Ren'Py - SunSity [v3.40] [SunSity]

Amazing game absolutely ruined by a ridicolous grind and the greedy developers. They really took a page of the triple A studios, specifically EA and Ubisoft, making this game specifically to be unplayable without the paid cheat engine.

-Our game is not a familiar visual novel.
It is , and promises well for this... bot all this grinding it's absolutely boring!!!

-This is an erotic sandbox with survival elements.
Yes it is, but too extreme!!! all this grinding is BORING!!! if more than 50% of player say IT'S BORING it's because IT IS!!!
I hope u give us a version wit a difficult selection mode, for the grind lovers and for the grin haters

The game runs very poorly.
It crashes if you rollback- which you instinctively will, because clicking one of the unlabelled interaction buttons is fully capable of eating a half-hour of your in-game time, even if you figure out you didn't want to do anything.
The filesize is bloated, somehow near 2 gigs, despite the massive amount of asset reuse. If there was pretty, high-quality custom art, instead of the same play-doh skin for everyone, that'd be different.
The game itself is grindy, unintuitive, and unrewarding. The stats don't make sense-this is one of many games where someone being "angry" means "refuses to interact with you until you placate them". Want to rape someone? Too bad, you didn't rinse a plate off before you put it in the sink- they're mad, so they won't let you. Tell them a joke and you're golden, though.
Every sex scene is just the same model with any identifying aspect of its design hidden, plus a secondary window showing the individual character's head, so you can tell who they are.

I don't get this game. I really don't. At some point, you think a developer would take a step back, look at what they've made, try to play it for themselves, and realize it's just a mess. I guess if they actually enjoy this, more power to them, but I don't see how they could.
Even playing with cheats doesn't fix it- just removes the daily aspects of your character's entirely personal grind that has nothing to do with progression- eating, showering, and so on- that serve to slow the already glacial pace of the game down even more.
Every so often, I come back to this game, assuming I was too harsh in the past, or that surely things would be better by now. Nope, and nope.

TL;DR: Save your time, don't download this waste of hard drive space.

Other reviews have already talked about the oppressive grind and the weird sandbox elements of having to keep up with different MC stats, so I'm going to try to cover other things.

First, this game was clearly made by someone who has no conceptualization of game design, nor any desire whatsoever to learn. I think the thing that best sums up this fact is NPC interaction. When you talk to someone, the menu buttons on the side of the screen are only identified by icons, and mousing over them gives no information as to what the button does. Several of the buttons do to different sex action menus, which is fine, but exiting those menus consumes 30 minutes of game time. Even if you only clicked to find out what the button did.

This lack of design principles continues into the code, where the NPC stats are stored in "var_dict['npces']". This is an unsorted array, and the way the game chooses who to interact with is by looping the *entire* npc list and then using if statements tied to the specific one. That probably only makes sense to other programmers, but the simple version is that it's incredibly inefficient, and likely contributes to the ridiculous amount of interface lag the game experiences.

I use that example to show that optimization is clearly not on the dev's radar, because the dev instead spends their time ensuring that players are forced to pay into the dev's patreon to unlock the cheat menu. They do this with nearly-unreadable spaghetti code and a grind so oppressive that you'd normally need hours of gameplay to unlock a single h-scene for a single character, of which there are scores. That's okay though, because once you've seen an h-scene for one character, you've seen that scene for *all* the characters. There is no real difference between characters, as they all have the same sex dialogue, only varying based on whether she "like" or "don't like" a position. Incidentally, some characters "likes" certain sex acts... which the game code treats the same as "indifferent". This bug would normally be pretty significant, yet who can be bothered to grind though enough characters to notice it? I found it because I cheated to max out character stats, but cheating doesn't change much, it just lets you access the generic sex options available to every forgettable automaton of a character.

You can tell they're all forgettable automatons from the screenshots: Same pose for every character, because that lets the dev copy and paste outfits and hairstyles on the exact same basic bodies.

There are more terrible design decisions I could rant about, but you all get the point. This is a game with no redeeming qualities. Save your bandwidth, save your hard disk space.

Majority of this game is grinding endlessly for stats, money, relationship points, etc.

Sandbox elements are poorly implemented. You have to manually eat, drink, sleep, and shower with little clear indication of these stats in the UI. This is made worse by the fact that in order to do these things you have to click through several menus and options all of which are slow due to the game's poor optimization and performance. There is a delay to every click and in dialogue that is painful to sit through.

The developer puts more effort into DRM and anti-cheat in a singleplayer sandbox porn game than fixing the bugs and performance issues.

SunSity [v3.25] [SunSity]
There is a lot of love in this site for virtual novels. This game is not a virtual novel and breaks, negatively, some expectations.
This is also a game criticized for the grinding, but those who do that, at the same time, seem to ignore the amount of detail the game has.
Could this game be more entertaining for those players if done in a different way? Maybe. It's very possible that making some parts easier and adding some more "novel" to the game would do that. And have they heard about that thing called console, or cheats? But they could also play a different game and a different genre and stop moaning.
There is a problem with the files in this game - not all of them seem to be the conventional location/folders. In one of my comments i left a step-by-step solution on how to play this game on Mac. Enjoy!

I am suprised by ratings for this game as imo it is a decent sandbox, yes it DEFINETLY IS GRINDY but with that out of the way everything else is good, a lot of interactions a lot of freedom, actual choice i really like this i don t know how someone can give this 1 star and 5 stars for a vn with 3 scenes that you see in betwen of holding ctrl for 5 min. The amount of content and freedom in this game is 5 stars but i agree grind is just to long so 4 stars from me.

