v0.1.0.2:
First off I have to mention that this is the first entry in Michele's "The Vampire World" series I've played myself. I have watched someone stream parts of "Nobilium" with an italian accented TextToSpeech addon for renpy before, which was frankly hilarious, so I thought I'd give it a go with this one. Sadly I am a troglodyte when it comes to these things so I was only able to play "Sofia's Life" with the standard built-in TTS of renpy. You can activate it by pressing [v] at any point in the game and I highly recommend you do it.
Writing:
As I mentioned, I haven't played any of the other games in the series, so I went in fully expecting there to be things and contexts I wouldn't get immediately and would have to pick up along the way. That being said, virtually everything is just thrown at the players. Neither the Characters nor the setting or situations are properly introduced to the player.
Now a lot of what I'm going to say about the characters or the plot has to come with the note that the grammar and spelling are downright atrocious and barely more understandable than a slightly edited MTL, so I may be misunderstanding the author's intentions entirely.
The characters are wildly inconsistent and, for me personally, completely unlikable without exception. This starts off with a character (Donny) going off on how he'd want to bang the female lead (Sofia) and the moment she wants to have sex he's suddenly staunchly loyal to his wife and seemingly upset at even the implication... and goes to random characters fighting one moment, seemingly trying to off each other and starting to randomly fuck the next moment.
The story is best just summed up as: "Stuff just happens" Since virtually nothing about the background, character motivations or the setting is introduced, there is basically no telling why things happen and why characters do what they do. They just... do things.
Audio:
This was a surprisingly big part of the unintentional comedy in the entire experience. Overall the soundtrack is... fine. It's your standard indie porn VN fare with no real surprises. This changes with the -clearly- unironic use of sexy.mp3 (you know which) for the sex scenes and the hilarious use of animal sounds.
The first instance of this really caught me by surprise. As our heroine, Sofia, roars angrily at some other character, the sound of a lion roar resounds... only it doesn't stop there. The dev actually used an uncut sound file of about 3 minutes length that devolves further and further into grunting noises as time goes on... it's brilliant.
Later on, as other characters "roar", another sound sample is used (at different loop times for each character... also a very amusing choice) but this one is distinctly less impressive and due to the way it's looped it's hard to tell whether it's an actual lion or the sound of a lawnmower starting up.
Visuals:
I don't like knocking developers for their choice in engines, tools, or visual medium as long as it doesn't go against basic logic (like using an engine entirely unsuited to the type of game they're making) and there are games that are using Sims 4 screenshots in interesting and enjoyable ways. This, sadly, isn't one of them and will probably forever be brought up as an argument against using them at all.
A lot more could be said here, but I'm generally more interested in writing than in visuals so I'll just leave it at that. You can look at the screenshots in the thread yourself, what you see is essentially what you get.
Final thoughts and score:
It would be very easy to just call this a steaming pile of low effort garbage but I think that would be an unfair assessment of the situation. I know for a fact that michele puts a lot of time and effort into what he creates. This is more a sad case of effort directed in entirely the wrong direction. A case of a dev so convinced of their own abilities that all effort goes towards making more of the same instead of getting better at it and actually honing those abilities.
That being said, I did have a lot of fun with this experience. Just probably not for the reasons the creator of the work intended and in large parts due to the added comedic value of the Text-To-Speech. So you may consider my final score both a genuine reflection of my experience as well as somewhat of an intelligence test for those who choose to just skim over my review.
3/5
First off I have to mention that this is the first entry in Michele's "The Vampire World" series I've played myself. I have watched someone stream parts of "Nobilium" with an italian accented TextToSpeech addon for renpy before, which was frankly hilarious, so I thought I'd give it a go with this one. Sadly I am a troglodyte when it comes to these things so I was only able to play "Sofia's Life" with the standard built-in TTS of renpy. You can activate it by pressing [v] at any point in the game and I highly recommend you do it.
Writing:
As I mentioned, I haven't played any of the other games in the series, so I went in fully expecting there to be things and contexts I wouldn't get immediately and would have to pick up along the way. That being said, virtually everything is just thrown at the players. Neither the Characters nor the setting or situations are properly introduced to the player.
Now a lot of what I'm going to say about the characters or the plot has to come with the note that the grammar and spelling are downright atrocious and barely more understandable than a slightly edited MTL, so I may be misunderstanding the author's intentions entirely.
The characters are wildly inconsistent and, for me personally, completely unlikable without exception. This starts off with a character (Donny) going off on how he'd want to bang the female lead (Sofia) and the moment she wants to have sex he's suddenly staunchly loyal to his wife and seemingly upset at even the implication... and goes to random characters fighting one moment, seemingly trying to off each other and starting to randomly fuck the next moment.
The story is best just summed up as: "Stuff just happens" Since virtually nothing about the background, character motivations or the setting is introduced, there is basically no telling why things happen and why characters do what they do. They just... do things.
Audio:
This was a surprisingly big part of the unintentional comedy in the entire experience. Overall the soundtrack is... fine. It's your standard indie porn VN fare with no real surprises. This changes with the -clearly- unironic use of sexy.mp3 (you know which) for the sex scenes and the hilarious use of animal sounds.
The first instance of this really caught me by surprise. As our heroine, Sofia, roars angrily at some other character, the sound of a lion roar resounds... only it doesn't stop there. The dev actually used an uncut sound file of about 3 minutes length that devolves further and further into grunting noises as time goes on... it's brilliant.
Later on, as other characters "roar", another sound sample is used (at different loop times for each character... also a very amusing choice) but this one is distinctly less impressive and due to the way it's looped it's hard to tell whether it's an actual lion or the sound of a lawnmower starting up.
Visuals:
I don't like knocking developers for their choice in engines, tools, or visual medium as long as it doesn't go against basic logic (like using an engine entirely unsuited to the type of game they're making) and there are games that are using Sims 4 screenshots in interesting and enjoyable ways. This, sadly, isn't one of them and will probably forever be brought up as an argument against using them at all.
A lot more could be said here, but I'm generally more interested in writing than in visuals so I'll just leave it at that. You can look at the screenshots in the thread yourself, what you see is essentially what you get.
Final thoughts and score:
It would be very easy to just call this a steaming pile of low effort garbage but I think that would be an unfair assessment of the situation. I know for a fact that michele puts a lot of time and effort into what he creates. This is more a sad case of effort directed in entirely the wrong direction. A case of a dev so convinced of their own abilities that all effort goes towards making more of the same instead of getting better at it and actually honing those abilities.
That being said, I did have a lot of fun with this experience. Just probably not for the reasons the creator of the work intended and in large parts due to the added comedic value of the Text-To-Speech. So you may consider my final score both a genuine reflection of my experience as well as somewhat of an intelligence test for those who choose to just skim over my review.
3/5
