Ren'Py - Love & Sex Second Base [v24.6.0a] [Andrealphus]

Excellent game so far. Characters are mostly voiced, pretty decently for the most part. Art is good, though sometimes inconsistent for the same character in some scenes. Relationship building is well paced and it's easy to get immersed in them.

The main reason I took a star was because none of the scenes are currently animated. Most main sex scenes are one image before the act, one during , and another for the aftermath. Otherwise this game has so much going for it that even jut 2 or 3 frame animations and perhaps a tad more depth for some of the characters would be all it needs to set it on the path of a perfect title.

My biggest criticism is that there isn't much reason to replay scenes with any of the girls and they don't have much personality or spontaneousness outside of date situations or specific holidays. To have as many choices as a german brothel, this game had to sacrifice depth with half the cast.

The no-condom-and-drunk scenes aren't much different from scenes after a girl asks you to help her get pregnant, if at all. Several of the scenes, it still treats it like it's unwanted. It'd be nice if there was some different writing behind various scenes. A random swap between possibilities, no more artwork needed, but just something new to read. Many scenes also don't seem to take dom/sub, kink or whatever points are involved, into consideration. Fricking any given one of them on date 1 doesn't often yield any different results than if you're doing it after 5 dates, max love, and going steady.

It seems like some of the cast is just abandoned as cast continues to grow, in favor of more harem content that can't be repeated without tactical saving. Good examples being Anna and Hanna. Emma's story also seems stalled out, and what there is of it, it's repetitive.

I have been a fan of this game for a long time. However I haven't played it in the past 4-5 months because of 1 reason, and 1 reason only. I'll first tell you the great things about this game. Great story element, immersive world, fun mechanics and cool art. People sometimes cry about the grind but I find it fun because of the great environment that exists in the game. Content is also added at a good pace which tells you how dedicated the developer is. But I'll still give it a 4 out 5 and the reason being is the sex scenes. This game has the potential of being the best, but when it comes to the main stuff, it is a bit disappointing. I had read some reviews earlier and I was a bit baffled as people keep praising the artwork, but I think they are commending the artwork in general which I also agree with. My only advice would be to improve the quality of the sex scenes. Apart from that, great job, great game. Keep it up.

[v21.11.0]
The game was supposed to be one of the best. But it gets worse and worse. The stories and variety of girls are one of its good sides. The art is a good side of it but it is inconsistent. The dialogues and voice lines are also top-notch. So what's the problem? Bugs. Tons of bugs. The game gives us new bugs every patch. This game has few punishment systems. But what it punishes you most with bugs. The game requires a lot of grinding and time. But it will make them all meaningless when you can't progress because of bugs. Moreover, old saves do not work properly which makes your efforts go to waste. In addition, the stories clash with each other. The story tracker is not that great either. I liked the game a lot. But it is unplayable. Even though there are bug-fix patches, they can't fix it all.

When it comes to open world games, this is definitely one doing most things right! Not too grindy, so much content and good story lines for a lot of different characters (as you can see from the banner of the game - I mean a lot!). Version 21.11.0 still leaves most paths open and they are currently planning to implement a female MC, but there is so much to discover.

So if you like the style of the game, give it a try!

the game is very good even if every update you have to go back from scratch i still think it's great because the game is always interesting, but the fact that the art of one of my favorite (Samantha) characters has been replaced by one that looks like a draft left a little disappointed with the game I hope they come back in that decision!

Look, this game is not without its flaws. It can be grindy, it can be buggy,for sure. But, man, do I always find myself coming back to it.

I think it's because the game reminds me of something old school that I would have played in the Dating Sims section of Newgrounds back in the day, but on steroids.

The cast is big (a bit too big) and all of the girls are hot in their own ways. Especially Sasha, and Lexi, oof.

I would highly recommend playing this one with cheats on, however, to avoid wanting to rage quit from the grind. And save frequently incase you miss a key event that just won't trigger for some reason.

