Ren'Py - Love & Sex Second Base [v24.8.0b] [Andrealphus]

Version reviewed: 22.12.x
AMAZING game. I only recently found it because I usually use the BDSM tag as a filter and, although this game has good bondage content, the tag is (still) absent.
This game, although not completed yet, has dozens of hours of gameplay to offer.
The pros:
1. Great art and lots of girls to choose (or not!) from
2. Various body types, ages, skin colours and different personalities
3. Possibility to create harems
4. Some nice (light) bondage play with some of the girls – but basically all of them can turn up to be your slave, with a matching collar
5. You can play this for days and still find new content
6. The main girls have some (high quality) spoken dialog with sexy voices
7. Although there is a component of stats management, it is not critical and does not require any grinding to keep them up
8. Cheat engine integrated, that can be used w/o fear of breaking the game
9. Rock solid programming. In dozens of played hours, the game did not crashed once (win64)
10. Pregnancy is possible but (fortunately, for my taste) avoidable.

The cons:
1. You will need to look up the official Wiki to know what you are doing (the walkthrough is no longer being updated)
2. You should be careful with some in-game choices: some girls can and will disappear forever (the only way to get them back is to load a previous save... or start from the beginning) and can even get killed!
3. It is not possible to have a harem with all the girls...
4. There is no gallery to return to some favorite scenes but, to be fair, all or almost all sex scenes are replayable (unless you "lost" that girl in the meantime).
5. Some stuff can only be achieved on certain days or, worse, on certain seasons (each season is 30 days long). But I guess that can also be a "pro", since it extends the playability of the game.

Last but not least: don't ask for a "savegame" file, because you will miss a lot of content if you do.

Okay. Let me preface this by saying that I rarely leave reviews on f95 because I rarely spend more than an hour on playing a game that I find here. Now, I can safely say that I've played most if not all the content present in the currently provided version of this product. And, oh boy, do I have things to say about it.

First, let me start with the artistic presentation of the game. The art is clearly hand-drawn, quality 2-D cartoon-style art. It's really nothing special, but it's pleasing to look at and isn't jarring in any way. Of course, there are numerous events with the said art depicting both sexual and non-sexual activities, but when you take into account just how ungodly long it takes to see all of the aforementioned activities you just can't help but feel like there weren't even that many of them. They end up feeling scarce and criminally short. Not only that but vast majority of them follow the same template.

The template. Meet a girl. Date a girl. Fuck a girl in 1to4 positions (same for every girl). The end. Naturally, there is more to it but this is basically what you will find yourself doing for hours and hours when playing this game. At first it feels alright, then it starts to feel grindy and at some point it will truly test your sanity's durability. And that's just by the sheer repetitiveness of it.

Okay, now I feel like I need to address the elephant in the room. The how part of dating and fucking people in this game. Oh boy. I don't think I've ever spent this much time scouring a game's Wiki for as long as I did with this game apart from Terraria. And I mean it. Want to date this chick? Sure, now you can't date/meet/finish the storyline of that chick. Why? Check the wiki. Found the reason? Start another playthrough or rollback X amount of hours. Missed this event? Too bad. Didn't get to form a harem with these chicks? Too bad. Want to do it properly? Sure thing. Now just go and do this superspecific thing in a superspecific manner an arbitrary amount of times. Good boy, pat yourself on the back. Now hope you did everything right and the game didn't fuck up at any point of time. It's mind-numbing, dull and downright irritating how event triggers/flags are setup in this game and I would never, and I mean never want to go through all of that shit ever again.

Speaking of irritating stuff. The season system/time system/day system in this game is awful. Truly. It's extremely restrictive and forces you to constantly open calendar to calculate a myriad of things all the time and it gets old very quick. Want to progress with Minami? Too bad, you have to go to the Beach location and it doesn't open until Summer and it's fucking Fall. You dummy. Want to progress with Emma? Hah! Well she'd like to have a picnic in the park, but it's Winter. Who has picnics at Winter, dummy! And so on and so on and so on. When I say that this calendar shit gets in the way all the time, I mean it genuinely. Not being able to skip season/days and not being able to just prompt the necessary events whenever you want because that would save time and my dying neurons apparently never occurred to the developer. I have no idea why they insist for the user to use this system.

Same thing could be said about the 24H cycle. It's same-same really as with seasons but more actively frustrating because you'll find yourself looking at the clock and clicking "skip hour" button more times than you could humanly keep track of. To sum it up about these in-game systems - use cheats or edit save files. Fuck that noise, you'll thank me later.

