Ren'Py - Sugar Service [v0.10a] [GeeSeki]

Great character designs but horribly tedious, tiring gameplay with a card system i frankly just can't bring myself to care about. The incredibly wordy tutorials serve as an awful introduction to an overcomplicated system of numbers and stats that has nothing to do in it but grind, grind, grind. There is nothing to spend your time on but grinding. Attempting dates the moment you unlock them is basically pointless, as it'd be a much more effective use of your time to just grind a bit. The sole point in this game I found the gameplay fun was when I failed the date with the goth chick, the most memorable character design in the game, then went on a level 2 SMS date that somehow bugged and counted as her date because I was still on her porch.

Speaking of where I was, where you can go is limited to approximately three useful places, with the rest being empty date backdrops. In this title, GeeSeki has abandoned the natural progression system of his previous flop wherein you'd meet characters in the world, and has instead emptied out all the locations so that you could access them all through a clunky menu that feels awful to navigate. The moment I opened my phone for the first time I hoped, prayed even, that the array of apps was just a neat background entity to help your phone look less vacant. I was wrong. Each and every one has a purpose, and none of them are anything you want to look in the direction of. Why is there a stock market in this porn game? Going to bed takes far too many clicks, the house has too many rooms for typically only having 1 or 2 girls present at a time, the shops are a chore to get to and through, having a rotating array of items you likely won't buy anything from, and checking every hour to see if any VIP clients are available is the worst.

The girls you talk to in this game have no personality at all. They each have 1 hobby and even that doesn't make up a full personality. Pink haired girl is your friend and likes video games, a compelling set of characteristics to match her boring design. Blue hair likes anime, and that's all her twitter looking ass talks about, ever. Crop top likes skateboarding, and essentially nothing else. No character has more than a very, very small handful of lines of dialogue you can trigger without gifting them something. Even the dialogue you get for giving them a gift is as boring as their throwaway lines. I understand the game is early in development, but it feels like more priority should have been placed on making you care about the characters rather than implementing a weather app.

The art style is charming, certainly much moreso than the dev's infamous prior attempt at an adult game, though it's not much more suited to pornography, as simple as it is. Thankfully you get all the time you need for this to set in, as the only pussy you're likely to see for a very, very long time is choppily animated in the first minute upon opening the game. I'm all for simpler artstyles, but this isn't doing it, and the boring, static poses don't help at all.

The developer's previous work was much simpler, both in the art style and in gameplay. It was as bog standard as you can get with this genre of games, and it wasn't executed particularly well. What it did do correctly, however, was the writing. The very, very simple art style was a bit of a hurdle to jump over, as it's difficult to enjoy a sex scene that looks like an early South Park episode, but it was salvaged by its writing. The characters were written well enough that the emotional connection and context behind the characters and their actions was enough to propel the scenes to acceptable. This game does not have that luxury. The five or so lines of dialogue aren't even enough to establish defining character traits, let alone a connection to the characters.

If you really want a boring card game with tits in it, there's likely others out there that are significantly more rewarding. If you want a game with a simple art style but intriguing character designs, there's a plethora with better writing and characterization. If you want a boring, convoluted mess that fails to achieve anything beyond the bare minimum for a demo, you're still better off just playing the dev's previous work.

I would have preferred to be optimistic about this game going into it, but after grinding and grinding through boring card battle after boring card battle waiting and waiting for a VIP client to become available, for the shops to stock gifts worth giving, and for the clothes to be worth the purchase, I checked the developer and it all started clicking into place. Maybe this game can turn itself around someday, maybe I didn't stick around long enough or read enough tutorials to see the part where it gets good, or maybe I'm just salty because I've seen our boy band Yu Narukami jack off alone on various pieces of furniture more than I saw any women bust poorly drawn loads on his face, but as it stands I have no idea what the appeal of this is.

A Town Uncovered is getting abandoned for a glorified rock paper scissors game? Seriously? This game sucks dick from the small amount of rock paper scissors that I could stomach playing. If there was an actual story with dialogue it wouldn't be so bad but you just play cards. I just love A Town Uncovered so much despite its flaws and I don't think this will be even a fraction as good as it. I really hope I'm wrong though.