But regardless, I recommend checking this game out if you're an old school dating sim genre fan like myself.

4*

It is a deep time management, stat based, corruption sandbox dating game.

Pros:
- It has high replayability if you enjoy the loop. ALOT of content and variety
- You can get EVERY girl but you'll better be prepared to save scum and open wikis if you think you are up for the challenge
- Most girls have an interesting personality and are fun to interact with, some even have their mini game/mechanic
- Long term dev support, the devs are always updating some aspect of the game, which is uncommon in the adult game industry, even if they do start side projects when inspiration hits them.

There are some big cons that you might wanna know:
- The art can be pretty horrible esp during the sex scenes
- It gets weird bugs every few patches because the game is so extensive, it is hard to QA and find them till weeks later.
- A few girls are built around unpopular kinks like Netorare, yes you get cucked, although they tend to be optional or you can command them to stop
- You'll need the wiki for the harder challenges(like the big harems and collaring)

End of the day, if you just want a quick wank, this game might disappoint, but if you enjoy something more challenging and replayable, this might be for you.

I liked the 2d art style, and I can say I was amazed at the complexity of the game. I have done several playthroughs from the start, because I keep finding that I missed part of a story or failed to start one of the quest lines. This game will keep you involved for a long time.

There simply so much variety, from strict boss femdom to a rock band harem. I like the writing, it was fun. It can be grindy but that is what cheats are for. A good amount of kink as well if that is your thing. It has its own art style, which is is impressive. Everyone looks great. Yeah

3 words: inconsistent art styles
If the game mechanics, setting, story is fine, there will be always one major crutch that will ruin any experience and that will be in my case the inconsistencies of art styles between the scenes. The artists somehow can't replicate the character images as shown on the banners in the actual scenes themselves.

Good art, interesting concept, but poorly executed, with too many flaws that make the experience annoying.
- As a free roam ren'py game, this game, for some reason, lags. It takes several transitions to move to your desired location, and about 1 second of freezing for every transition, making the gameplay experience very clunky, stiff.
- Too much repetitive grinding without proper guidance. Without a walkthrough, most of the time you are wandering aimlessly, doing random stuff, watch your stats grow, waiting for something to happen, and can still be locked out of certain paths for good. Unplayable without a walkthrough pdf.
- Bad, amateur voice acting. Perfunctory. Better just turn it off.
- For a free roam game where the major fun is to collect sex scenes, for whatever reason there is no gallery implemented, which makes no sense to me.

There are good parts, sure. I appreciate the idea of simulating daily life, but I don't think the dev understands what makes a game PLAYABLE. Players will enjoy the fun of a game only if they are not inevitably constantly annoyed.

First off I want to say i have been with this dev since the beginning. I have loved this game and lost my saves during updates. I have broken all the girls at some point and had to start over. I have put many hours into this game because i thought it was worth it. I loved the girls and the routes and the story they told.

When they introduced the pimping thing with Lexi i shrugged because it was avoidable and so it didn't affect me much. Then came Alexis with her surprises. (if you did not know it was coming, she will get you every time). And Kylie with her shenanigan's. Still i kept playing, working my way around the landmines of content that was disturbing and or downright rage inducing. It was small and far between so at first it was easy to dodge.

That being said. Recently the dev has for whatever reason decided that his focus needed shifting from kinky harems to full blown sharing and ntr events that if you do not know how to avoid them beforehand, will slap you in the face like a pissed off mother in law and leave you feeling like crap about the whole thing. Mike went from caring, loving partner to full blown ice cold pimp in 2.5 seconds flat and pretty much broke any good feels this game had to start with. I can only speak for myself, as i know there are people who are into stuff like that, but I would like to think im still one of the majority of guys who likes to keep his girls to himself.

So on that note sadly i will not be continuing to support the game and wish the developer the best of luck in the future, i hope his 5 people who wanted that content are happy now.

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.