The game has far too much grinding.
It's not fun.
The good content to simplify and test the game is behind a paywall.
I know the creator wants to make money, but there are other ways to do that than by having an endless grind and paying if you want to be faster. WTF?

Terribly long, annoying, repetitive. Desperation of the highest order. You can't play without cheats. Graphics ok, but the game system absolutely desperate and trying to endlessly click on tasks without adequate response. Lack of meaningful tutorial.

I hate this game. Normally I try to find something redeeming but there is nothing redeeming about this bloated game. It's so boring, do the same interactions over and over again. I seriously hate this game.

Biggest grindfest in which the only bypass is hidden behind a sleazy paywall, which the dev makes sure to be his priority to keep hidden, turning this into spaghetti code which in turn lags the game like there is no tomorrow... Yeah HARD PASS

tried it when it was first added to this site and it was grindy. tried it again two years later and it got more grindy. two years later im back and if you go by the new comments, its still grindy as hell. the grind is so bad that it makes korean mmo's blush.

It's not a bad game, but it's far from good. The sandbox is well made, the character models are good, but the "good" part of the game ends there.
The menus are very basic and don't provide enough information, especially when it comes to relationships with other characters, the character's needs weren't well implemented, the gameplay loop is very confusing. There are several other negative points, but what bothers me the most is how shallow the interactions and relationships with other characters are. That's what made me stop playing.
What made me give it 3 stars is that I think it's easy to fix this game. The hard part is ok. Now all that's left is to polish some mechanics.

This game is a grindy, buggy mess. It combines the worst aspects of sandbox games into one awful package.
-You have manual eating, showering, drinking
-annoying and slow navigation through dozens of rooms
-the LAG, omg how does one create so much lag in ren'py with such a simple game
-very tiny inventory, and an inventory system at all


If you value your time DO NOT play this "game" it has the very low rating for a reason.

My God this thing is grindy and tedious.
The Interface is horrible, you have to click a ton of things all on different parts of the screen.
You have a horrible inventory system ...
The interface is deliberately made lagy. Holding down skip seems to skip the crappy "animation" that does only lag the whole thing. As in there's no animation it just delays the reaction to your click ...
This is where fun comes to die , have its corps trampled and be raped a by a bunch of sadistic McDonalds clowns ...
I'd go below 1 star ,sadly I can't

Game is a buggy mess. Lags like crazy. I have seriously never seen a Ren'Py game lag like this. Also, this game seems like a grindfest, and cheats have to be purchased from Patreon. I guess that's a quick way to make a buck.

I really wanted to like the game, because on paper it should be right up my alley. I enjoy grinding (long-time fan of HHS+), enjoy sandboxes, enjoy stat-based npcs. But the game is just not good. Most of the components for the at least okayish project are there, but the game flow is horrible and it's generally very slow in every sense of the word. I stopped playing when I caught myself thinking "fuck, another day is starting, I'd have to manually drink and eat again, what a chore".

I doubt dev will ever read this, but if you do, I think there are a couple of simple ways to considerably improve the game.

1) rework "needs" mechanics so that the player doesn't have to make several clicks every time he has high thirst or hunger. IMO we don't need thirst and hunger at all - no porn game needs it unless it's a hardcore zombie survival with porn elements (which this game is not). They serve no gameplay value. With dirtiness you at least can add different girl reactions to clean or dirty PC. Joy creates incentives to try and fuck girls because some events give it (even though horniness would be better in that regard). Energy works as a limiter for work/study spamming. But hunger and thirst are just a burden. If you insist on keeping them because it's something you've worked on, at least add some mechanics like auto-drinking whenever you're in location with sink.

2) add random events with named NPCs allowing you to influence their main stats. E.g. Isabella tells you about her problem with mother and your reaction will either give "love--, submission++" or vice versa, or something. Patting a girl on the head for a week to get her to accept your advances is just ridiculous.

3) optimize the game. It's horribly slow and frustrating. There are multiple renpy projects with complex animations that are much faster. You don't use hundreds of procedurally generated rnpcs. I have no idea why it's so slow but it is. Probably either large game files or something with minute-by-minute routine calculation that is suboptimal.

I think I'll get back to this game after a few updates, so two stars are not final, but for now I can't make myself to squeeze at least three.

There are lots of characters but you don't know where to look to find them. The quests are not well explained. The characters all have the same pose, they all react in the same way and they lack life. After a few hours of going around in circles without finding anything new, I preferred to give up and I don't think I'll try again.

Nothing really unique. Terrible grindy, animations and pictures are not the best but also not the worst.

I think the game is really unfinished. What really bothers me: Its slow in itself. Laggy gameflow. The characters has nothing unique.

But it has much potential. But if you want to play a similiar game play Lab Rats 2

SunSity 2.15, sandbox game that avoid every hassle that define what sandbox game is great at.

Because my last two progress is clicked away and closed the review box, I will make this more concise to avoid any meaningless typing.

Gameplay, it's hassle to navigate, having an option to place that you can't do anything yet, talking and grinding mindless and soulless sex bot, forgetting which option was on, or making a priority.

Beside that, it's a great sandbox game.

Mechanics, dev should learn how to threading.

Storywise, 501 Not Implemented.

Scene, yes.

In summary, I was about giving this game 3 stars but then I felt bad for the other game which is also in this platform and also a sandbox. So, this has to be done to be objective.