general so I left this one lurking on the update screen for literally years.

While there are some bugs and grind, once I got used to the system and the idea of needing to periodically refer to the PDF guide, it was just plain fun.

There are a wide variety of kinks available and you can gear your choices to either enjoy them or make them go away.

There's a wide variety of girls whose stories are written pretty well albeit with the occasional proofing error. The artwork is appealing and I don't mind the lack of animations since this is a dating sim and not for fapping.

The entire experience reminds me of another game with a certain love fairy that rhymes with Bunny Hop, but without the puzzles.

Recommend this for those who like these type of games.

I've played many versions of this game. I don't feel like making a comprehensive review of it, so just some of the things that I find bothersome and that prevent me from returning to it:
1. Most importantly, models and sex scenes are bad. Not only they are static with no animations, but they are also often poorly drawn with wrong proportions.
2. Gameplay is grindy and that's perfectly fine, but story progression is often very obtuse and requires a walkthrough pdf on hand.
All in all, pretty average. Would be a stable 4-4.5 if models and static sex scenes were better.