Others - Completed - Sensual Haunting [Final] [Lesson of Passion]

This game has great charcters, really attractive ones. The graphics is good although some details might be better. The gameplay is not that good. This could be much better games if there will be more possibilities or intersting scenes.

I was eagerly anticipating this. The original Sensual Haunting, janky as it was, was one of my favorite LoP games.

The good:
- Visuals look great
- The map shows where all the characters are
- You can save anytime, in multiple slots

The neutral:
- Game system has been simplified. The old one had an energy system and an hour-by-hour clock, where various tasks took different amounts of energy and time. This one has a fixed number of timeslots and no energy mechanic, just actions that have skill gates. You can also only go to rooms that have people in them.

The bad:
- Copy errors abound
- There's huge delays moving from scene to scene. Like, a black screen for 3+ seconds. Maybe it's a relic of how the game can also be played on the LOP site, but makes absolutely no sense for a game I have installed onto my hard drive. This is by far the worst problem with the game and something I imagine they could patch out, but I highly doubt they will.
- Custom engine so there's no text speed settings or any other nice RenPy conveniences, despite the game being simple enough to be a RenPy game.

I bought this on Steam so I'm sure none of the issues have anything to do with it being a pirate version.

I'm excited that some of LoP's future games will use RenPy because then they won't have these ridiculous technical limitations. I appreciate how different these games are from the typical RenPy VN, so I hope they actually keep some gameplay when they go that route.

A couple years ago I actually hacked up the original Sensual Haunting to remove animation delays, add a better save system, and show what rooms the characters were in. It was working pretty well but I lost the code in a hard drive crash before I could publish it. I was hoping this version would be better enough that it could heal my sorrow from losing that code. Some parts of it are, and some parts aren't. Oh well!

We got to remember that Lesson of Passion are one of the earliest players in this E-VN games world, and Sensual Haunting has a couple years so the render quality was outstanding at that time, and still is. I see other devs that cannot get to this level. Also the story is amazing for a game done years ago. 5 stars without a doubt, Leonizer's team is one of the teachers of more recent developers, so thanks to them we can say that this community is possible.

This is a pretty decent and short game with a story that is sufficient if not particularly exciting or coherent. It is good for quick porn setups, and it has some interesting ones with good visuals. However, it could use a better UI and more complete requirement descriptions (there are tasks that have lust requirements as well as stat requirements, but only the stat requirements are displayed).

There are also bugs like a buggy gallery that tends to lock previously unlocked content. There are also one-time events that have high stat requirements that one must work towards ahead of time that one would not know about during a first playthrough. There are also some events that actually lower stats that could not be predicted ahead of time.

I would give this a 3.5 if I could, but when deciding between a 3 and a 4, I decided that the various technical issues reduced this down to a 3. While this game is currently listed as "Completed", I believe it needs some important tweaks to really improve the overall gameplay and experience.