Ren'Py - Love & Sex Second Base [v24.4.0a] [Andrealphus]

These people are right; it's a grind. This is a dating sim, not a romance VN, not a nukige, not anything like that. To me, complaining about the grind- a valid complaint- is like complaining about too much reading in your plotge.

If you're looking for a OELVN dating sim, this is a great one. It's a little feature bloated, and once it's "finished" could really use some reconsideration of events, but eh. It's fun enough, and back when dating sims (not VNs) were big, this would have been a kamige so you know. Credit where it's due.

You will probably want to play with a walkthrough open.
Just like the Dating Sims of yore.

Lots of content and harem options, to my personal taste the art it's pretty inconsistent, some CG's have good quality some others are outdated or just bad.
The writing is ok, most of the girls are basic and plain only few of them have interesting branches. For the "gameplay" what can I say... it's the average grind and click endless cycle.

This game is horrible.

It really doesn't respect you as a player at all. First of all, even with the cheats on, everything is an enormous time sink. You'll be clicking screen after screen for everything.

And after that time sink? Doing this or that can lock you out of certain girls or routes that are so esoteric and hidden you need to follow a wiki guide for it. No wait, you need to follow a wiki guide for MOST of the game.

The CGs aren't half bad. The scenes are kinda flat. Even if they were good though, it's all locked behind a bunch of time wasting. So, not worth it.

I kinda has a mixed felling toward this game. This game is pretty long and still in development; currently has a lot of good content, but it doesn't mean it's overall an amazing game. The CGs are mixed, some are good and some are bad, and the plot some are average and some are high quality. Although the game does has some hint, but overall, it still needs the player to look up for a guideline, or otherwise you will be end up in situation you doesn't want to get.

Although looks like a normal dating sim game, but you can play in some kinky ways by building Dom/sub relationships with your harem and use different sex toys on them. For example, give them a slave collar, taking them for a walk like a dog. etc.

Sometimes the game can also become buggy due to version updates, some events will reappear again.

Really enjoyable game play, not boring the player because, there are enough map size and graphic / drawings. Story / events are the punch line for this game.. Events are the best and keeps you busy to truck..

I have tried this game periodically, and each time I hold out hope that the game will have improved at its foundation.
This game does not allow you to easily load, and requires you to quit and reload the game to do so.
Another problem is the fact that you can lose access to a lot of women if you mess up how you play. For instance, if you have sex with Shiori before progressing far enough with Aletta, you will be fired, lose access to the office, and hence, lose access to downstream characters.
I find this lousy, although it might not bother others who are more aware of how crappy this game mechanic is. (The problem is that if you are unable to revert to before you had sex with Shiori, you have to restart and lose hours of gameplay.)
Anyways, the game could have and should have been better because I am sure I am not the first to complain about these or other issues that I haven't come across or can't remember.

- First sex scene in a game is MC being cuckolded. Well done, devs. My roommate was fucked in my house and I had just 2 options: watch them or close the door.

- Content is locked behind a lock icon on a character progress bar with no explanation. Seems like I was doing everything right, increasing girl's love points and then I get a black lock icon in her progress bar. No explanations from UI or hints, just "Fuck you!" from a game. At first I hought that I need to ask her on a date, but she refused "I dont see you that way".

- To progress with Bree I need to play with her on Z-box, that she will gift on my second birthday (on the first one I've got a sweater). Thats whole ingame year to wait for event! There is no other way to get that freakin Z-box.

- Events are bugged. Wanted to play arcade games with Bree in the mall and it didnt start. I see her in there, its saturday, I can talk to her but nothing more. I've gone in and out of the building a few times, save\loaded, lost LP and gained back (by slapping her ass and then comlimenting). And only then the event started. At this SAME location, SAME stats, SAME time.

- Pregnancy. This is a problem. I dont need pregnant women in a porn game. But the only way to avoid it is to buy condoms. And earning money here is hard, really. While sex scene may happen at random, when I dont have them in inventory.

3 stars for art and writing. Imagine others as locked behind some broken event with no hints.

The key points of this game are: Shitloads of solid content; awful amount of grinding and waiting (even with cheats) to progress through it all; far-too-often objectives are obtuse/indescript/require hardstudying the wiki; kinda buggy sometimes

It feels like a serious victim of development bloat.

The game is far from well made.
I am talking purely game play. Most game features either bug out. Even without cheats! Content is locked out without warning or any sign of that going to happen. The guide or the book in game that shows the events etc. Has to be made a lot better at displaying what the player needs to do if they want this or that.

If I want To control the company I need to take this route if I want to control the company or take another route where you get kicked and you are free to do other things. But you are locked out of the office sex.

