Unity - Seaside Mystery [v0.27.1] [KsT]

So, one very obvious thing is, the author never, ever plays his own games. Because if he tried to play it even once, he'd immediately know what's wrong with it.
The amount of tediousness to do anything here and push the story even one inch further is truly staggering and drags the whole thing down like a pair of cement boots.

To be fair, the game is technically better then it's predecessor and it looks better as well, but in terms of gameplay, not that much, unfortunately. And that's precisly why it will most probably never grow out to be anything more then mediocre without a solid, in depth rework.

A game with positives and yet massive negatives too, where the foundation makes you think there is something great, but the execution for some things makes you want to tear your eyes out and wish you had the technical aptitude to take the basics and make everything else much better.

Positives:
- Animations, especially for sexual scenes (once you get to them) are really good
- POV view in sexual scenes gives an interesting perspective compared to other games
- Interesting camera options and functionality in sex scenes
- Nice details for general graphics, makes it feel more game like
- The look of the UI has a really polished feel
- Nice level of customisations and outfit options for the characters
- Some level of range with characters personality not being an immediate stereotype
Negatives:
- The game seems to have a story of some sort, but you don't really get to find out as the pace of the story runs slower than an overloaded coal train
- The game progress also runs at the pace of that same coal train with minute little crumbs being given each time and progress jumping around from sometimes being multiple things, and yet sometimes super linear and inane to get little crumbs and other fun stuff, like getting a whole clusterfuck of abxyzxcv combination of different conditions that need to be fulfilled where its not only time and place that matter, but people present, where said people are in said location, and its not fixed day to day or during the weekend, which results in progress that feels extremely mind numbing.
- Further to this point about game progress, some of the tasks don't describe prerequisites well, involve dumb stuff like taking another path for a once a week task meaning a whole cycle just to get a little thing done and going through old content that you have seen before.
- Speaking of old content, the game is quite inflexible and linear (somehow like a VN even though it is a free action game) and many things you do later will not reflect changed relationships, past events etc., not even in text (fair enough for not redoing scenes for sake of development time, but at least change the damn text....) - Models, in contrast to the rest of the graphics, do not feel good, with a lot of feeling of cookie cutter swaps, usual "smooth like wallpaper" skin texture, not enough variation in facial features or body types (while some of the parts look good, its still not great), I understand some things like the plastic looking hair are mainly an issue of game engines etc. and you want to keep the game able to run for a lot of people and not cause major performance issues just for nice hair, but even the basics of just pure character design are very ehh
- The movement is extremely dumb considering its a 3d game, just let the MC walk already and not make it some weird "click here to walk here" system, which, surprise, surprise, works awfully when you have to click to go into other rooms, with lots of misclicks, annoying hotspots for clicks and so on
- While its nice to move the camera during scenes etc., its movement is jerky and all over the place
- The MC seems ok at first, but in later scenes, you want to slap him, hard - Continuing from this, the character design is also dumb - it doesn't need to be realistic as that would be boring, but make it about good temptation, coercion and corruption along with actual romanticism, not just magical "poof, now you like", and that can be done with good content flow and not drabby little content updates as well, so that is not an excuse
- If you are making a 3D sandbox game, why make it so predominantly linear and "do y to get x", and not have any side content or actual gameplay like challenges, puzzles etc. if that allows you to do it, rather than just "I've given you choices, but it's basically a VN and a do x to get y simulator!", makes no sense...

Overall, the core seems to harbour some good things, but the execution does want to make you slam your head through your desk - I'd say play it once armed with a Unity save editor for when you hit those points that you haven't exactly followed the dev's super clear (sarcasm) way of playing the game and see it for yourself, as currently it feels like a game that could be saved if you cut out all the proverbial rot and built on what is a good base, but knowing life, "content" will be trundled out on a repeating pattern with classic updates like "ooh, I get to see x's boobs now!" or adding a character you won't interact with until like 12 updates later, because that is what gets the pledge bucks from the sites of course.....

while the female models look good and the animations are cool, the game is agonizingly slow and grindy for some pretty milquetoast scenes.

this might change when you get to a point where you're unlocking more impactful scenes, but with a very restrained direction that may still not be worth it; really vanilla framing, sound, posing in scenes it feels a bit meh???
it's still worth a try and maybe checking out on the final ver

