VN - Ren'Py - TableTop BornStar [v0.85] [Basilicata]

v0.85

Round 56, still a waitress that does mildly lewd things on occasion. Still counts as a virgin too.
Yawn.

This game suffers greatly from the core gameplay it is designed around.
The board game style is a neat idea, but this is a visual novel segmented to match it. Which really just chops a story up and puts annoying mechanics in between.

Unfortunately my patience ran out. Consumed by the filler of everything between the more interesting scenes.

The AI voices need an off button too. Separate from sounds.

The art was good though.

fantastic game, if you like this kind of art style, semi realistc semi comics, then it's a must play.
the story is also very interesting, i never felt the need to skip a dialog.
the animations and sex scenes are hot and well done, which for me is a plus compared to a game like gggb.

for sure there's not really a pornstar content like suggested by the tittle, nevertheless the hot stuff is there.

i choose to be nice with the girl and, at my surprise, the whole stuff felt like a romantic comedy. which is not bad.
dunno what happens if you decide to be a jerk.

5 stars minimum, the girls is hot, the renders and art style are top quality,
the story is engaging and never cringe or strange.

also the dev pushed the detail level high. for exemple each woman has a different pussy, different pussy lips, and they are well drawed.

when mostly seeing those badly made and unrealistic, unapealing, non engaging, plastic looking, vaginas from daz models in almost every games, btw they are all the same, one model, always the same , well seeing real well made and diverse ones in this game is a nice surprise.

no seriously this is a high skill level required game. bravo i'm bluffed by the quality.
highly recommanded.

very fun games 9/10 but i wish i get 3 thing more though
1. modification boobs , hair , outfit
2. unlimited round cheat / i understand round progress story , but i'm kind of guy who level up to all max before last boss if you know what i mean
3. get it on steam i would love to support game i enjoy but i hate subscription model

The art is the main strong point. It's unique, memorable, and somehow fits the theme.

The game mechanics are novel but not particularly fun. Really it just adds RNG to the otherwise common "choose stats to grind each day."

The writing is coherent and has plenty of smut and humor, but neither the characters nor the plot are particularly deep. It's hard to really be invested in what the characters do or what happens in the story.

The game has some major flaws in basic technical features: it lacks a proper replay gallery, and restricts the number of saves to 25 pages. Combined with the RNG and event system, it's annoyingly difficult to go back and replay different paths, and when you do you quickly run out of saves if you want to also be able to replay the events you've already gotten.

Overall: 3/5 - I've seen this game on F95 for a while, but I kept passing it by. I finally saw that it had a lot of tags and reviews, so I decided to give it a try. I'll say that the game isn't what I expected, in both positive and negative aspects. It's got some good entertainment value, but ultimately, the game is a grind-fest due to it being a game of chance where very little progress can be made on each turn, and the rewards aren't proportional to the time and effort needed (assuming you don't cheat).

Story: 4/5 - It's full of Hollywood stereotypes, even the story itself is a Hollywood stereotype (young aspiring actress from the Midwest moves to LA and gets lured into more sleazy work to survive while she's waiting for her big break). Still, it flows and is somewhat interesting, especially if you're old enough to remember the late 90's.

Writing: 5/5 - The English writing is top-tier for adult games.

Art/Renders: 3/5 - The comic-book like art is OK, but the models really aren't that attractive. I do think the artist is doing a better job than most 2D artists at making the models look consistent from different angles.

Animations: 3/5 - They're all low frame-rate, some use a weird combination of sprites for movement. Maybe it's supposed to fit with the art style, but I'm just not a fan. One animation that's worth noting is the movement of the game-piece around the board, with sound. It's a nice touch that provides a real board-game feel.

Content: 4/5 - There's a decent amount of content and lewd content in the game. A lot of the lewd content is done through characters (usually Mary Jane) telling a story to the MC or another character, which is OK for a novel, but kind of unsatisfying for a porn game. It's strange because most of these scenes could be shown as events during each play instead of flashbacks at the end of a "round", but I guess since the MC isn't there when they happen, the author wanted it to make sense of how the MC knows about these events. Honestly, it kind of feels like the game was conceived for a female MC.

Gameplay: 2/5 - The fundamentals of the "board game" design are pretty good, but that's kind of where the pros of gameplay end for me. Here's a summary of what is likely to be a turnoff for other players:

• The game is a huge grind. There's too much left to random chance, and too little progress can be made in each round. Random chance on a board game has no appeal without an opponent that is also at the mercy of random chance.
• The game has way too many stats (some stats are displayed in the UI all the time, some stats can be viewed only at the end of some rounds, and some stats are always invisible). Most events are dependent on stats reaching specific values, but there's no way to know when stats are high enough to either trigger a new event or to successfully complete an event.
• The randomness of side stories is doubled since the side stories are randomly added to a space on the board at the beginning of a round and then the player must land on that space from a random roll of the dice.
• In addition to the board game play, there are also some visual-novel-style choices. These mostly affect invisible stats and they can have serious consequences, but you don't really know what those consequences are until later. The only way to discover the consequences of each choice is to make a save at the choice and grind through each path, which just isn't worth it.
• I expect the vast majority of players will either use a cheat mod or just constantly save and reload.

