Ren'Py - Shoretown Saga [v0.51] [Dan1228]

It's a sandbox without any sort of navigation system except unlabelled arrows on the edge of the screen - that should tell you all you need to know.

Has some nice looking characters but I got so fed up and frustrated going round in circles that I gave up before even leaving the house. It doesn't even tell you what you need to do till you try to do something else. I was in the bedroom, it told me to go to school. I tried to leave the house, it told me I needed to collect things before going to school - presumably from the bedroom. Nope, not doing this.

For the love of <insert any deity here>, if you're going to make a bloody sandbox, provide some sort of navigation system - don't expect people to magically know the layout of your virtual world.

And, it's currently 11GB - for a sandbox! Someone compressed it down to less than 500MB...

This is a review of version 0.04a so it could get better.

The story 0 stars.

Not much to go off of here the whole game is filler for between the stories. The flashes of story you get are small and poorly written. Then the scenes repeat with the slow pace of the game. It is all just a waste of time that makes you stop paying attention.

The gameplay 0 stars.

This game is another time-wasting torture session of sandbox games. You will have to travel all over town managing your time. To add to the travel time is food, water, and hygiene levels to manage. Then came the fight sequences which are terrible. Fights are quick timed events with small hit boxes. Then when you do accomplish something the reward is lack luster. Repeat the same scenes to end up getting a small new scene. An hour of boring torture to get a peeking scene is not worth it. I don't mind grinding as long as there is a nice reward.

The models 1 star.

I like the women in this game with some very natural looks. There is a nice variety of shapes and sizes in this. That is all I enjoyed in this mess of a game we have here.

Visually, it’s poorly done. The gameplay is extremely inconvenient and tiring (even the cheat menu doesn’t help). The plot is primitive and not interesting. I can’t say anything more, because I couldn’t play it for a long time. 2 stars only for the effort.

What attracted me to this game in the first place? Perhaps the size. 8 GB of content, I thought, and how disappointed I was when I realized that the game simply had large image sizes, which made the size of the game itself so bloated. I tried in vain to go through, expecting to see something interesting, but in the end I only received teasing from interesting characters and the result was “content to come later.” It's a pity, the game is quite interesting, I will keep an eye on it, but so far there is little interesting in it, at least for me.

I admit, grinding can be a little bit annoying. However I think the game is promising.
First, I liked most of the characters. They don't look unrealistically good shape etc. They also follow a pattern (i.e. do not jump on the MC at one point unreasonably).
There are many variable for a sandbox games and I hope even more of them are on the way.
With the incoming contents I believe the game will be better

Hi, tx for this game. I find the story progression very exciting. Same for the pictures and animations.
I sure would not have played it without the in-game cheats. Normal mode is hell for me.
Still some grinding remains in the game esp. when u wanna skip several days to go to an interesting event.
Or when u wanna spot ur progression. Several times u can have an empty tips space for a character whereas the story can still progress with this character (a "You've reached the maximum progression with this character for this update" would be nice or "You have to fo further with (other character name) first".
It's a shame cos the story and visuals are really good and exciting.
But dev seems to be opened to critics and suggestions and making positive changes.
Tx for that and please keep on doing it to make it a great game.

I say this not to discourage the dev because there is... something here.

The writing isn't good, but there's room to develop there. There are typos that need to be corrected and some grammatical errors that a proofreader would be able to help with. Or even one of those grammer-correction apps if you just run your script through that. On the bright side, there is a story, at least from what I can see. There are characters with personalities to some extent.

The visuals are pretty good. As many of the other reviews say, the models are solid. The mom model is good.

The game functionally built besides a few minor glitches and one gamebreaking glitch involving the laundry room

But as the other reviews say, the biggest issue is the grind. game progression is so slow and the guides aren't very helpful. I just opted out of the "needs" categories with the in-game cheat option, but if this game was played the way it was intended to be played, without cheats, it'd be literally intolerable. ive gone more than 5 in-game days, following guides, trying my best to be active during each hour, and got more than a dozen repeat scenes with 0 new content. the grind brings this from a 2.5 to a 1.

The things I remember from this sandbox:

...I'm too tired...
...It's too late...
...The shop is closed...

Bloody fucking thing has the worse times/schedules of most sandboxes I've played. Everything takes entire chunks of your day, bordering on half days. With the travel time, it's pretty much too late, or too tiring to actually do anything, every time, all the time.

I tried the combat, and rolledback to pick another choice... That's how bad it is.

The characters, renders and text, are subpar as well.

With a LOT of work, this could become something, maybe... I'm not even sure this can be salvaged.

Lots of grind, no reward. It's pure sandbox hell.

You spend all your time managing hunger, thirst, hygiene, and energy levels. FOUR different bars to keep up. Then you repeat the same mundane interactions for +1 "Likeness" and +1 "Loveness" points. You can't access the town map until you're outside and you have to navigate the rooms one at a time, there are no icons.

Underneath all that, there's practically no content. Nothing past the whole "spy on people in the bathroom" teasing phase. There are 11 different girls (that I found) with nothing more than introductions. Somehow a 6.2gb porn game contains no porn.

Downloading this isn't even worth the minuscule toll on your hard drive's lifespan.

[0.22 update]

I enjoyed this game and hope the dev isn't discouraged by the 1 and 2 star ratings because it has amazing potential. So I'll list what I liked about it followed by some critique.

The model's are SEXY as hell realistic (especially stepmom ).
Very much reminds me of 'Man of the House' and 'Straitened Times'. In other words, less talking more gameplay buuut isn't quite as well balanced, but I still enjoyed working up to the scenes. Also If you're expecting to read a novel, play something else.

