Second Chance is a solid, slightly above-average adult visual novel that caters to the incest and harem fetishes. Specifically and individually, mind you. What I mean by this is that the story (post incest patch) has two paths, and only two paths; the MC may engage in an incestuous relationship with his mother (or prepatch, a close family friend that was like a mother to him), or he gets (pretty much) every other girl in the game.
Early gameplay scenes and decisions allow you to cement the story path you want. If the MC chooses to dislike his mother, then she will accrue negative Mom Points, which are shown in the upper-right hand corner of the screen. If he chooses to forgive and love her, those points will be positive. Eventually you will hardlock either the Harem or the Mother path, and all choices beyond this point are of the standard AVN 'filler' variety (will you bang this side-chick, will you smoke a dooby with the girls, will your cummies go in tummies or grace the face, etc.). None of it really matters in the larger context of the story and you're not punished or rewarded for making these choices, it just adds flavor, and makes you feel like more of a participant once the final destination is set.
The renders are fine. They're not mind-blowing, they don't really have the explosion of detail and color that Radiant, Love of Magic, Light of My Life and others have. But they're nothing to complain about, they get the job done and some of the girls are very pretty. If you dug the models and looks of Parental Love or Bad Hero, these are about at that level. Animated sex scenes, however, are pretty damn swell at points. Personally, I don't usually care about animation in VN's. I can get my rocks off just fine with still images so long as the writing, um, gives me a hand, so to speak. But serious work was put into these loops, and it shows.
The premise is your standard Ren'Py Incest/Harem fare. You're a young college dude who moves in with an estranged relative to continue education at a new school, and you quickly become embroiled in various family/friend dramas with a smattering of petty revenge and crime. The thing that sets Second Chance apart from its contemporaries is the way it handles the branching story. On the Mom path, she's the goal post, and is as sweet as peaches and cream. But if you treat Mother as a villain, Mother becomes a villain. On the Harem path, she's an additional antagonist for the MC, and how he extricates himself from her clutches becomes a part of the narrative. It's intriguing, and kept me more involved in the Harem route than I thought I'd be.
SIDE-NOTE: There's been some hub-bub in the forums about the final update for the game, and how some players feel it abruptly ends the story. I personally did not get that impression in either of my playthroughs. There is a narrative build-up advancing several story-arcs and subplots, a big bad emerges, a climax ensues, and then there's a resolution. After the climax, the resolution details what happens initially, then over the coming months, then finally years. It takes about forty minutes to an hour (per route) to wrap everything up, and it does so just fine. Your mileage may vary, but I saw no problem with the game length. This isn't a forty hour epic saga of porking your mom and friends, but a single route can easily take you through an entire afternoon. It's not a short game, and the pacing felt fine to me. /END SIDE-NOTE
Second Chance is not perfect, however, and I would like to mention a few odd points where I think it faltered. First of all, for an Incest/Harem game, SC is surprisingly vanilla in its sex. Yes, you can engage in sex with multiple partners at once, there's impregnation towards the end, a couple instances of anilingus and ATM, and of course there's the whole 'banging Mommy' thing. But for all its pomp, none of it really feels very illicit or titillating. On the Harem route, almost every girl loves the MC and will eventually throw themselves at him. He even bangs the handful of girls that hate him. The sex is fun, but there's very little build-up to it and it's never dangerous or more than matter-of-fact. 'Here are twenty-somethings, and here's them banging. Cum, wipe, next scene.'
The girls are game and certainly pretty (and the much-praised Jessica is absolutely worth a Harem playthrough for her personality alone), but it never reaches for anything beyond baseline menage-a-trois erotica. There's no foreplay, no watersports*, no fingering, no dry-humping, no risky "don't get caught" sex at public functions, no BDSM**, and just one choice with one frame of hidden cum-swapping. That's it. Penis goes in vagina, penis goes in butthole, penis goes in mouth. Ejaculate, rinse, repeat. Serviceable, but not wholly stimulating stuff.
Similarly, the Mom route has mother and son, always, constantly referring to each other as mother and son. The game will never let you forget that. Mom thinks of nothing except how much she loves and wants to bang her sweet son. The MC gets to interact with other girls, but 'Mom' is his number one on this route and he, likewise, is one-note focusing on how much he wants to get up in them Mommy-guts. That's it. There's no real relationship between the two of them except how much they want to fuck each other, and the fact that they don't want to get caught. They go shopping, do the dishes and talk about how much they love each other, but they don't really act like a mother and son, so despite all the constant referrals to them as such, there's very little power in the erotic nature. And again, take away their names, and all your left with is very vanilla sex.
SIDE-NOTE #2: The game is, in fact, so vanilla that you're introduced to your younger sister at the beginning of the game and nothing happens with that for the rest of the game. She's sweet and pure and innocent and looks appropriately aged, she loves you and loves Mom and, again, there's no loli tag required because she's appropriately sized, with tits. But you know that the actual age would probably be a little suspicious, a little -BANG-BANG, FBI, OPEN UP!-. So no-go. No matter what, on no path, until the Epilogue, five years later, when you know it's age-appropriate. /END SIDE-NOTE
*Watersports- This irritated me. Perhaps I missed something along the way, but the game is tagged for urination. A couple of times, in both routes, the MC went to the bathroom and used the toilet. Then left. Nobody came in, no girls watched him. The story just continued. I never saw any urination used in any sex scenes. Yes, I'm a filthy degenerate, but consider me disappointed.
**BDSM- There is ONE spanking scene. One. The player is given the choice at a point to punish a girl that has been utterly horrible to him throughout the game, and if the player chooses to, they can spank her and engage in mildly rough sex. This is the closest the game comes to leaving safe waters. I can not stress this enough. Despite its tags and premise, Second Chance is shockingly vanilla.
Final complaint. The Harem route ends on a high note. High fantasy, even. It's the "you can have it all" ending, so long as you don't pursue Mother. Not particularly realistic, but who's asking for realism here? It's fine, and to be honest I enjoyed that ending very much. It's difficult to dislike a Happily Ever After, as improbable as it may be.
Then we have the Mom route ending, and holy shit, is there a difference. For whatever reason, this one went hyper-real. Imagine you're a super-attractive dude, with a super-attractive, married Mom. Imagine you two banged, and the world found out about it? How well do you think that would go? Short of jail time, that's exactly how well this storyline ends up. It's not quite miserable, but it sure as shit ain't happy. It's quietly desperate, sad, more than a little lonely, stressful and peppered with bittersweet. Heavy, heavy emphasis on the bitter. Not a great ending for a fantasy, but it doesn't exactly ruin the game either.
4/5 Standard, Vanilla Incest/Harem Game. Slightly above-average. Will continue to follow the dev's work.
