Ren'Py - Love & Sex Second Base [v24.9.0] [Andrealphus]

The game manages to give an outstanding first impression. Unfortunately, it fails to deliver anything more.

The good
The game's main character, Mike, has reached a turn in the road of his life: His two roommates, Ryan and Samantha, have moved out to start a life together. They've even put up a "roommate wanted" ad for Mike.

Mike is incredibly lucky. No more than a few hours after his old roommates have left, two new roommates arrive. Bree is an exuberant, cheery, blonde geek with bushy hair, who loves colorful clothes. Sasha is a dark-haired rebellious type who enjoys loud music and hard alcohol drinking, but is more than willing not let them impede the life with Mike and Bree.

The object of the game is to help Mike strike up a relationship with either Bree or Sasha, and eventually ask for the hand of one of them in marriage. With careful planning, Mike has a third option too: Entice both, make them tolerant towards a polygamous life. Instead of a girlfriend, have a harem!

There are, of course, obstacles. There is money to made, skills of life to be learned. And there are distractions in the form of other women. These women all dress in the manner of "sex on a stick", but trying to have a relationship with them ultimately won't go anywhere. There is Lexi, the hooker who sells drugs on the side; Alexis, the gold-digger and compulsive cheat; Palla, whose foul mouth does an excellent job of making you not want to look at her pretty face; Cassidy, the spoiled brat; Morgan, the man with female reproductive organs, and Kylie, Alexis's clinically deranged sister with murder in her eyes. This game is an exercise in keeping focus and abstaining from greed. Your policy must be: Throw into the trash bin that which befits the trash bin.

The game's technical aspects do not disappoint. It features tablet-drawn anime-style graphics, appropriate music, and some voice acting.

The bad
Play this game for a while and soon, its first impression wears. Every game needs a good idea with which to start. This game has taken that good idea and gone nowhere with it. The problems of this game are not one or two:

• Too much of a grind: I mentioned that this game puts your focus and abstinence to the test. The problem is that you will fail this test. It is a Kobayashi Maru test. (Hell, there is even an Scottie in this game!) The combined determination of Samantha, Anna, Hanna, Scottie, Aletta, Audrey, Palla, Lexi, Kleio, Kylie, Alexis, Shiori, Lavish, Harmony, Cassidy, Morgan, Emma, Ayesha, Cherie, Reona, Natalie, Victor, Shawn, Jack, Ryan, CEO Dwayne, Danny the thug, Jenna Jefferson, and Mrs Jackson finally prevails. They will derail the game. Mike needs to spend more time in the game, grinding, to undo their damage.
• Denies closure: Denial of closure is a catastrophic failure for every video game. (In case of Mass Effect 3, it caused such an uproar among the fans that they threatened lawsuit and compliant to the Federal Trade Commission.) This game denies closure. The relationship with Bree and Sasha is as unsatisfying as the relationship with every other women. The main story has long been forgotten while developers are spending time adding contents for those distraction characters.
• No explanations: For no obvious reasons, certain buttons do not appear on the UI. On many occasions, actions like kissing, requesting sex, doing pushups, swimming, getting a coffee, petting, or slapping cannot be performed on eligible targets; the game provides no reason as to why not. For example, if you have a Bree or Sasha with 100% Love and 100% Submission, you expect a "Tie up and have sex" button to appear 90% of times, right? And when it is greyed out, you'd expect the game to tell you exactly what's wrong.
• Clandestine UI: Some locations remain totally invisible unless the player travels to their parent location at a specific time. For example, there is no way of knowing there is a sex shop in the game unless you visit the Dark Alley at exactly 10 PM.
• Insane mechanics: Some actions take zero time while others take an incredibly long time. For example, sometimes, having sex does not advance the clock at all, while at other times, it advances the clock by 23 hours.
• Stingy with showing sex: The ultimate reward of this game is a scene being played. Unfortunately, you cannot keep the reward; i.e. there is no gallery with unlockable contents. Saving the game does not guarantee reproducible results either. Coupled with the fact that getting to see these scenes is very difficult in the first place, the overall experience is not good.
• Degrading quality: Brevity is a virtue that this game does not have. It pours walls of text on the screen. But that's not the worse thing. As the game progresses the quality of dialogs drops. They become more annoying and illogical. Typos appear. Context often gets forgotten. An example of a significant quality loss is the moment that Bree and Sasha confront Mike about his double relationship with them. The quality of the text is significantly low.
• Quirky UI: Right-clicking invokes the "Save" dialog box. To invoke the game menu, you must press the ESC button. To hide the UI, you must press ESC twice. While this UI is better than Ren'Py's default UI, it still has room for improvements.

Women just showing up to a house and deciding to just move in without checking anything, rent cost, room size, rules, room mates, litteraly nothing is just so fake that it makes it clear from the start that the game is not going to be a serious one.

The slight lag in the game seems like nothing at the start but gets very annoying later on as do the repetitive conversations.