Story: Interesting, without much depth or reality, but it's a game! nobody cares about that!
Gameplay: TERRIBLE! on control is still click-point, in a free 3d scenario, I expected a control on the minimu "tank". which prevents you from even exploring the scene better, instead of clicking on each object, to check if there is interaction
Graphic: despite the resources used, they are very bad! of assets from the scenes are interesting, but the models are not that beautiful, they lack a bit of polish, but they are sexy
Content: the development and involvement of the character is quite right, but there are times when it accelerates a lot! Unfortunately, the development of the game takes a long time, and content needs to be delivered. But in general, if you go see it, it's super quick! 2-3 weeks thing!
I expect more blackmail, flirting, involvement, conquering, voyeur, and VERY slowly he gains ground over each woman.
It would be cool to see him slowly instilling interest in women, something that wouldn't take 2-3 years.

I myself was 4 years old to "get" my aunt

Anyway, I hope the game develops in a healthy way, I know that we demand fast and constant delivery, after all my costs here are already more than AAA.
but I wanted more work and polish on the attraction between the characters.

I was already disappointed with all the development with Brenda, because it was over for me, and I lost interest.
wait to see the rest now...

One of the best games. Free movement and gradually increasing opportunities. Interesting storylines and quests. Unique mechanics and ideas for interacting with characters and the environment. I highly recommend it to everyone.

I honestly find it very surprising that this game is rated so low.
Graphics, models and systems are way above other 3.5 star games on this site.
It improves on everything from Twist and is a genuinly hot experience.
Its fun to roam even in this early stage. There are obviously more to do and a few areas lacking, but for 0.2 this is already very ambitious and shows the developer knows what hes doing.
If you havent played it, play it!

Game have a lot of bugs:

1. What is the role of the start day button (If the feature has no purpose why show it, why not show it later if it is necessary to skip a day or similar)
2. Every time I wake up I have to see the same sentence and press the button like a maniac for a trivial thing, can you just throw it out
3. Why can't I cross the street normally, let the cars pass so I can understand, why do I have to cross over crosswalk, also the distance between the cafe and the pharmacy is huge, plus there is no sprinting, why didn't you put them next to each other normally
4. Is it realistic that you left only one banal source of income?
5. You wrote the game in Unity, why don't you normally set the movement controllers on the arrow, more precisely on the letters (wasd)
6. Why wouldn't the menu open by pressing esc?

The game may look (6 from 10) for this rank, but there is still a lot of work to be done to make it a game that makes any sense in terms of gameplay.

Decent game, nice build up. BUT bugs are presented and also mostly only Brenda content. I very like physigue of heroines and story for this type of grind games are nice. Its not oh, we just met, lets fuck. Well, we will see if dev will deliver, at least same way as the Twist did, but I already really like clothes changing options..

In two years from now, this game will be really good. The characters models and animations are very good. Once their is more content, this will be a masterpiece. Game has a lot of potential. Just needs further cultivated. Only negative thing i would say is the grind. Game can be really grindy. But the scenes are really hot.

I did not play The Twist, but this game is really cool, I like the gradual progress when you need to earn trust. I'm looking forward to the completion of the story or its release on Steam, I'm ready to buy it.
I don't understand those who rated it with 1 star. It's a completely playable and full-fledged game unlike other 3D games that are published here with version 0.1 and run at 24fps.

My favourite adult game so far! An improvement over the Twist in every way. The new character models are more realistic than their predecessors. I wouldn't have brought back the Twist characters at all, or if I did, they would have been remodelled.
So far, I think the story is excellent, it is building nicely, even if according to some people it is too slow. Highly recommended!

The best of the best nice psyhic nice models good sound and kst still update the content what u want to more ? maybe more girls and more scenes? Yes of course but i think we will see more soon. Dialogs too is good not a simple and plastic fabular just good game with girls

Love this game. Need more games with this style in 3D. Characters are so good , the dynamic of gameplay... Awesome. Graphics are great, and character creation excelent. 10/10.
Waiting for the end......

Ok, so let me balance out a little bit those angry reviews which can be seen down the review section.