I should also probably mention the City/Location/Room system of navigation that the game utilizes. Oh God. I mean, I can't tell you how many days I've skipped waiting for Morgan and Kleio to show up at Pub at the same time. Or how many attempts it took for Sasha to appear at Nightclub on Saturday night when I went out there with Lexi. Etc etc etc. There is a schedule for girls on Wiki, but it's not always accurate, it changes based on many things like seasons, point or path of their story and so on and very soon you'll come to realize that not having the ability to just call the needed girl and ask her to come to a certain location is a fucking feature that's not sorely missed but makes you feel like it was purposefully omitted to drive you insane.

Having Morgan lock out as a character if you receive a call from Kleio is stupid. Having Emma be such a needy character that you almost must rush through her story early is stupid. I could go on, but truly many of these arbitrary things are unnecessary and just get in the way of enjoying the game the way you want. Can't form harems with several girls if you're progressing with one of them, can't progress their stories if you triggered a certain harem flag and now you must do other events before you continue. The list is truly never-ending.

Finally, I'll sum up my impression. I'm glad I played this once, it was somewhat enjoyable for what it was, but I never, never will play this game again, unless some major changes will be made. Also, it's just too vanilla for my taste, but that's neither here nor there. Play this when you feel like you are ready to have 20 wiki tabs open and stop to read each single paragraph of each girl on there every 3 minutes. Otherwise - don't.

Great game .
in my top 5 .
couldve been better in execution cuz some of the mechanics are a bit too rare.
but hey the dev is awesome and updatets it pretty regularly and it has a lot of cheats.

Actually this is one of my absolute Favorites and is one of the very few examples where i come back regularly and even start over new Playthroughs (sometimes even with the same Woman).

It's not flawless, that for sure. It have quite some Bugs, it doesn't run smoothly all the time, even some events do trigger weridly and it can be especially Grindy... for the latter one i'm quite happy that we got a Cheat-Engine implemented, because esp. if you like me do playthroughs over and over (for the first 2-3 runs i personally don't find it "that" bad, but it might still need some tweaking as the final touch if they ever come to the point to finish it). In General, not only for Games which are grindy, i really appreciate when devs gives cheat-tools but that's besides the point. Also some Arts are sometimes a bit off and it would be nice to have (more) animated Secnes. And maybe NTR would need a bit of love / work.

Why do i still give the Game 4 Stars out of 5 despite the Flaws. Simply because the strenghts of the game outweights so much the flaws. I really love most of the girls, while sometimes build on some tropes / stereotypes, they really worked out the details. Most people you encounter are absoluetly interesting and you want to learn more (and yes also get into their pants) and also quite some characters unfolds (also for some in different directions based on your actions) over the course of the Game, show their personality in strenght and weakness, their own goals etc And that's quite addicting.

Take Sasha as example (small Spoiler-Warning). First Impression of her is a strong, independend woman, which have no issue to speak out what she thinks, makes her als a bit sassy / bitchy, and you also learn pretty fast how liberated she is sexually. But when you progress with her (also based on how you handle her routes) you see softer and more caring sides of her, also that despite having quite a high selfesteem there are also a some spots where she have insecurities of herself. That makes here not to one of these "perfect modern woman" as quite many media try to push it, but portrays her as a human being.

Also the Pornstuff is quite good (again with a bit more consistency in terms of art and animations it could be even better), though also the build ups plays into it for me. The Story itself is okay... but doesn't stick out really, which is imho not a surprise for me due its more a sandbox slice-of-life thing and not a kinetic novel or something like that. About sound i can't say anything i play porngames always mute.

Try to match 5 different values at a specific time with inconvenient mechanics simulator, if you like playing a bad cookie clicker for half an hour for a two minute H scene in between sittings, go for this, you will love it.

Hours on hours of replay! The characters are all unique enough to want to learn each of their stories and the MC is vague enough to be relatable to. I've enjoyed this game but you might need to use the cheat menu if you want to get the most out of it, overall really grindy game. The work put into this game is also awesome to see with complete voice overs and variations of outfits and such. Great game if you want to keep yourself busy for a while!

Amazing game, has hours of content and a really diverse story/gameplay.
Plenty of replayability and just fun overall.
I've spent hours on this game just having fun progressing in the story and 'conquests'

I'm like pregnant seks, nice graphic but the way. In my opinion is better like this, with social life and everyone is fuck-able and pregnant all women you have in fantasy, not real life. So it is clear for me to give this game an excellent rating.