Mc is yet another spineless white knight whos a bit dumb, the women are barely one dimensional and just go along with whatever MC says.

The "dates" feel like a chore and dont change as the relationship gets higher plus getting the stats up is just grindy as hell(even with the cheats).

On a positive note the interface is nice and the art is well done althrough not nearly enough adult content.

Hard pass from me, too many dom women and not enough adult content makes this a hard game to play for little reward.

I've been following the game for over a year and watched it develop and grow. Top notch graphics, well developed characters, interesting stories and lot's of paths to follow and choices to make.
The Dev team is doing a great job and I look forward to the finished product.

The idea of game system is good, but CG is too bad, and there are only a few characters in it. The content is too little, the text is mostly, and there are many places to improve. But the game is still good. I hope the subsequent updates can be improved

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The game is very good, there are many girls and events, I also managed to see that there are seasons since it arrives in autumn, the bad thing is that it currently has enough bugs and obviously more history is missing in some girls, what screwed me was that it did not I got to unblock Ryan before Samantha's marriage so I couldn't do route A well, I'll wait a while for the game to get more progress with the girls, fix some bugs and that there is an updated guide since the one I found was from the version 17

The game is excellent.
1) Very engaging. Played for a few days.
2) Quality content. Especially those descriptions of sex scenes - really gives a boner
3) You can make a progress with all girls simultaneously, no "select who you continue fucking with" situations.

A few minor bugs, but I can live with that.

I think nearly anyone who has played this game has something of a love-hate relationship with it. When I first played it, it was a buggy mess. Those mostly got fixed and I appreciate a dev who isn't afraid to interact with the community. Before I got further, I want to state that up front that I very much WANT to like this game. It has tons of potential. First, the positives

I like the art a lot. Definitely prefer the drawn style to the "taken from Pornhub actual pictures" version of the game. The girls (and there are a lot of them) are all distinctive in looks and personality for the most part. Some of them have lots of character development. The "primary" girls (the old roommate, Samantha, the current roommates Bree and Sasha, the co-worker Audrey, the Boss Aletta) get stories. Now there's an almost comical overload of characters. Just looking at the "old" header vs the new header is absurd. It went from like 6 girls to 20.

If the dev can manage to focus on some of them or even gets around to giving all of them attention, well that would be impressive as hell.

The gameplay, such as it is, it pretty grindy. There doesn't really seem to be a underlying story. Now I like sandbox games but they still have a narrative that hold all the moving parts together. So there isn't much of a story.

I actually like the idea of a Female MC. But there isn't much there as far as I know. I could do without the VA but its a nice touch.

I think this game almost has too much going on. A better focus on the core girls/game would easily make this a 5/5 game

*Updating my review to account for the new content*

I think my earlier review was a bit harsh. I still have a few issues with the "sandbox" VNs, as the grindy nature usually only serves to to obscure the fact that there isn't much content. If you didn't have to spent hours grinding money or stats, you'd realize that there isn't actually much there.

I think that WAS the case for this game. I would like to say that might not be the case when this game is finished. The characters and background art is still good and the writing ranges from solid to excellent. Some dialogues actually impressed me. This game still has a ways to go, to be sure. Particularly for a Bree MC. I dont know how many people actually play as Bree, but now that its been committed to, I'd like to see it actually work for the sake of the game.

This still has 5 star potential. I hope it gets there

This game possesses a rare quality not often found in games on this site; while being lewd and all that. It has a stunning array of personality, and this is one, if not the only game on this site I actively have not wanted to cheat in; nothing feels like a chore, and there's a lot of stuff to do, so even when you grind, you kinda forget the grind, because it's 2-4 minutes of 30 min of amusement.

The characters are all unique and interesting, and the sheer fact that there's voice acting adds even more to it

Overall, this game is excellent, from my point of view.

Characters and art style is great, but holy shit, it is not worth the grind. Even if you enable cheats, you have to wait for random events to happen because a few of the stats needed for certain scenes is capped 4-5 different times per character. Meaning you have to wait for 4-5 events (which happen once a week in-game time if you're lucky) just to get all the scenes that are available.

One of the grinding game in this website.I spent hours to get one cgi.You gotta work for money,and you dont even have time to date any of the girls.Full of bugs aswell.Anyway,

Pro:
-Art and sex scene
Cons:
-Too grindy
-Walkthrough is really necessary
-Waste of energy and time only to get unsatisfying cgi
-Bad game design
-Full of bugs
-You cant get all the sex scene.You need to wait to get a chance.Daily and weekly.

Not recommend

Pros:

- Decent 2D art, but nothing amazing
- Fairly unique character designs
- Consistent updates, but mostly bug fixes

Cons:

- This game is probably the worst grindfest on the whole site. 90% of your time will be spent doing repetitive and mindless tasks that add little value to the game except for making it look like there is actual content
- Extremely buggy (even modders dropped this game recently)
- Story is almost nonexistent
- Sex scenes are basically just one cg each and feel unrewarding after all that grinding

Neutral:

- The game does support cheats, which wouldn't even be neccessary, if the game focused more on character interaction and story, instead of grinding stats.