The art of this game is pretty good and feels overall attractive, and the dialogue I'd seen seems fine. That being said, I didn't get too far, and I'm going to go over a smaller complaint first because I believe I understand the reasoning as to the change and it has to do with the bigger complaint anyways. Then I'll wrap by addressing what I believe to be a significant core philosophy issue.

In regards to the lesser issue, I don't like it when games remove forms of control. I want to be able to mouse wheel up to look at previous dialogue instead of having to drag my mouse to the bottom of the screen to hit back. It's not a huge waste of my time (maybe a second or two every time it happens) but it is a waste of my time. I also didn't appreciate that I couldn't right click to open the save menu. However, I believe both of these functions were removed for the sake of attempting to dissuade players from cheating at the rock-paper-scissors minigame.

The unfortunate issue of the main minigame is that it's rock-paper-scissors. Ignoring the ludo narrative dissonance involved with buying packs of cards worth hundreds of dollars despite the fact that my roommate and I need to pay off three months of rent by the end of the month, there are significant issues. Even with the addition of the flipping the bird card or whatever, it feels like I understand the entirety of the minigame right away. Because I do. It's rock-paper-scissors. I think I first played this when I was like 4. You can throw all the birds, dynamites, Spocks, or whatever else you like into it, it's still just rock-paper-scissors. I was only on my fourth round in when I found myself wishing it just wasn't there. And to cap that off, various control schemes seem to have been removed in what feels like an attempt to stop me from save scumming the minigame to just win as fast/easily as possible without having to over-edit my deck.

And that brings me to the last point. The philosophy of this game seems to be less about time enjoyed and more about time spent. I don't want to have to click multiple times to open a pack of cards or to break the heart at the end, I don't wanna play another boring minigame, and I especially don't want to have to do it multiple times before I even see a single scene (barring the initial shower scene.) I wanted to be responsible for managing the business, I wanted to get to meet the friend who owed me a favor or the two new roommates as they were moving in, and maybe I would've even wanted to help them.

This art has potential. Don't bury it beneath rock-paper-scissors.

Well it was honestly really fun ! Loved the designs/CG/Animations a lot (and 2d games are getting rare so it's a plus) , the characters are particularly loveable (pink hair is always peak tbh). Looking forward for more updates !

This game... I like the art style and the animation. The writing is alright, too. Unfortunately, the core game at the center, the card game is. Oof. Wow. So fucking bad you have no idea.

So basically, the card game is rock paper scissors with a few twists. You pick a rock, paper, scissors or special card from your hand without seeing what your opponent is playing or even could play (except for if you get a buff I'll talk about later). Each card has a value. If your card beats the other card's type, you deal that card's value in damage to them. If your card loses, you take their card's value in damage. If your cards are the same type, whoever has the higher value deals damage. Special cards always take damage from the opponent's card, but always deal damage, too, or you can have them heal you for their value instead of dealing damage (more on that later). You win if you either reduce the opponent's life to zero or they run out of cards to play without reducing your life to zero. You lose if either of the same happen to you.

In addition to card behaviors there's a few other mechanical twists. If you play 2 losing cards you get to see what your opponent's next card play will be. Your opponent, if they lose twice, will also get to see what your next card play will be, which essentially means that you're guaranteed to lose at least one out of every three plays, since they'll beat your play as long as they have a card in hand available. The special cards are a way around this mechanic, both for you and your opponent, but if you mean to use them for that your deck needs to be roughly 1/3 special cards. There are one-time use items you can receive for winning battles, along with receiving cash and XP, and those one-time-use items let you do things like make a card unblockable, deal double damage, or make it so you only need to lose one hand to get your prediction powers (I may be misremembering one or more of the item effects, it largely doesn't matter because the items are a bad idea, a mechanic that *could* be a comeback mechanic but ultimately only helps out players who are already doing well).

When building a deck, you are limited in how many cards you can put into it. Each card costs a certain point value equal to the card's attack value, with special cards costing double their value. This means if you want to hit the "1/3 special" sweet spot you're spending a ton of your points to do so, so you're probably not going to hit it if you want to keep a deck that's big enough to not regularly lose by running out of cards. It is possible this is, in fact, not a sweet spot and I'm overestimating the need to outplay the opponent. Maybe it's cool if you just take damage on one third of all your turns. You have life points, after all, and the only one that matters is your last one, so may as well tank a few hits? Even still, the use of special cards to mitigate the harm of those turns seems important, and like it was a core design consideration, which is problematic since using them that way is mechanically prohibitive.

