Ren'Py - Shoretown Saga [v0.48a] [Dan1228]

Shoretown Saga [v0.48]

Models and renders are beautiful, but the game has an incredibly high level of grind.

Cons:

1. The developer has disabled the skip button. As you know, in RenPy, pressing Ctrl or Tab allows you to automatically skip scenes without clicking on the screen, but the developer has turned this feature off. After playing for a while, my finger started hurting from all the left-clicking. Additionally, when you try to go back (scroll up), instead of returning to the previous dialogue, it sometimes takes you all the way to the start of the conversation.
2. The game is overall grind-heavy. There is a cheat menu on the phone, but even if you use cheats, the grind doesn't go away. Because of the time mechanics in the game, you constantly have to move the clock forward by one hour or sleep, which becomes very tedious.
3. There aren't enough sex scenes in the game. Most of the characters' stories are incomplete, and some don't even have a single sex scene. Many locations are labeled "Work in progress."

Pros:

1. The models and renders are amazing. The women aren't generic; it's clear that effort was put into making each character unique. Normally, Daz3D artists tend to make women look the same, like Barbies, but the developer here has added some uniqueness to the characters, which I really liked.
2. The game shows a lot of promise. The developer is very talented, and if they put more effort into the game, fix the issues, and better understand RenPy mechanics, this game could reach great heights.

It would be amazing game if this was not a sandbox game. I dont understand why DEV's making sandbox gameplay in their games.. It's so painful to process ig. This game's guide system is also not good
Overall, this game needs huge rework to gameplay and guide system. I dont want to see those amazing models ruined because of terrible gameplay.
2/5. 1 point is only for models

This is my first review, so please bear with me. I don't know why this game has a low rating, as I think it's quite good. While it does have a sandbox element, I don't find it annoying. In fact, I really enjoy the graphics, which are some of the best I've seen in recent games. I've given it 5 stars so far and am looking forward to future updates.

This is the very definition of sandbox minigame garbage. I absolutely hated this experience. It's a knockoff of another much better game which has actual cheats available for it that work in your favor. And if it weren't for the money cheat and the ability to turn off energy, hunger, and hygiene requirements I literally wouldn't have even tried this. But I did. I wish I hadn't, but I gave it a shot ... for 3 hours.

What I experienced was a grindy minigame waste of time on repeat. And I spent over 200 days in Summertime Saga. That should tell the dev and everyone reading this something. First there's the Mini games. Completely unskippable and absolutely horrible. The moment a skip cheat is created I'd take it because these were so bad I couldn't keep trying this anymore. What kind of window are you giving your players with these block/hit mechanics and at what point did you think anyone would want to play pop the weasel in order to just block/hit while they wait what felt like forever to just attempt to punch? So awful I couldn't take it anymore. And to find out that after taking the MC to the gym multiple times had only given him 120 for power? Nah ... miss me with that nonsense.

Then there's the constant repeatable dialogue, which you CANNOT SKIP. Hey Dev, the tab button is a thing in these for a reason. Why is this function not working? And yes, I tried. I even turned on the "Skip Unread" to absolutely zero effect. Do you know how annoying a conversation can get after hearing it over and over again just to get a single point of affection for the MC? This was like living Groundhog Day.

Then there's the zero guidance checklist system. The dev has a list of things for the MC to accomplish for each character, but no order to them and no daily tasks that have to be accomplished, regardless of the fact that there are daily events that can be missed (exams for the MC, seriously?) that indeed affect his standing with other characters. So if you're thinking you can go off the beaten path and just concentrate on building the characters other attributes ... nope. Don't even think about it. You have to hold to repeatedly going to class, study, go to work, go to the gym, help whomever you can, rinse repeat ... forever.

I don't appreciate having my time wasted in general. I certainly don't appreciate my time being wasted because a dev can't streamline their VN. At the rate I was going the only action the MC was going to get was from hookers and seeing his "landlord" (seriously dude, just go for gold and make them a family ) make it back home to rail the "landlady" and fellow "tenant." It didn't happen, but I fully expected it with the pacing this story had set.

So how do you fix this? Simple. First, remove energy, hunger, and hygiene entirely. I guarantee no one wants to have to monitor any of that shit. It doesn't matter if it's to make sure the MC has interactions with the two ladies in the house. That's why you create a checklist of daily events to guide your readers. Next streamline every school/study session, course, and work shift. If the MC shows up to school, don't require them to click around to get to class. Just have the quick cutscene showing class flying by and move on. Courses shouldn't cost anything but time. YouTube exists. $45 to learn to repair a lawnmower or massage, bruh ... come on. I can take apart my engine and rebuild it because of YouTube. Then there's the work shift. In 3 hours I didn't experience one event that required the MC to even show up for work except to get money, so if that's its only purpose, stop wasting the reader's time and having them go inside, click the work button and select work. Just have them go to the building and that's it. Screen to black, cut back to shift is over, money there pocket, time wasted.

Now, and this is the most important part. You have got to give the reader the choice to skip your mini games. They are not fun or engaging. Make the fights directly related to strength/fight experience. Not click here, now here, now here, now here ... oop, not fast enough. Also add the ability to learn to box at the gym the moment the MC gets a membership. That will get the MC in shape a hell of a lot faster. And finally, don't make any events time sensitive. Nothing in this should be missed or screw the reader over for not doing something in a certain time period. As you have it right now, the reader is on repeat going to classes, doing daily crap, and if they miss a day, then they can't study or they could miss an exam or god knows what. This costs the MC relationship points which shouldn't even be possible. I'd rather you take all choices away at this point and just make this a kinetic novel.

Look, I get it. You wanted to make a stand out VN that did some things different, but what you wanted to make was an RPG. That's fine, but not in this format. Go learn how to code in Unreal or Unity and make this in those. That's literally where the elements you've created belong. But this ... this ain't it. Anyways, regardless of what my frustrations are I still wish all the best for this dev. And I genuinely hope they've found their audience. If you're someone who likes this, great. Leave a review. Don't let my opinion sway you at all. Let the dev know what you like and what you don't. As always, remember this was uploaded for free for us to try out. So if you enjoyed this, and when you can, give something back to dev. Cheers

This game have really a great potential but also have some problems to solve. It have a cool character design, they are not very beautiful but they looks much more real. I also really apreciated the hot situation created with evelyn and lily.
The biggest problem of this game it's the navigation sistem, confusing in the beggining becouse you don't know really where to go till you learn your house, and annoing later becouse you have to navigate all the house just to access the city map, with all this hal of the game play result in you clicking arrows to go from point A to B. I love sandbox games but this navigation system is way too tidius.
The grind is very high but at least you can disable the basic needs from the cheat menu to balance the game and make it enjoyable

This has potential.

I like the models, because they're not "models", LOL. They're decent looking, and realistic. No MILF's that look 24.

The story is pretty standard fare.

Unfortunately, the sandbox is a clusterfuck. It's just a confusing mess. I'm not a fan of sandbox, for the most part, but sometimes it can add to a game. In its current form here, it just detracts from the game.

Best of luck, developer

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.