We need in-depth branching knowledge. Or even better to be able to lock specific paths. I start talking with Some one if there are multiple routes that I might take so the game locks me on that specific route.

As far as animations go! The new animations are well made. And even the older ones are decent.

Considering that the uploader of the game is not the creator but I think just a patron subscriber. I can expect mutch of what I say to be improved upon. Even so my rating will change accordingly.

one of the best erotics games i have ever played, give it a try please and if you can, buy it in steam, that author deserves money, it has a lot of content and the grafics are really great as you can see, i just love the dom sub mechanic

It's a very nice game with tons of content and tons of kinks. I like how the dev releases some content frequently. Each character has its own storyline and choice does matter. Dev did a good job.
Overall it's 5 stars for me.

it's... good. Tons of content and characters that don't feel like memes.

The complexity and sheer amount of things you have to keep track of to do a perfect playthrough of this game is staggering. The girls are split into groups of 4-5 that you can form a harem with. Each girl has a schedule and a path, you can't go down just one path in case it blocks your way down a different one. Once you're in a certain stage of the path, you can't sleep with more than one girl from any given group in the same 7 day period, because if you do, the girl you cheated on will leave forever.

Sleeping with a chick isn't always intentional either, you'll get into random events with one chick that trigger the cheating mechanic and screw you over. You basically have to keep half a dozen saves, each made at least half an hour of game time apart, because there's so many ways a playthrough can die. The bear... the stupid bear... don't go to the park at night. I really did not expect this game to have horror/gore.

You have to schedule dates, keep them, keep up hygiene, food and exercise, there's events that happen only at a certain date and you need to know exactly what to do in order to continue a girl's storyline (the wedding one is diabolical imo). Really, really not easy to do anything without the massive wiki.

I'm glad they fixed the slowdown bug (or was it just my massive expensive computer upgrades?) and I loved most of my first playthrough, but I can't bring myself to do it all over again, because I made 2 mistakes in a game with 5 million traps, while I was following the wiki as best I could. Just 4-5 girls is an entire game's worth of complexity, this is... unbelievable. I feel like this should've been a few games developed in a series instead.

I love 2D digital graphics, that's the reason I have turned my attention to this game in 2019. And sometime before the middle of 2021, I enjoyed revisiting it periodically as new versions were released. But then the inevitable happened - as new characters were introduced and story branches branched out, I just started getting confused by the numerous girls that appeared in the game, as well as the story progression that kept getting more and more complicated. By September 2022, I realized that I was completely confused by this legion of girls, especially the need to keep track of each heroine's points.
In my opinion, the developers missed the moment when they should have stopped and finished the project. I haven't touched this game for over a year, but judging by the discussion, there was nothing good to look forward to.
"And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action". - W. S.

The game is overall a well-made life-dating sim game.

Pros:
The good visuals of the game attracted me to the game.
The writing is very nice. It was very well descriptive and detailed that I didn't feel the lack of animation in the sex scenes.
The girls are quite diverse, both physically and personality-wise.

Cons:
The game is very grindy, we have to experience many dialogues and repetitive date events to earn a certain love point from the girls.

Pregnancy content is too short for my liking, if we don't get married when the love interest gives birth, the love score drops significantly and when we get married, the game ends immediately. It would be nice to continue afterwards.

A game that makes you grind stats and items and "relationship scores" with characters. Until few characters go "WHAT?! YOU SLEPT WITH SOMEONE ELSE?!" And characters leave. And you lose job. No warning. No discussions.

No character is clear in what they want in relationships. No character wants to discuss. The game is rigid, tiresome and stupid. Over all disappointing.

Gamplay: 4/5 the movement system is so pretty unique afaik so it has a slight learning curve, but once you get it your only limited by the transition speed and engine limitations. The NG+ in the game is well done, however, it does force you to go through hours of content over and over that even with skip is unbearable.

I used a cheat tool about 3 hours in since some plot lines can take in game months, real time hours to slog through the first time if you are reading the dialogue. Highly recommend doing one blind playthrough to learn the game and after that use the Time Freeze Mod + wiki to make it more bearable.


Story: 6/5, No special powers, dark undertones, no grammatical errors that I saw. Includes NTR for those into that, all avoidable in the patch I played with liberal wiki usage. With such a huge roster of characters each one remains feeling unique in their own way. Highly recommend avoiding skip usage since the dialogue is also voiced usually, making each character feel even more unique.


Art: 3/5, when the art is good, it's really good. When it's bad, it's goes from mediocre to straight up terrible. Excluding the grind, this is the biggest flaw so far, a lack of consistency that will have you forgetting which character is which. Some scene opportunities were also missed, but I can't fault the developer for this.

