Ren'Py - Completed - Space Journey X [v1.50_15] [y.v.]

[v1.50_15]
The game has both great pros and bad cons, which are very similar to the dev's first game (The Princess and the Tower). Both games share the same tone and game mechanics (and also one main character).

Pros:
+Great humour.
+Great lore.
+The dev has developped his own graphic style and I like it.
+Tons of content. The dev is hardworking.

Cons:
-The grind is real. I recommend using the cheat to have unlimited money to lessen this grind.
-As with The Princess and the Tower, sex scenes are really lacking. The dev just throws a couple renders and it's done. It's annoying to spend so much time grinding for a single render reward. There should be more interaction with the girls during sex. This is even more frustrating that the dev got it right with the punishment mini-game. He should think of a similar system for sex, with stress/pleasure gauges.

To conclude, it is fun to play, but a disappointing fap. Whether you liked or disliked The Princess and the Tower, you will have the same opinion of Space Journey X.

Fantastic game, featuring mix of classical space strategies like Space Rangers, Galaxy on Fire, Freelancer and best corruption games like Akabur games - Star channel 34, Princess trainer. Got me hooked for several days. Looks like a good compromise of erotic game and space adventure. Highly recommend.

I've very mixed feelings about the game.
On the positive side it has:
- A very unique style
- Hot models
- Interesting story
- A lot of different well made mechanics

On negative side:
- Too much grind
- Grind to sex scenes ratio is small
- Overall too few scenes
- No SFX in scenes (beside the ejaculation sound)
- Scenes contain most of the time a single movement from a single angle
- Have I mentioned grind already?

I really would like to give the game a better rating, because clearly a lot of effort was put into the creation of the world, models, environment and complex mechanics.
But I'm cheating and still it takes me hours after hours to progress, find out what next, level up characters stats to get the next short sex scenes with them.
It's simply not satisfying.
The game could be a 5/5 with better sex scenes and more of them. The grind can stay, but the reward must be equivalent.

This is a solid 5 out of 5, however, it is not a game that lets you just turn off your brain and wank away and I do have some issues with the game and especially some obvious(?) missed opportunities.

1) Don't expect elaborate animations. The sex scenes are hardly gifs. But the models are great so you'll certainly get hard. In fairness, I wish the dev would make at least one properly animated scene for each character.

2) So I can build sex bots, customize them, train then and ... yeah, I can't use them after I've customized them since there are only 3 models that support that and each only have 1 mini gif.. Why you gotta do me like that Mr. Dev?

3) Can I please have the option to at least customize the one that lives on my bed, please?

4) Some of the puzzles aren't actually puzzles.. There just quest with lacking instructions, the hard part being figuring out how to even start the puzzle part of them. Just count the amount of comments on the Beacons despite there being a walkthrough, it's all people not knowing to use the wrench on the console.

5) Please, Mr. Dev, let us get to a point where regardless of what the crew wears and what tasks they are assigned, the amenities and doctor's support should be enough for them to not die from stress and despair. For the first 300 days, sure, let me struggle.. But it's just a hassle now and the primary reason why I'm not gonna replay this otherwise fantastic game.

6) Being a completionist, it really, really hurts that some of the Gallery scenes only have a tiny window of opportunity to be unlocked.. I'm at the very end of the game and have been grinding for that pesky last N-Shell for ages, and it's glaring how I can't unlock 3-4 of the scenes because the moment has simply passed ages and ages ago.

So in summary.. Griffindor takes the house cup, but also minus -600 points to Griffindor for making me hard, but never making me cum and making me spend 30 hours engrossed only to end up feeling slightly vexed. Also +100 points to Griffindor for making the best models for tits I have ever seen - they remind me of an ex that I still wank about..

To be fair, the 2 star rating is because this is indeed a poor sex/porn game. There isn't a focus on the sexual aspect of the game.
The game is not bad at being a standard management type of affair.
But tremendously more time and effort has to be put in to building up funds than having fun.
There was so much sexual potential that was not explored. The interactions were too brief with no depth.

To me it feels like this was a game that had non-sexual designs in the planning phase but tacked on some nudity to garner some attention.