Overall even with cheats the game is unejoyable to play. The devs should look at some other games that do a far better job at combining erotic content with character interactions and story. Instead so far they've only added more and more characters instead of listening to some of the valid criticism posted here. Kind of a shame, because this game has some potential, if there was some actual gameplay and willingness to improve. If you are looking for a rewarding and interesting erotic game experience, look elsewhere.

-

Grindy but a great game. I wish there was a little bit more content apart from that fact every girl is quite interesting to interact. I really wonder who this game such a low score here. Believe me all, the score does not justify the game's quality.

A year ago and I would have given this 5* no doubt. But now? I'd say 3.5* is exactly what it deserves. Why do people play games, specifically an adult game on f95?

If your answer is to relax, DO NOT play this game.

If your answer is for the art and H-scenes, DO NOT play this game. Or you could, but you should just wait for the mod for that.

If your answer is for the story, plot, and moral lessons, I'd still NOT recommend this game. Don't get me wrong, the story telling, plot, and lessons here are still average, maybe even above average. BUT they can't save the game from its downsides and shortcomings.

If your answer is to torture yourself OR spend days trying to get everything done because you have OCD and want a sense of accomplishment, OR because you love working but your boss won't allow you to work overtime, OR if you LOVE grinding, THIS IS THE GAME FOR YOU!!!

Like seriously, I don't play this game to relax from a day of hard work and studies. I go on a day of hard work and study to relax from playing this game!

THE ONLY WAY, you can play this game and get any enjoyment out of it, is to use the cheat menu and follow the walkthrough, or ask in-depth questions on this thread. AND EVEN THEN, the grind is still torturous, and you MIGHT STILL NOT get every scenes you want because REASONS.

It also doesn't help that older saves are no longer compatible, and no full save is provided recently.

I USED TO love this game. I USED TO be able to play without cheat. I USED TO get excited and eager with updates... NOT ANYMORE. Now I just wait on Lain to update the mod and look at the H-scenes and be done with it.

this game is downgrading. It was promising no become average. Instead of continue the story, this game always looks different every time I download. For me it isn't refreshing, just demotivated. I prefer old version, for me it's clearer and better

Hello Andrealphus,
Love & Sex: Second Base [v20.1.3] is a great Game with a lot of opportunities for a lot of people. I like the Art, the conception of the game and the many girl there is. I hope you have great Ideas for the future and i had enjoy it a lot.
I had just one Question. Is it possible that you can consider the intox fetish a little bit more and make it easier to buy drugs. I had after 20h of playing just one time the possibility to buy drugs by a random guy so...
But after that it is overall a great game.
Thanks for your great work!

So this game interested me because of the amount of girls. There are a lot and with variety, petite, busty, shy, flirty etc. Some girls have easier patterns to follow and to find. Unfortunately you will find yourself interacting with a girl the exact same way, with the same conversations many many times until you cross your fingers it makes some progress at a certain point. Outside of some girl specific story scenes, there is little of interest in the dialog after your initial interaction. Some girls do not offer much of a story at all. Much art in the game is varying in quality. Both character models and sex scenes themselves are by the hand of different artists. Some characters offer more rewarding choices because they were drawn more sex options or interactions. Surprisingly, many characters can be impregnated with the corresponding changes in the art and sex scenes. I'll give it some points for that, but overall the art is a bit lacking and the inconsistency adds to the underwhelming feeling.

My suggestion is the only way to really make this game playable is with one cheat enabled (aka god mode). Otherwise you spend too much time basically eating, resting, showering, increasing your mood and so on... These are your character's "needs" which you must maintain above a certain threshold, only to make your character do stuff like go to work to pay rent. Yup, you can't even hold onto your money from a daily task like work. You can get promoted for better pay but not without a lot of work put in first. This will get in the way from making any progress with girls that are not related to work. But what if you don't make enough to pay rent? The two girl roommates you start with will hate your guts and you will lose points with them. Not a fun time. The gameplay is poor, the character depth is inconsistent but the art is passable. Just about average I think

Far too grindy for my tastes... I enabled cheats and even then it was still too grindy I only played as the female, I'm not a huge fan of the male protags also kissing sasha shows the man kissing her even when playing female... it just feels too barebones and boring I'd rather more time on story and less time on a dating sim grind

A good game, with a lot of interaction, the arts are nice, a more than correct number of girls.
Updates are frequent, and the content keeps growing.
The interface has even been improved.
The music, on the other hand, can be repetitive and annoying.

I don't understand his average score on this thread.

Congratulation to the developer
Even though the game is incomplete and imperfect, I'm still eager to open it and spend a couple of hours playing.
I've started playing on version 19.12.2 and quickly became in love with the story, the gameplay and the characters.
Especially how realistic and complex you've made some of the characters appear to be. They're all unique and free spirited, exactly what we would ask for an H game.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to play this game for free, you deserve praise for what you've accomplished.