Overall: A great game being bumped down to good by inconsistent art, a lackluster time skip function (corrected by mods) and an ungodly amount of wiki usage to the point I was playing wiki simulator more than the game itself.

TIPS:

• The game is extremely well paced once you get a decent stat build up, if like me you hate overly excessive grind to reach the well paced parts, Time Freeze Mod, makes everything much easier and includes a UI Cheat.
• Use and abuse the wiki to ensure you are on the path you want and that you get the best starting skills.
• Don't Cassidy Route/Office Route last, it is one of the longest routes and if done last you will have nothing to do for a long while.
• The hypnotize skill is not in the wiki and only has a few mentions in forum search, it's super useful to develop certain characters Dom/Sub/Gender stats quickly. Maybe NG+ exclusive but I located it in the bookstore on my first NG+ loop.

Version: 23.7.0c

This game is awesome for someone like me, since I enjoy grindy games, if that grind is done right. Taking care of needs, boosting stats, learning skills and of course boosting relationships with girls. To make perfect playthrough you will need to open wiki so you don’t mess up any events, which can lock you out with some girls forever. On the other hand there is NG+ which is great for those, who like to play without spoilers and want to learn from their mistakes. Also huge applaud to the devs, who are feeding content consistently for I don’t even know how long, I was patron for a whole year like 2-3 years ago and was never let down, seems like they keep on giving.

+ All girls are unique physically and mentally-wise and are very believable, which you don’t see in many games of this type. There are 21 romancable girls atm and you can form many harems between them under right conditions. There is ton of content btw, which can entertain you for many hours! All the NTR is avoidable luckily.

+ Writing is mostly very solid, each girl has her own story and makes you care about them or some of them at very least. Progression through their stories feel natural and kept me involved.

- This game clearly tries to make you to immerse yourself in it’s world, which is great, there are many issues which will take you out from that immersion tho. For example your secretary asks you if she can go home to take care of her sick son, you agree yet she stays in office and keeps on going like nothing happened. Some girl can storm off in rage from you, yet you can interact with her immediately like nothing happened and many other examples, which I won’t be covering here. They should make it that she dissapears for a day from a game or not to include those conversations at all, feels like blatant oversight here.

- What takes you out from immersion the most is art. This was problem even before and was one of the main reasons I stopped following this game, it got unfortunately worse over time. This game has some freakin beautiful art, all the backgrounds, main sprites of girls and those tiny shibi or how it’s called are all awesome. But other art (mostly sex scenes) ranges from pretty good to mediocre to absolutely atrocious. There are at least 7+ artist maybe even 10+ in this game, that inconsistency is the worst I’ve seen in any game and for someone like me, who is sucker for consistent art, it is a huge let down. I’d rather have one mediocre art style then this mess. The worst part about it is that the newest art (or art which I didn’t see in earlier stages) is so terrible on many levels and I’m not talking about subjectively disliking that type of art, what I’m talking about are disfigured heads and faces of girls it looks absolutely horrendous to that degree, that I had to redo many of them in photoshop just to keep playing this game. One would think that game will improve art in time, doesn’t apply here tho. What is the most confusing for me is that there aren’t even that many scenes drawn and one or two artist could handle them with no problem imo.

My Rating: 7/10

Story: ★★★★☆
Dialogue: ★★★☆☆
How well it plays: ★★★★★
Art Style: ★★★☆☆
Sex Scenes: ★★★✩✩
Girl Options: ★★★★★
Replayablity: ★★★✩✩

- The story is pretty simple to understand, you are living the life of a guy that happens to have an immense luck when it comes to the ladies.

- The dialogue really needs some polishing for sure, certain things are said and done, and then you are greeted with different dialogues that make no sense, or belong to a different selection of choices to be made.

- You have a large variety of women to chose from, you can either choose to bang them all, or hand pick your favorites. The developer doesn't force you to have them all, you can have one or ten girlfriends at the same time, the choice is entirely yours.

- Each character has his/her own personality, some personalities between the girls seem the same if you really put your mind into it, but I appreciate the effort.

- The art style for the girls when you talk to them is very good, unfortunately...I can't say the same when it comes to the sex scenes, the girls go from being all nice and almost "realistic" to being very cartoony and messy, whomever drew the sex scene images did a poor job, broke my immersion many times.

Overall what do I think? The game is alright, it's definetelly worth a try, and you might find some girls to be...very appealing to your likes.