Deepest ero game with lots of characters, routes and events. A bit chuggy and slow but otherwise fantastic. A beast to get through all the content, which is both good and bad. But most other games feel too light on content so it's kinda wierd to complain ;P

I have mixed feelings about this game: on the one hand, as others have pointed out, characters do are fleshed out nicely as updates go by, but on the other I don't appreciate much that some characters seems to be exclusive (you cannot proceed in the story of one if you chose the other). While conceding that this plays in favor of realism, I reckon that this is still a harem game, so I think that this is not really necessary, and this is the main "flaw" that I see in the game. Add that, in case you wanna start over to see the content that you've missed, you need to go through a lot of grinding again (which I absolutely don't mind in the first playthrough). I do however appreciate the art and the effort put by the dev over the years, so I think that this 3.5 rounded up to 4 sums up my rating pretty well.

Tbh. One of the better games. Not the best but much you can do. I love it. You can have different harems and also the fact that many lines are voiced is at least for the games i played very uniqe. I love playing it.

Good game with quality but play needs too much grinding to reach for every single scene, not animated. Original characters are awesome but some patreon characters are just too absurd sometimes and yet, algorism of the whole stroy of character just too complex so you should find wiki or walkthrogh if you want to see whole scene without meaningless repeating. Just consider that. You need whole lot of time for fapping.

Played this game quite a bit over the years; usually starting over from scratch every so often considering that every six months or so saves seem incompatible with prior versions. First run through the game was really good, and I didn't mind the tedium of grinding or the several clicks it takes just to get out of my room to go outside; but after a few playthroughs it's a slog.

Story is okay, and some of the characters have quite a lot of depth. Some in personality, but mostly in how they develop over the story and how the MC can impact them. While some of these paths have been shallow as a puddle for years now you probably won't care unless you are focusing just on that one character only, which given the varied cast isn't likely first playthrough.

Though there are a lot of complains on tedium. bugs and lack of convenience features, the biggest issue for me was what was the strongest issue for the first couple years. I don't know why but newer releases seem to have art that is worse than the start, some of the standing sprites/pictures also are different in quality as well. LoSeb is no stranger for revising/changing art or even full character appearances, but I get the feeling that the art I'm seeing in later stages of the game is more definite than the changed art from literal years ago.

That said, and I know it feels like a lot of this is just complaining, there is a lot of content here, and if you're new to this you likely can sink some hours into it. Overall, a decent game.

V:22.7.0
A lot of the complaints about this game are about how grindy it is, and if you're going for an authentic 100% completion then yeah sure it'll probably take you a long time - as in several days to a week's worth of dedicated play. If you're not trying to do everything with every girl in one clean sweep then it's a lot more managable. Alternatively, use the wiki and make plenty of saves, because this game does not protect you from fucking yourself over - much like real life. If you hate grinding, there are cheats to bypass most of it so even that's a none-issue. I would recommend at the start adding +20 submission and +10 love to most of the characters since that gives you more options to increase that stat, taking out a good chunk of the early grind.

There are also mutually-exclusive routes like Gamer Bree and Maid Bree which require 2 different playthroughs if you want to see both - get your saves going!

That said, this game is fairly rare in that it has a large cast of romancable NPCs who are *all* quite unique both in looks and personality (not copy/pasted bimbos). There are certain characters - like Kylie and her sister Alexis who are... shall we say interesting in ways which you might want to avoid if you don't have certain kinks or a reasonable understanding of the consequences of certain choices - but this (along with the mostly decent voice acting) only enhances the immersion of seeing them as people rather than images on a screen. These characters aren't mindless sextoys; they are semi-realistic depictions of people that you can seduce or repulse depending on your actions. I'm guessing if you're looking for a porn game, you want something more than a quick fap over a character you feel no connection to, L&S:SB delivers that in spades with a massive amount of regularly-updated content.

If there's one thing I would suggest to improve, it would be for the dev to add the option in the mission log for a *spoilers* button to give more detailed information and warnings about potential consequences/suggested route-timings so people don't have to rely on third-party resources and building up a compendium of knowledge if they just wanna build their harem in peace, without ruining things for people who like authentic progression and consequences. It would also be nice if there were more actions which increased stats by more than one so it cuts out much of the grind - like maybe make gifts more impactful? Well, that and more optional fetishes/content but then that's really up to the dev to decide what they want to make.

Wasn't sure I wanted to try it after reading the reviews but so many of those giving 5* ask to at least try so... (better be careful what you wish for).

Going to keep it short as this game already wasted more of my time than it deserves. So:
- Awful grinding. You will be mostly doing the same things over and over. And it has all the pointless hunger/energy/waste_your_time management.
- Awful UI. Painful to go anywhere. Even worst to work out where there might be something to do.
- Awful voice overs. But at least you can mute it.
- Awful time mechanics. Certain events are date bound or require you to wait for a time. Added to the above it really make the bad worse.
- Awful sex. Really poor after so much work.
- Cute girls. Some of the girls can be pretty cute. With so many I suppose it was bound to be though.