So, first of all for those poor souls who lived under a rock and somehow don't know what The Twist is: the same way as that game - Seaside Mystery is a walking talking quest which revolves around you, young dude (not VERY young tho) living under one roof with some hot girls in (one way or another) dysfunctional family. You do errands and get well animated real time 3d scenes, gradually corrupting said girls and MILFs (focus on the latter).

I didn't want to wright any type of review before the 0.18 because there was not much content in the game for that time and I don't think anyone should care why exactly it is the case after 2 years of development. I'm no dev's mom to defend him.

But for now - I recommend starting this game and trying it. There is finally respectable amount of content, graphics are miles better than The Twist, now there is some sound in appropriate places, and even dialogs became better imo. Also atmosphere is a little bit less cartoony, which for me was a plus: I even felt that some scenes were written sensually, not just as 3d porn thing occasion. Can't say it was the case with The Twist. Regarding grind - honestly, it feels like the dev owes money to previous reviewers or bullied them at school. Because I played games with some god awful grind, and let me tell you - it's not even half that bad. More like dev didn't come up with more inventive way to slowburn the game in the veeery begininng. Because after that part game actually picks up the familiar The Twist pace and feels ok.

For now I'm giving this game 5 stars. It is because of potential, yes, but dev truly delivered with The Twist and I think here it'll be the case also. Walk through all availible content (4~ hours) and keep your save - our favourite porn "TV series" is back.

i completely 100% agree with Jnx who posted a detailed review before.

The grind is horrible for nothing - and if you play fresh from the start, you will reach a point after HOURS where you get bugged and can't progress.

It seems to be a known issue, and all you get is a savegame from another user. But what's the point to play that savegame? The issue seemed to happen around 0.15 - now we have 0.18. So it seems you have to miss all the content between because of a known issue which breaks your game.

That's not funny at all.

On top of that, what's the sense about blocking stats to develop? why do i have to grind through content i might even would have done later (SANDBOX), just to be able to level some stats which i need to progress.

That's no sandbox game, that's just a pure linear puzzlegame from start to the end with no rewards.
I played hours from 0 to the point where i got stuck, and all i got was to be able to massage 2 women and get kisses from mom.

Sorry, but this is a game for blacklist.

TL;DR Because I value your time more than this game. It's a billion slow fetch quests with bad controls. Do no waste the HOURS of your life on this to get a peeping scene. And a possible sex scene in 3 years.

Once again, tedium for tedium's sake. Both of the games by this dev are designed to be as slow and tedious as physically possible. You have to skip hours, days, probably eventually weeks to advance anything just to give an illusion of slow burn. But what is this? Just a collection of "go to this point, hope RNG makes the character appear here this day/time to have a broken English interaction consisting of 4 lines of dialogue. And +1 point to this characters affection." Wow, fun. And I want to be clear, that was complete sarcasm. This is not fun. On top of that, now instead of clicking to go to each room, you have to CRAWL your slow MC to each room unless it's the sleep/skip day option. Which by some miracle is thankfully NOT locked behind a paywall.

Reader, value your time more. Is it fun to: go to a room. Skip an hour. Skip an hour. Skip an hour. Skip an hour. Skip an hour. Click on character. "Talk." Skip an hour. Skip a day because there's nothing else you can do. Then repeat. Is that compelling gameplay? No. This has the same boring gameplay loop as the umpteenmillion "sandbox" Renpy games with terrible default menus to go to a room and find a girl at a certain time. Except THAT would be better because you don't have your GPU running at 100C waiting for MC to enter a room, only wait, you misclicked on the other door. So now you need to leave this room, walk to the other door, and enter THAT one. The first day, you walk room to room to figure things out, but after about 3 ingame hours, there's no more unique lines of dialogue. Instead of, I dunno... Making a game and story where you interact with the sandbox, learn about the characters, maybe do one more thing than max out your strength in three workout sessions? What do you have? Click button, number go up. This is glorified cookie clicker.