In this game, much like in Magic: The Gathering and other similar card games, Lifegain just delays the inevitable, and if you don't have inevitability on your side, usually delaying it isn't going to put it on your side. There are ways you can design a game so that is not true. Sugar Service has not done those things. It seems like the devs are not even familiar with the concept of "inevitability" in 1v1 turn-based, life-point based games.

The game is mostly a VN, but to get the next scene with any of the characters you need to buy them gifts. To get money you need to go on "dates" (card battles) with unnamed, unseen characters, and you need to win. You can't spend money to get one-time-use battle items, only to buy card booster packs, gift items for girls, or to improve your stats. Your stats don't currently appear to do anything in unlocking scenes or in battles, rather at the end of a battle you discover what your opponent's "favorite stat" is and then get bonus money based on how high yours is. At the end of battle. Meaning you can't choose your opponents based on who would be most rewarding based on your stats. The whole game is full of little decisions like this, ways that they make the game's other mechanics feel pointless or random.

And the pointless randomness is the big problem! At its core the battles are rock paper scissors, meaning you're only winning about 1/3 of the time. The tools to mitigate the randomness are only given to you if you're already winning, the "dates" (random battles) scale up with your level so you can't reliably grind against weaker opponents, meaning if you buy too many gift items and don't keep up your card deck you could easily softlock yourself by having a deck that's too weak to beat anyone and not being able to buy more cards for it. There are cheat codes you can use to just give yourself money, and I recommend using those, but even then you still have to play the card game when you're going on story dates with the main cast girls, so you still have to interact with the game's incredibly random and incredibly unfun card game. It's all just a pile of bad decisions that there's no quick easy "just do this' fix for. I'd say the best fix is "don't base your core gameplay around rock paper scissors" but that ship has already sailed.

If I were to go about starting to fix the card game I'd probably make there be cards that do more than just basic things? Cards that let you draw other cards, cards that can block specials, cards that can lifesteal or guard break, cards that let you put some played cards back into your deck (and then exile themselves from the game afterwards to prevent infinite looping). Just... something to make the card game less basic, more strategic and less random.

the potential is crazy the characters are all meaningful sex scenes are great card game system is a bit too hard imo and it feels too grindy but other than that it has great potential to be an amazing full fledged game

Definitely a very promising game. This deserves a higher rating than it currently has (v0.04B.ba).

Love the visuals, love the gameplay. It can definitely be tedious but I think it's fun and unique in this setting. Like I said, very promising.

Version v0.04B.c review (as a quick aside, the paid version is on .06B so I don't know if any of my criticisms have already been addressed in the newest version).

I liked this a lot. The gameplay is fun and feels well thought out. The girls are pretty cute. Money is a little weird: you need to earn $1500/month for rent but you can do that in like a day. Everything else (card packs, gifts, and clothes) are super expensive so you'll play the card game A LOT. The games go quick though and I rarely had any difficulty winning on the second hardest mode so it never felt too tedious. It is kind of crazy, though, that the game goes up to level 100 and after two hours I'm level 6. Not sure what the dev's intent is there.

My biggest criticism is with gifts. Those are the only way to raise relationship with the various ladies. You can't give the same gift twice but there's nothing (that I'm aware of) indicating what gifts you have and haven't given. With relationships going as high as 20 in the current version, you basically need a spreadsheet. Also, each girl likes one type of gift and some are obvious (the controller probably goes to the gamer) but others are like a skirt or a box of donuts and it would be nice if they just had the traits shown.

Overall though, I thought the card game was well thought out and the girls are cute and this is a fun little game.

The idea sounded fun and the visuals looked cute, but in the current version v0.03B_f the gameplay is horribly slow and unrewarding. The game takes ages to start and the core loop is unrewarding to say the least. The dialogue was okay and the characters could develop into real stories, but any strip poker game is honestly a better investment of your time for now.

The idea looks fun but in practice its just rng and gets really boring after a few rounds.
I'm not shure if its my lick but the npc seems to "guess correct" more often than you.
The art is decent but nothing special.
Could become a fun game in the future but it needs some major reworks in the rock paper scissors gameplay.