Won't go too much into detail as Talilover (the review right before this) echoed a lot of my sentiments with regards to the diverse girl options, the story and disconnects, and the absolute need for a walkthrough. I'll diverge a bit in saying that I'm not usually a fan of sandboxes but the included cheats menu made it mostly bearable with skipping the grind for so many different types of stats, though it can highlight the story/character behaviour disconnects even more. The quest log is a handy quick reference tool but the wiki is a must for some scenarios which require more detail or when progress gets stalled, especially if playing in multiple sessions where it's likely that I'll forget some details.

One feature I love and want to highlight and why this game goes back to 4 stars for me is the ability to remove piercings from the characters once you get close to them. As someone who's not a fan of piercings or tattoos I appreciated it for an option to continue with the otherwise attractive LIs. I only wish it was just available as a customisation option from the get-go rather than me having to skip through early scenes, or at the very least also to remove the tattoos.

Quick version before I rant about a few things: This is a game where I enjoy playing and gooing to in equal measures, I'm a sucker for sandbox type games ig and this is probably the best sandbox experience on this site.

As far as Art goes there's a WIDE variety of characters to bang and a wide variety of ways to bang em, there are noticable bumps and dips in quality due to how long this game has been in development (you'll notice that scenes with Sasha and Bree don't always compete with scenes with girls like Audrey as an example). That being said ALL art is still enjoyable and these older scenes are being revamped.

Any tags, like cheating or netorare, can be avoided if you want and you typically have plenty of warning before you get thrown into stuff. That being said if you want to experience the most this game has to offer you're gonna have to lean pretty heavy into maledom stuff. Not really a problem for me but it can get a little tiring turning every girl into a slave to achieve harems, on top of the fact that it's a bit of a grind to do it. Now if on the other hand you were excited about the female protagonist tag I'd stay clear as that part of the game has long been left to rot, and honestly I'm surprised they haven't removed it entirely (I don't think anyone would actually care at this point)

Speaking of grind you should know it actually doesn't take that much effort to get in the pants of most girls, with some serious outliners in this regard. What really gets annoying tho is trying to grind out their submission stat via gifts and slapping their ass a bunch (once you reach a threshold). It gets better as you go, dates can achieve a lot of heart points and the more submissive they become the more actions you can do to gain submission points, but it's always going to start a bit slow and you'll bump into roadblocks in the form of "do x at y during Z time". Putting aside the grind with the fairer sex you'll also have to grind out 3 stats, manage 4 status meters, hunt down certain skills (sometimes to avoid death, straight up) and get that sweet sweet bread from your job if you want to experience everything this game has to offer (you'll need a lot of money btw). Again, this isn't a problem for me because I enjoy the sandbox experience and I don't feel like this game is ever blue balling you, but it's worth noting because sometimes there is a bit of a time crunch because you have to grind out some bar in a certain amount of time

I also want to talk about the writing of this game, which I usually enjoy, but sometimes it feels like there's a serious disconnect between the characters and the sandbox experience. There's a yandere character in this game, someone who is obsessed with you and quite plainly tells you how she flicked her bean to you fucking her sister, but she'll act disgusted if you invite her for a booty call or slap her ass because all girls are coded to do so until you reach a certain submission level. See what I mean? The gameplay is trying to have a very standardized way of handling girls while also having a wide variety of personalities that can't sensibly fit this mold and it's weird when this disconnect pops up. You also have certain events that will happen that just do not make sense in the grand scheme of things. Example: One event has Bree sucking you off under the table at her place of work, the next event had her acting embarrassed and bashful because I implied I liked her...huh? I later fucked Sasha in her room after the Halloween party and then a few days later they confront me about sleeping with both of them...damn bitch, hate a playa if you gotta, but you just figured this out? You'll just regularly get the impression that there isn't really a coherent and linear story but rather a checklist of events with no sense of connectivity or real meaning. I digress tho, this is a porn game after all

Now the thing that's knocking off a full star (because I can excuse everything prior in someway) is holy fucking hell do not play this game without peeking at a walkthrough. The game will attempt to tell you what you should do with a little quest log thingy but the problem is it just doesn't tell you everything you need to know. You will lock out certain routes because this guide just decided to withhold information from you and sometimes not even realize it. Other times you'll do everything the guide told you to do...but still fail because there was just a little tidbit of info it didn't feel like sharing teehee. Example: The home harem mission tells you "make sure they are agreeable to sex with women" and a few other things...what it doesn't tell you is you need 75 affection and 25 submission from Bree and Sasha as well. In my current run I've already lost access to the Cassidy story because I "forgot" to install a camera in my office on top of grinding out the investigation bar, and I only realized this at a point where I'm sure as hell not loading the save for her. This isn't a game where you just figure this stuff out with subtle hints, you need the guide if you don't want to fuck up shit which I just don't think should ever be the case for a game.

Still an overall great experience that has been receiving plenty of love over the years and worth a look imo