I’m just going to say here that I fucking hate typical RPGM porn games. The gameplay is always an afterthought, and amounts to nothing more than meaningless grind to access the next porn scenes, and nothing kills my boner faster than being bored. Yes, SoC has too many random events. Playing without savescumming might result in different experiences, but that experience can accidentally gate you out of your preferred content. That said, they have gotten significantly better about this, with most important scenes tied to certain locations and accessible after certain dates, though this encourages the player to check every location every week, which is itself tedious. Still, credit where it’s due, getting onto Greyhide’s path used to essentially require savescumming since there was a low corruption requirement and getting the events early enough was a crapshoot, but in my latest playthrough, I’d gotten the intro events done by like the 9th week or something with no required savescumming thanks to the scenes being tied to castle locations. There’s still a lot of savescumming though, especially with Alexia’s job events growing in number and nothing but random chance dictating what you get.
I’d still take this optional mindless savescumming over mandatory equally mindless grindy gameplay and scenes tied to specific hidden locations, though; I have to pay a lot less attention, and generally spend less time, savescumming than “playing” generic RPG gameplay. And Ren’Py has the distinct advantage of rollback in case you accidentally skip too far, and fast forward if you have to retread your steps.
tl;dr: SoC is far from perfect in the gameplay department, and Ren’Py isn’t the absolute perfect fit, but I would rather it than pretty much any other EZ-Bake engine.
