Unity - Sinners Landing [0.3.9a] [Flexible Media]

I played v 0.3.9a

Classic visual novel with some decent deckbuilding combat. The art and writing is up to Flexible Media's usual high standard, but I wish the dialogue was snappier. I feel like there could be half as much without losing any actual content. It's still buggy, but I expect they'll iron those out in time. Also, it took way too long to get to the dungeon, IMO. There was one time when I thought there was no more content because I couldn't figure out how to proceed, but it turns out that a character was telling me to do a task before that task unlocked, and I had to do other unrelated stuff until the option came up. Just needs more work.

The art style, gameplay hooks, writing, humour... this is turning out to be a top notch project! I am thoroughly looking forward to any and all future additions. Absolutely crushing it Flexible Media!!

The artwork is excellent! Story is good enough to keep me interested. The characters are quick to want to bang the PC but it's presented in a way that's believable (i.e. Tyra living in the moment, Dawn being unable to fuck and desperately horny, Morwenna being a priestess of an order that's specifically about fucking, etc.). Gameplay is pretty standard for a VN so that's fine, not a dealbreaker. Card-based combat is fun! Really gives a sense of agency and control that I don't get much of in other VNs.

Only have one real problem. I was expecting far more scenes to be available in the "spankbank" than there were. For example, the scene where Dawn does the ritual to make the trinket for the player, and the shot of Morwenna on the ladder in the library (I like high heels!) are not available in the spankbank. I just assumed they were so I didn't make extra saves for those, and now I have no way of re-watching them without replaying a bunch of the game I've already covered. I hope future versions will include scenes like these which are very erotic but not necessarily sex scenes in the spankbank.

Looking forward to future updates!

Sinners Landing is made by the same people who made Paradise Lust, this game is a great fantasy storyline. I love the work they put out and the character designs, now that there are dungeons too this makes this more fun. I just really hope they add a lot of dungeon monsters or things that you can optionally grind for. Amazing so far and can't wait to see more.

Good start so far, decent dialogue fun minigames that are skippable if found tedious. And the character design is definitely a step up from paradise lust. Music and sound are good and the renders are about on par with paradise lust. Think some of the intro questing needs some more tuning, could flow better with some of the time of day requirements.

Story 5
Characters 3
Writing 3
Graphics 4
Gameplay 3

Like it says on the tin, this is Paradise Lust in a D&D package, with improvements in most areas. The story is better (as of 0.18b), the characters are the same, the gameplay is improved, and the writing is slightly improved.

Story
It's good. Or, in terms of F95, good enough to warrant a 5. Coherent, somewhat silly to fit the general theme of a Leisure Suit Larry type of game, and slowly expanding.

Characters
OK. Like before we start out with dominant 10/10 bi-sexual Cath (except red-head), playful blonde 12/10 bar-wench, and alternative goth-half orc (ghorc?) 10/10 Pog. They are rather one-dimensional so far, and if you click them they will dump several books worth of text on you. Exactly the kind of thing that shouldn't be necessary in a VN. MC is a good character so far; a mix between Leisure Suit Larry and Simon the Sourcerer.

Writing
The writing is similar to Paradise Lust, *but* the MC is slightly more silly, whimsical, and detached, now. This works much better and brings up the writing a notch, as it (so far) does not end up in the uncanny valley between genuine and satirical. Alas, there is still the issue of not conveying information in a concise/organic way, and not using the visual imagery to cut down on the explicit. This is in my mind the most significant negative of the game. What we read should be purposeful, but currently the meter goes all the way to "frivolous".

Graphics
It works well for this type of game.

Gameplay
The fighting is fun, and I look forward to more of it in later updates. The mermaid puzzle was a bit more involved than in previous games and I like it (hopefully this means there will be fewer but more involved puzzles overall). I like the stats but they have a weird implementation; instead of choosing the answers I find the most fun in conversation, the stat gains from asking specific questions means I need to go through the branching text trees to see where I can "level up" the most. It also means I have to ask for long versions of character backgrounds to make sure I'm not missing out on any "level ups" or combat cards. This is probably not an intended side effect of the stat level up system.

Finally, since this is a very early version, there are some minor things that I assume will get ironed out:
Some areas that should be opened up by quests aren't doing that, requiring that other quests be completed/progressed first.
Some hints/quests tell you to go somewhere right now (cinnamon spring) but won't trigger updates unless you go there at the right time of day.
I got the sensation that not everything clickable I moused over resulted in a description tag popping up.
At one point conversation could not be continued/clicked forward unless I closed the game and restarted it.

All in all it's an improvement from Paradise Lust, and I look forward to playing more. Good luck to the dev.