Let me spoil the "mystery." Carl probably caused the accident. Emily is probably your sister. Brenda will fall in love with you for doing the dishes. And you will have to have another monitor open with a walkthrough that can't 100% help, due to the RNG. You should not waste your time on this to "get the privilege" to see an uninteractive sex scene that's only novelty is, instead of pre-rendered footage, it's in engine. I hope to whatever it is you believe in, that someone comes in with a movement speed mod and maybe even an RNG removal. But that's a pipe dream. Unless your fetish is denial of content, I'd recommend avoiding this game.

Great game experience and unique character modeling, the game isn't complete yet but the story goes pretty interesting, and they have done something similar to house party on the gameplay, if you like The twist you will love seaside mystery

Right now I would say is a solid 3 for me. Not magnificent but not bad either, I played worse things just this same week.

Starting for what I enjoy here:
First the models, their proportions and the interactions, mainly compared to Twist, the proportions mainly of the two characters we interact the most right now seem more balanced the in many other games and the interactions also seem more natural.
Other thing I really enjoy is something I have been criticizing in other games. The game is divided in hours and here the only activities that consume that whole hour make sense, doing the dishes, fixing something, but other things like talking to someone, fetching something or moving somewhere don't move consume a whole slot, in too many games just by talking it advances time without much logic. So this is a big plus for me


Now what I don't like right now is mainly the pace of the game, there is not much to do yet so several interactions are locked between specific hours(in some way it makes sense as no one would be all day in a specific room) but it also has events tied to a day of the week, and as there isn't much to do right now, forces you to skip ahead several days unless you need to grind a bit the money. Maybe in the future with more content it gets solved but for now it gets really long to advance in the game with some grinding.
A suggestion I give to the dev team is creating a new way to work, maybe the cafe house, so maybe in those days when you have to skip you could work in some and get more money than doing the dishes every day.

Another thing I don't really enjoy is, if for some reason the character is faced opposite to a door you need to cross it ignores the command several times forcing you to face the character correctly

Also some parts of the map are really big for the pace of the character so something like there is in the house(easy access to different parts) would be appreciated to easily cross, otherwise it doesn't invite that much to go there too often.

TL;DR
For now I enjoy the models used and some of the mechanics but the game is still low in content and sometimes unnecessarily slow in others making it slightly boring until you reach the next phase as such my 3 stars, as it kept me playing but felt that it could have been better. I will keep paying attention and adjust my review accordingly

Actually, This game needs some attention on the way save files behave and how to take away those pesky bugs because that's the principal of any kind of games. As for the gameplay of a real-time 3d, This one gives us the freedom that only few other games could offer, in addition to a quite engaging story, I can say. Hope the Dev would put more time working on this game.

(v.15)
Good Lord I just spent the entire afternoon click-clickety-clicking my way through this thing. At a certain point the hints stopped, so I think that means I clicked my way to the end... did I?

This is like the next step in evolution from the dev's previous work, which I have also played, reviewed, loved and hated.

It's a 3d adventure with a hot, yet neglected MILF, a nerdy daughter who is bustin', a dragon lady prof straight from my wildest dreams, and a shmuck just trying to figure it all out. Oh yeah, and there's Janice. You know this dev's work, you know Janice. Say hello, Janice.

I see the same clever little visual touches, like the hot MILF checking out the room to make the coast is clear before snoggin' with our hero. I love stuff like that . I love the random hotties struttin' their stuff around the campus or the quaint shopping area (anyone been to Bath, UK? It really reminds me of that). I am concerned about the need to actually traverse so much terrain. I mean, I have to cross the effin' street at the crosswalk. And don't get me started on the park. A walkin' sim... with tits.

Trying to do it all in 3d really is taking a chance. You can read the rage-quitters in the discussion. The dev is perverse. On the one hand, he's added a lot of quality of life stuff that wasn't there in the previous work. On the other hand, he's made the damn thing almost fully 3d, with all the attendant hassle... 2 steps forward, 2 steps back...

I have a lot of respect for this dev. He is totally non-derivative, his thing is his own (pardon my pronouns) and I think he has maybe the best composition skill of any creator on this site. But I am not sure I can spend another half-day clicking my life away...

Oh yeah, not a huge amount of hot stuff so far. Lots of teasing, though. For some reason, when they're kissing, the MILF suddenly looks much taller than the MC. Weird. I hope we're not going to end up with another Baby Herman like the last one.