Art/Models are easily 4/5. Trying to rein in my bias, because these puffy nips are in my strikezone.
Animations are, unforunately, quite bad. I'm not sure what the intent was, but you can count the frames.

Gameplay is...3/5.
There's nothing that jumps out at me as being bad, but it's got some of the typical jank you'd expect from most renpy titles, and there's nothing especially involved/creative here.
There are some minigames that help break things up a bit, but nothing complex. It's more or less enough to hold my attention, and not feel tedious.

Overall, 4/5. I enjoy the humor, characters, and artstyle. The jank animations are distracting, but otherwise the lewds hit the spot.

I did not expect to like self-bondage before I played this game, but now I do.

Character design stands out which is a breath of fresh air since you are used to seing the same DAZ charactesr copy and pasted thousands of times.

Game has a lot of humor and a dev that is very active on both discord and patreon.

The sandbox part of the game is not always 100% (available guide if you are stuck) intuitive but it is engaging and if you have a soft spot for managment type games this is a must.

if I could give it more than 5stars I would

I found this game browsing the BDSM tag. I'm fairly singularly focused on BDSM.

This game is about 70% vanilla so I'm not fully the target audience, but I felt like it threw me a bone often enough to stay interested. To some extent I also realized while playing "vanilla content isn't the worst thing in the world" because the artistry of the game does a lot to sell charm and uniqueness. I am also a heavy strategy gamer. I very much enjoy the various economy mechanics in play. There are so many variables for a player to keep track of at first and it's very fun to juggle them all.

On the whole it's quite incomplete. As you get into the later chapters, the myriad gameplay mechanics become less relevant and there's a lot less scenes being unlocked. So this dev has a lot to do yet. Judging from the size of the patreon and discord communities, this project does seem to have a good amount of energy behind it.

The character designs put me off at first and I took a while to even try the game. I warmed up to it after playing for a bit though. This game has a lot of charm and the artistry is very solid - posing, lighting, camera effects, environment design all look great. The writing is enjoyable, the main character striking a good balance between "innocent goof" and "horny sex pest" and the girls all just roll with it because it's an ero game. I found a decent degree of immersion with it.

Nimhe best woman 5/5.

Girls are hot. The models have a unique style.

Very interesting mechanics such as creating bots, loot mining and economics.

I would like more sexual scenes and angles.
Many scenes are repetitive and need to be repeated over and over again to progress. There could be more inappropriate interactions with girls.

At some point the grind and obstacles become annoying. The sex scenes end. There are very few of them anyway. This game mercilessly eats up your time.

Excellent mechanics are ruined by merciless grinding.

A superior game in content and size to The Princess and the Tower, the other game by this developer, and while grinding at times, the mini games are challenging enough to not be bored. Easy to figure out how to make progress fast, and from a completitionist perspective, it's very straightforward while still having a feeling that the player makes his own choices in the storyline. One of the best games on this site, with a unique art style, quirky characters and cool electronic music (I like the bar song in Iltari station the most).

Art is 10/10 which is good, but also bad because you'll want to see more.
In my opinion setting and minigames are good.
All of the boring parts of the game either will be automated on later stages of the game, or in future updates, so you don't have to do boring stuff.
Game is lite, no lags, no crashes, no softlocks.
From my experience all of the bugs were minor and did not affect player's game progress.

Game is good, game is fun, I would recommend.

This was another tough review.

The art was interesting, but not amazing. The story was good but not great. Bonus points because it is an actual game.

Given where we're at, it was a little surprising to me how much fun the combat was.

Sorry this is a little choppy, but again, this was tough. It definitely gets very very grindy (to the point where I didn't finish) and the quest hints are definitely inconsistent.