In summary, a huge waste of time with little reward.

+ Good Art
+ Good Characters

Decent setting/plot

- Grindy Hell

- Convoluted Mechanics and Events

- Random Events firing that don't fit the current narrative
EX: One girl accepts creampies then suddenly doesn't in a different event
A certain soon to be married woman starts sending flirty texts to Mike despite the not having an interest in cheating unless you do the event chain. This would be fine if it happened after that event.

v22.6.0a

Warning Huge Ridiculous Grindfest.

I gave this game a shot initially because I was intrigued by touted diversity and breadth of the characters. After 100+ hours (probably much more I don’t track playtime) this game while having some good bits has some MASSIVE problems… the in game ”quest” guide is unclear, misleading, or just useless and directs you to dead ends or situations that are almost impossible catch …

I recognize that people love for their “choices to have impact” but when the only impact is for you to be locked out of content …it’s an exercise in masochism.

Miniami, Lavish, Samantha, and Lexi chains all get borked by unknown switches that get flipped by … ???. Who knows??? events get put on pause by X character in X stage but then that character is nowhere to be found and you try and track them down and they respond “I think I’m lost” … while funny it’s distinctively unhelpful.

Perfect example … you speak with Lexi and she tells you how her trailer burnt down … so immediately you go talk with the other girls in your home harem and get their ok for Lexi to move in … get to the stage of the quest where it says invite Lexi to stay and you go talk to her but she won’t accept the invitation.

So much going in circles and running into invisible quest conditions(bugs)

save yourself … avoid this title unless you enjoy walls of text and being locked out of content because you didn’t grind in exactly the right method as dictated by the encyclopedia of the wiki.

Alright, I've played this game for a while and ready to write my review. Let's first go with the cons.

Cons:
The grinds - Especially money. Money relates with a lot of events you can do in this game. Such as a seasonal event(car-summer), or story event(Spoiler character), or some trigger to open some side events which has the hottest cgs in the whole game. The grind gets better later, but it feels really awful when you miss or fail an event just because you didn't had enough money. That's life, huh? But it can feel too cruel. I wonder if there can be a bank that you can get a loan, and pay it every week or month.
Seasonal events - Charming, but it gets really annoying when you can't progress with some of your favorite characters. Such as, going to the water park date. You gotta wait a year to progress more with that character.
The lags - Yeah, this really needs to get fixed.
The cg illustrations are not by the same artists - Which kinda breaks the game experience. Some girls you date can be ugly at the bedroom, some are actually more prettier.

Pros:
The game is not easy - Which I think, is charming. Some characters can leave permanently becuase you did a wrong stuff. And I really loved that part. It's not just about brainless 'choosing the right answer', but what you do matters in this game. And there are consequences. Whether it is for the better, or the worse.
The characters are mostly fun - Such as Morgan. Her fashion and dialogues all changes depended on her 'masculine' trait. One character can lead you to game over. I like this. And as a text game, I can see the dev really made some effort to make some fun dialogues. The oldest character (such as Bree) and the newest character (like Camilla) have all fun dialogues.
The dev has a great work ethic - This is the main reason I gave this game five stars. The game itself is actually a 3 and a half game. But as a game that you pay monthly, the dev always comes up with something every month. That is a great work ethic that you cannot find in other game developers. So what you pay monthly results into a monthly updated content. Of course, the update might not be something that you want. However there is always something, and the dev always tries to make something new. Which I think, is great. And I think the guy is having fun himself too.

This is my personal stuff. Even though there's a bunch of girls in this game, there are still other teaser characters that deserve their own storyline.

bit grindy, but i love how much content this game have. + constant/regular updates keep me invest in this game. Wiki is super helpful but of course there is difficult things to understand, there are bugs of course but nothing game breaking (at least i don't have occur any). I can't wait to this been complete and then i can have full and complete game on Steam.

Interesting game but definately has some flaws

Pros

• Artwork is nice and models are interesting
• Immersive Pregnancy
• plenty of action with models

Cons

• Interface is really laggy and rollback is a pain (if it works)
• The story is overall good but very convoluted. You almost have to read the entire walkthrough and the discussion here to properly plan out the game you want play. Ie Samantha Path if you want to keep her in game and be okay with other girls you have to go down the revenge path but if you dont know that and go down Path A she will leave unless you agree to be faithful.
• Needs animations