Other: I started a new game and got through all of the content through v0.8 in about 5 hours. About 4 of those hours felt like I was bored to death playing solitaire. I felt like I had to write a review after that. Oh, and in case you think you can complete the content and keep grinding your stats so that the next update will be easier...sorry, you can't.

Amazing game. Wow. This is my first time rating in f95zone.
Fantastic art and animation. I didn't expect this good. game is not like in any other game. This is without a doubt one of the must fun experiences

A very solid game.

The biggest drawback for me personally is that I'm not sure the board game mechanic is a good mechanic, since it's such a core pillar of the experience that it's even mentioned in the title, that's a bit of an issue.

There's one other game with somewhat similar mechanics out there, with a girl wanting to get married, and I think it managed to incorporate this whole tabletop angle in a superior fashion. In TTBS, I went through tree phases. In the first phase, hardly anything happened on the board, and it was just a stats grind where I was at the mercy of where the dice took me. In the second phase, there were quite a few events on the board (not on the same day, mind you), but whether I could trigger them depended on the luck of the dice. In the final phase, hardly anything happened on the board, and I was back to grinding stats.
Speaking of stats, they're implemented in the worst kind of way, with open ceiling stats you grind without ever knowing how far you need to take the grinding. And apart from those singular events, nothing happens in the board game phase of each round/day, you just visit the same places and pick the same options. Only after the day concluded, sometimes there's a new mini story told in the day's synopsis phase, sometimes there is not.
The point being, the board game phase is mostly boring and feels a tad superficial.

Now, on to the story itself, it's decent enough in my opinion (everything is far from finished, of course, this being a wip), varied characters which come across as reasonably believable in the scenarios featuring them.
It's still a game of it's genre, mind you, but does a very good job not being too "out there". Definitely a plus in my book.
With the caveat that the boardgame phases make everything feel a little bit disjointed.

The art is probably not everyone's cup of tea, but a tremendous upgrade to the authors last game (and I didn't think it was terrible there either, it's just much improved now - hats off to you Basilicata.
I, for one, quite like the style, another plus for me. Animations are limited, but well realized as far as the engine allows, and there's many little details that improve the overall feel of the game. Good stuff.

The AI voicovers are a big of a mixed bag, as is the music, but I felt it fit the mood of the game well, no complaints there.

Final verdict, a good game with the potential to become a great one.
And a definitive improvement to the already solid previous title.
Hope this one reaches the finish line and we'll see further games by this author down the line.

Very fun game!! Its pretty lite-hearted, optimistic, and a generally 'happy story' with a fairly unique concept (managing one or more rising stars). The MC doesn't feel like a goody-goody, a total tool, a chad, or anything else that would get in the way of emphasizing with him. There is a romantic thread that feels pretty sweet and actually kinda pulls you in.

So, pros:

* The graphics are good (you can see them) and show a lot of consistency of that quality level. They're not 'I'm gonna print them out and post them to a wall behind a frame' but just about everything gets a graphic and they're nice

* Engaging - I actually played all the way through tot he end of the version (0.6) and it sucked me in with the 'one-more-turn' syndrome

* Fun characters - each feels fairly unique (at least the main-ish ones) and you kinda wanna see how all of them play out

* Good story - you really feel like you're watching the rise of a career - between the early points (just side-jobs) to casting calls, to a red-carpet party and a stage debut. There's an 'evil antagonist' that you wanna stick it to and some side-romance characters for both the MC and the Rising Star, all the while not really feeling like NTR (though some cheating on the MC's part is available)

The meh..

* The board-game style really encourages save-scumming. You have an incentive to hit every landmark at least once per go-around (its what 'maybe' triggers something to happen), there are minimum values for some options (and its very hard to 'go back and redo' if you're under them so you kinda wanna just maximize them on every go-around to get the 'hot / good scenes', with no real incentive to be under those values / no alternate 'hot scenes because your numbers were low'), the possible rolls vary greatly, and there is little control beyond 1-2 re-rolls allowed per go-around. Something like 'fate-dice' or earning skills to manipulate the rolls more specifically would've really helped

* There are finite save-slots... 4 instead of the normal 6 renpy per page, and 25 pages max instead of the renpy 'infinite'. Just... kind of a strange choice, not really sure why a limit was fixed. Especially as the game doesn't seem to have a gallery-unlock mode to go back to your fave unlocked scenes and re-watch them, and the afore-mentioned issue of scenes being hidden behind 'minimum values' that you may need to go back and try to re-do (tedious, but more tedious then restarting - the game is too long to play more then once-through per version)