The game rewards you for mastering the your time and energy, and figuring out other people's routines, balancing school with work life, working to learn how to help your family out etc. earning character's trust.
It's the challenge that made the hot scenes so damn rewarding, makes other games seem so easy with just an easy "Yes/no" option every 200 pages of dialogue.
It's very realistic than I expected, slow grind/corruption to both protagonist and the characters around him. I love it.

Below are a few suggestions that will make game more balanced and overall more better:

-Items/consumables like sunscreen, bread, milk, bottled water etc. should be able to used AT LEAST 4 times each. (Are we squirting the whole bottle of sunscreen per use?? Are we just buying 2 slices of bread every time we goes to convenience store?? lol)
-Water should be available for free at home.
-Time skipping absolutely needs more options: "5 mins, 10 mins, 15 mins" etc. and customizable.
-Taking sneak photos should be available anytime character isn't aware. eg. DVD scene. (god damn that was hot)
-Indication for when you've completed the update for a character
-Being able to repair bike in order to travel to places faster (though I assume dev is gonna implement it later)
-There's no stat for bartending skills.

I can see where this game is going and I think it's going to be one of the really good ones but it definitely needs to sort some stuff out in order to play much better. Best of luck and keep up good work!

i like the mom model, its different and more real , she is not an exaggeratedly young mom, that looks like a 25/30 years old mom, who has a son of 18 years.
The other charactes looks fine to me, they look average , and no like, the protagonist live amoung bimbo models.

This would be so much better as a kinetic Novel. I don't understand why this is a sandbox-style game. There's not much point to it, in the particular game. Renders are not amazing, but decent, definitely not bad. The music is a little generic and doesn't seem to follow the mood of the scene.

Shoretown sage is not a porn game but a piss poor attempt to fuck with the players.
The game has the most ridiculous NEEDS system ever implemented that It's pretty clear that the main purpose is to drag out the game. The needs of Cleanliness, Thirst & Hunger/energy deplete so fast, that you'll be busy eating /drinking the whole time, and best part, nothing is freely available, you need to buy items with money, so you have to work for it.. and thats not the worst of it... If I buy a pack of bread, It should last me atleast 2 days, but no, this motherfucker gobbles up food like a black hole.. and the most COMICAL this about the dev nd his game ?? Fucking water, water is a commodity, like you have to buy water... and when u drink it, It'll give u a message " 0 water remaining", like holy shit LOL,... aren't there taps or water filters in the dev's universe ??
This game is a JOKE, nothing more than a time waster. Best of luck to the dev continuing this game that's prolly gonna get abandoned soon ..

It's an okay start to an overall nice-looking game, but as of 0.21 there just isn't enough to do that actually matters. You just do house chores over and over and over again for essentially no reason because there is nothing after that point in the game yet.

For a comparison: lets say World of Warcraft comes out brand new, but there's only one class available, and only a handful of quests you get to do over and over again so that you can earn money, but you can't use that money to buy anything except various potions to help you do those quests.

There needs to be a reward or at the very least a gameplay change in response to the grind and endless tasks to make those tasks worthwhile. That is how you make a proper gameplay loop.

I liked the game, good implementations of the surrounding world and interaction with it. The characters look more realistic and it's cool, Evelyn especially liked it, rendering looks great. In general, the game is good and has potential.

2 Stars for the mom model.
Gameplay is trash, the dev just try adding endless grind for extend gameplay time and hide small content.
For writing, I am not a native speaker but it's just poorly even for me.

Advice for the dev;

- Remove bullshit grinds like "eat food", "take a bath". (Even AAA games don't add that kind of grind)

Obviously an homage to the 2dcg sandbox game of our hearts, it nevertheless tries at the moment to add a lot of unnecessary fluff to the gameplay. Which wouldn't be a bad thing if they were properly balanced.

Energy for washing dishes is 15, half of a workout session. Weird dishwashing flex but ok.... but then walking to school which takes 30 mins of time, takes just 6.
Hunger and thirst drain is pretty ok, a liiitle on the fast side, but hygiene is rock bottom after a third of a day.

All this takes away from what should be the main game loop, improving stats and then getting some. Also I cannot comment on the fighting, cause I wasn't a complete moron to pick a fight as a wimpy, twiggy, manlett MC, with a guy who breaks tree trunks for shits and giggles. Maybe after a lot of training sessions, which btw should be VISUALLY represented on the main char. (Nothing more annoying than getting to, like, 50 strength and looking exactly the same)

So to recap, poor as of now, busy and not in a good sense, which takes away from the main gameplay loop. On the plus side, I like it so I hope the future versions improve

There are sandbox games, and then there's this "gem".

If sandbox was not enough to steer you away from this, then let me tell you what to expect (at least in version 0.1)

You have to manually eat and drink. It's not enough to get to the kitchen and just "eat and drink", no you need to actually press the food to eat and then the glass to drink.

So far this is a sandbox in name only because it doesn't even give you the freedom of going/doing what you want. You are forced to go to the path the game chooses for you. And the hint system is... let's say trolly, because that's the only thing I can think of describing it. One time it says "You need to go to school" and once you find the exit, it says "You need your wallet and phone" without actually telling you where it is.

(Edit: There is a hint system, but for me it blended so much in the background I didn't see it first time around. Fair is fair, it's there but not visible at first glance)

And once you find that you get a message from "mom". One would think that it would be enough to open phone and then just see "unread messages" or something, but nope, you need to open the phone, click the contract icons, then click the mom where you finally find the new message button, and all of that without the game telling you anything about where to look for it.

So over all, if you like micro managing in your porn game, this might be for you. For me however, I like porn in my porn game so this will be a skip for me, unless it changes heavily going forward.