TL;DR - decent game that goes on too long

Space Journey X is an adventure, point-and-click game made by yv, with some very similar mechanics as his previous game The Princess and the Tower. The models are really good, one of the best made for a game, specially for a Renpy engine. But sadly the art is not enough to compensate for the massive problems and obnoxiousness this game has. The amount of time this game requires for you to start seeing the most mellow and basic of scenes or simply progressing the story is absurd. This is one of the grindiest games that one can possibly conceive. Many solutions are hidden behind the most confusing paths imaginable without any guide provided on how to progress on, or even creating new mechanics that were not previously used or explained. It feels like yv makes this on purpose, planning methodically how to make the most obnoxious jumble of obstacles imaginable, constantly pulling your brakes. Truly, he is a master of the craft. Since The Princess and the Tower, yv improved tenfold his talent for creating the most annoying gameplay loops known to men. The incessantly blocking of relationship points without any warning and without any explanation on how to move on, the boring excessive precise gameplay, and the unnecessary grind demanded just to see a mediocre scene make Space Journey X yet another waste of great modeling talent, to a worse degree than The Princess and the Tower. On day three hundred, with everything maxed out, on the xeno system I decided to back off because this game is just not worth it, and I suspect any future game by yv will be the same.

Review of Space Journey X. Versions played: 1.30 and 0.7.
Overall Assessment: Excellent game.

Pros:
- The artwork is good and polished.
- The characters are quirky and fun.
- It's an actual game - there's a challenge to it (as opposed to the mindless click-fest of a VN)

Cons:
- The game can be a bit of a grind.
- There's not always a substantial increase in content per release (though as of Version 1.40 , there's a LOT of content overall).

There's a lot of content and systems here... but sadly, as an AVG the reward to grind ratio was just was too low, and sadly it continues to decline as you progress through the story, which turns into mostly fetch quests and space combat and resource management.

It's truly unfortunate, since with more focus on the adult content this could've been a great trainer game with an interesting setting.

Really nice gameplay, really nice girls, felt like jerking off to Barbie dolls!
But yeah I enjoyed the gameplay most of all, something about space just gets me hooked to these games.
The writing could use work, a waste really to have the scenes, but not the writing to extend them a little.
but as far as plot goes it's good, just not sex writing.

V. 1.40_18

Let's face it, y.v. knows how to make a game.
Progress may seem slow, but it pays off. The game is long, generous and addictive. I spent hours on it.
Of course, it's not without its faults, but as it's not finished, I suppose some of them will be improved.
What works particularly well is that new gameplay elements are added as the game progresses, preventing monotony.
You can feel that the programmer is having fun creating mini-games, such as space battles, but the best part is the creation of sexbots, which is this game's greatest achievement.
The erotic content is fairly soft, but no less enjoyable.
I think this production should have a higher profile on the site.

Once again, an engaging storyline with excellent artwork and of course, the sex! My only wish was that there is actual animation (but I'm not complaining about the 3D models here) and sounds. Otherwise, amazing game!

v1.40.18

This game is weirdly addicting but at the same time a little disappointing.
The story and characters are fine but nothing really special. The art and dialogue are decent enough. The mechanics work well.

It does have a significant amount of grind, but once you get past the mining and start to unlock more options it becomes pretty fun. The only part I really had a problem with was when you have to grind for a specific item that's completely luck based to get. That's very close to the end too so it really destroys the pacing.

The other big issues are the puzzles. There are 3 puzzles right before the end of the game and they feel pretty out of place. The game has plenty of strategy before this, but no puzzles iirc. So suddenly having 3 fairly hard ones in a row is a bit of a pain. Particularly the last one is just kinda bs. It's pretty unclear what it wants but even when I knew I had no clue how to get the answer. The game really needs to draw your attention to these things so you remember them for later.

Finally it's clear that this game just isn't completed. Hopefully it will be in the future, but right now all the dead ends and "wait for future updates" are really annoying.

If those few issues are fixed this game could easily go to 5 stars but right now it's just a little mediocre.

OUTSTANDING, UNIQUE, AND JUST PLAIN FUN!

Discovered your work with The Princess. I think it is nothing short of fantastic! I'm always looking for the next update and to see what you'll do next.

What's to Like :

1. Your Unique style of character art that separates it from the more commonly reused characters in Renpy games.
2. You have a great and slightly twisted sense of humor
3. Challenging but managable and balanced gameplay and puzzle system; with enough sex to keep it interesting.
4. You are active, accessible, and accept the good and bad of feedback, complaint, and unreasonable annoying whining from people you GIVE your hard work to for FREE in this community !

What's Not to Like -- NOTHING

THANK YOU!!! Keep doing what you do, and I'll keep playing.