* Hot stuff.. there's totally some, its hot, but its kinda brief and intermittent, to the point where it almost surprises you when it happens. Feels like the game could really benefit from more 'sexy random events', especially early on, especially as some rounds nothing-happens (even if you hit every key spot) which feels like a let-down

* Summary-only events.. I kinda get it but it leaves you with a bit of unnecessary trepidation of waiting to get to the end to see if 'anything fun happened'. It might be nicer to just have events happen as you hit them on the board instead of breaking up the experience

* Dance animation... ok, its pretty funny, I'll give it that, especially the Star's initial dancing moves. Not 'hot' funny, just.. oh renpy animation... oh my... The effort is cute

* The 'spoiled' mechanic, and some others (like 'luck') are fairly poorly explained (what gets it, what risks it, what loses it, how to improve things). The 'spoiled' part especially stands out because plots can strongly hinge on Star's state there, but she'll just suddenly jump to spoiled from a single seemingly innocuous choice, and it becomes really hard (and confusing) to change it back

* The 'jealousy' flag is also a bit weird... I get it.. but also slightly weird given the Star plays around with various girls and no one bats an eye over it. And especially at high corruption it feels like open-relationships / poly would become a possible path where she wouldn't be 'jealous' anymore..

* Hard to tell when some stories drop off or what retriggers them. Some things happen and then just... stop. Eg. the fight ring plot, the porn store plot. Others change suddenly and end plots - like the job at the bistro when the character takes the stripper job (feels like she could work both). Feels like the game might benefit for a button that will let you know which stories are still playing out in [this version] and what the triggers might be for those plots to continue (is it on specific turns, do you need to reach certain values, is there a randomness component and what impacts it...).

Anyway. Overall yea, totaly try it out, support it, its one of the more unique games on here, and I'm curious to see more!

Holy shit this game is amazing.

Would appreciate the ability to see the hidden stats; the pathways are too obscured and not easily re-approached if you've made an unknowing misstep but man, what a fantastic game in every other way.

Fantastic art and animation, wonderfully period correct world design, rewarding and dramatic gameplay loop, perfectly curt and meaningful dialogue, GREAT characters, believable corruption of a well thought out and properly explored subject and just a fun idea all around.

Begging for a slutty path that includes implants/extreme bimbofication in future updates. If she can become a porn star, let's make her the most porn-stariest porn star ever.

I love the implant details in the art BTW, you can clearly see the (admittedly small) implants in some of these worn out sluts and it's awesome. So many little details like that.

tl;dr: fresh formula and setting, quite unique art style and well written, slow corruption - absolutely worth a try.

Whenever I come across a game with good writing and a sensible and coherent plot, I almost feel obliged to leave a review. This is such a case.

I was somewhat surprised to be honest, the concept seems odd at first glance and the art style is not like in any other game. However, you get used to both the unusual gameplay, as well as the way characters are portrayed quickly.
It is an immersive game, the dialogue usually does not overstay its welcome and the gameplay is quite fast paced all things considered. This cannot be said about the corruption of the main LI, which I welcome. It is a slow burn, realistic (for a porn game) and feels natural and authentic with the gameplay loop.
Sure, ideally you want to save scum to not end up bankrupt by round 5 like probably most players that try a run for the first time. But I think in this case it's fine, I feel like the game allows for the player to choose their "difficulty" by allowing to save and load whenever (great renpy integration) so I would say it's by concept.
Sex scenes are thrown in here and there, at the current build (0.57) there is some hot and wet action with MJ included as well, which is satisfying.

The only thing I wish would be improved is transparency. I am not sure what exactly influences whether MJ is becoming spoiled, friendly etc. (how many routes/personalities are there?) There are pop ups that tell me that I am on a certain route, but at no point is there an explanation or hint what routes there are or what influences them. At some point I have been told that I am now on the MJ Reserved route. I don't really know what that means, as on the board it still says Spoiled. Is her demeanor going to be more reserved now, as apposed to open and adventurous? Have I "reserved" her for myself, as in a monogamy route? What does the star mean next to their Spoiled/Friendly status? Can there be more stars? What exact influence does the raise in expenses have after a shopping tour? Is she going to be more spoiled and bratty? Will the (hidden) love stat decrease when I object?
I'm not asking to have everything explained by the dev beforehand, I just feel like there are too many unknowns and at least some aspects of the background mechanics should be mentioned and hinted at before they suddenly appear. I like for example that after some time there is an overview of some stats on the PC monitor.
After finishing the current build the dev actually explains a very important point on how we can influence MJ by our decisions, I feel like this could have been hinted at a little earlier, since it would have obviously made me rethink certain decisions.

In summary, this was an enjoyable game with a surprisingly catchy soundtrack and likeable characters and an engaging story. Even the AI voices that seemed cringe in the beginning grew on me, I feel like it's a smart idea to have included those. They are actually less cringe than most amateur VAs but still give life to the characters.
I wish the dev all the best and hope he keeps updating this game, I will follow the process closely.

Well written, interesting mechanics. I'm a bit disappointed on replay though, because a lot of the choices and stats seemed shallower than I'd expected. Still, that happens in much bigger budget games as well, so it's hard to hold that against it.

The idea is original: a board game and a dice.
Resources and abilities are also required to progress in the story and to unlock scenes.
The graphic style is interesting, it reminds me some comics.
BGM are good too.
Nice nods to the 90's !

Man! Really unique concept and artwork! The randomness in each round can be quite fun provided there is steady pace of events. Also, if there can be an autosave before each round (or a quicksave option), that will be really helpful!

I really feel like I want to rate this game higher because the story is interesting enough and the characters look good.
But the gameplay is just so horrible.
It's a porn game within a board game. You have to roll the dice to move around the board and perform various activities to increase MJ's stats.
It becomes a HUGE grind.
I honestly got to the point where I just no longer cared about the story.
Additionally - I can almost guarantee that nobody plays this game without cheating - by saving constantly and then just re-rolling the dice over and over until you get the nu ber you want. This game is an insane grind even with cheating. If someone were to play this and not cheat and just go with whatever the dice come up as - this game then becomes the grindiest of all grinding games that have ever existed.

Version 0.5
This game really got me hooked. The slow corruption is perfectly done and the quit unsual gameplay really turns out to be a great asset. I can only speak for my run (several hours in and currently at round 60 - inlcuding a little bit of save scumming) but the built up works out just fine and since a lot of the scenes you get to see are tied to the places you visited I never got the feeling that I was just a passenger.
The art style is also great and I really like the way it gets lewder at just the right pace.
Overall a really pleasant surprise and I hope for a lot of updates and additions like longer animations in the future.

Also I really like all the references to 1999 culture. Made me laugh a couple times and the overall writing and story are really top notch compared to many of the other games here.

Gotta say I really love this title. There's humor, interesting stories, erotic situations, and comic-quality original art to be had while rolling a virtual die to advance Mary Jane, our female talent and primary love interest, across the game board. It may not work for everyone, but I thoroughly enjoy it and expect this to be a very satisfying experience once completed. Hats off to @Basilicata for a really innovative, original game!

Unique tabletop game with an authentic 90s vibe.

The dicerolling mechanic is an interesting idea, although I'm not sure overall it works entirely. At first I mostly accepted the rolls I got (although I did go bankrupt right at the start because I missed the job a few times). Later I started savescumming when I realized I might not have enough stats to hit certain events. So the game's tabletop design clashes a bit with stat requirements for limited events. After I had a ton of money, I really wanted to increase stats more than go to the job again. Still it's a not that difficult to get stats, and it's fun to see something different.

There's a fair amount of content here, with most of it lesbian/corruption for when MJ is on her own and straight that involves MC and other characters. The game also is a bit literary, like literally has scenes with classic texts. So that's unusual too. So maybe you'll learn something! Ha.

I liked the variety of characters and personalities. The MC can be a sleaze but doesn't have to be. And MJ looks so excited when she's happy.

The art seemed a bit weird and the tabletop concept seemed a bit weird so I didn't try this for a long time. However it's excellent and worth a look!

A really great one. It's funny, really - at the first glance this game didn't seem to be my thing. Didn't like the screenshots, but started to dig the artstyle after the first few minutes of playing. The tabletop mechanics seemed odd from the description, but then I loved even the savescumming. The "corruption" tag has never been my thing, but the way it is implemented in this game is simply great - it is not some dirty perverted guy corrupting a dumb chaste hottie, but real believable people.
The main charachters are nice people for a change. Decent, even. The atmosphere is great, the end of 90-ies setting feels really nostalgic.
Thank you for this, looking forward for more.

This is without a doubt one of the must fun experiences I've had playing an adult game. The Tabletop mechanic makes the otherwise repetitive parts of these kinds of games far more fun. I feel like it's always exciting to see what awaits the female protagonist depending on where she lands on the tabletop.

The atmosphere in the game world with the late 90s aesthetics also works perfectly with the overall presentation. Far more unique from what I've played so far.

The graphics are amazing. I love this style since it looks realistic even if it's "hand-drawn".

Last but not least, the humour fits me well and I had a lot of fun with some of the jokes and situations that happens.

One of the most unique job in this cheap porn game industry. Art style, gameplay, storytelling. All of them are good. I really liked this game. And why the fuck i've to write two fucking hundreds characters in my review. That's pointless. I can review a fucking porn game without use that much letter.