Ren'Py - The Simpsons Dating Sim [v0.11.0 BugFix] [SaltyStupidFish]

[v0.10.4]

I'd like to address the claims made by previous reviewer first:

1. The quest log is pretty clear, if it says talk to a girl, when you only see a prompt to take her on a date and you can't figure out what to do - that's on you brother.
2. There is a little bit of a extra side content that you have to explore on your own, but it's just a few scenes and interactions, most of the stuff is described in the quest log.
3. You no longer need to shower (thank God).
4. The "shitty husband" trope is only used so far with Homer (maybe also Barney, if we count the side content), I mean he wasn't a cheat in the original, but he wasn't a good husband either, so I think it's fine.

Premise: the game starts with our protagonist, who is a friend of the Simpsons family, being framed for his father's murder and sent to jail. Then after a while he's released after being proven innocent and now lives in Bart's room, who's in jail for a different crime. Now you go to school to a class for adults, make connections around the town and ultimately try to solve the case of your father. There is a decent amount of content already, tho it's nowhere near the finish line within the narrative.

Writing:
Most females are going to be all over MC as if he was Apollo incarnate, so there is not much conquering that you have to do. The writing for story, characters and their relationships is mostly comedic in nature, if I had to give and estimate, it would be like 70% comedy and 30% serious. The humor is ok, not cringe, but didn't make me laugh either. And as it stands, relationships rarely go further than puddle-deep, so romance enjoyers will most likely be starving. I mean, to be expected from a Simpsons parody, but there is "DATING SIM" in the title so....

Erotic content:
Sex scenes are pretty short and generally feature very minimal dialogue. There are quite a lot of them already. The animations can range from pretty good to pretty silly. No sounds or music, the action is completely silent.

Miscellaneous:

• The game is a point&click sandbox with stats and money, yet there is very little grind and navigation's very solid, definitely not a click-fest.
• The visuals are pretty nice, definitely on a higher end for cartoon-style illustrations.
• The time skipping is pretty arbitrary, some interaction may do that, some not, it's not always clear which are which. Also some actions may skip to the next day, when it's doens't make sense for them to do so, e.g. a simple conversation.
• The textbox if fully opaque and is in the way of the sex scenes. It's tiring having to constantly press MMB/H to see things.

I'm kinda torn between 3 and 4 stars here, will give 4 in advance and wish the author will pay more attention to "dating sim" part of their game in the future updates.

It's okay. I wish it was more than okay.

Pros:
- Charming art. It's not the best, it's not consistent, but it works well for the property.
- Decent amount of love interests. Very early in the game but there's a good amount of iconic Simpson ladies to interact with.
- Attention to characters (to a degree) aligns with what's known about them and adjusts it for the VN.

Cons:
- DESPERATELY needs a clear quest guide. Things like "Just speak to [insert character here] when they don't have a "talk" prompt just isn't enough. I'd rather a game drag you to your next interaction than not say anything at all.
- Very easy to miss out on new content because there's nothing telling you that there's new content.
- Shower system ruins the flow of interactions and feels like a way to extend playtime. Would rather that interactions be tied to the day/night cycle than having to shower after a set amount of moves every single time.
- Your common "hot MC casually makes the husband looks like shit" trope. Not against conquering every woman in a VN, just think a believable story for the husband not being around would work better.

Overall, it's not a bad game. It just needs the pain-points to be reworked as to not ruin the flow of the game.

Review of the early v.0.4.

I did NOT go into this with high expectations. Marge being one of my favorite cartoon moms of all time looking like she came out of Season 1 in the previews didn't give me much hope.

Then I actually played the game. For an early version, wow is there a fair bit of content in the game. With this being a sandbox style game, it's hard to say how much of the content I've actually seen that exists in it, but so far you have quite a bit of story with Marge plus a handjob, a date and sex with Edna plus a little with the other girls in the story as well. Kept me playing for well over an hour.

And the best thing is how grind-free it is. You have to do simple tasks like going to the store to get milk, buff up your stats and so forth, but once you get going it's quite easy to find these objectives and to proceed with the game.

It lives up to the name "Dating Sim" in which you actually do date the ladies in the sense that you build up you relationship with them naturally and gradually and the reward can be awesome.

Only real issue here would be the art style. The dev is definitely still an amateur in a lot of regards, and sometimes the models looking like they came out of an early Simpsons season may be jarring if your mind is trained on the standard style The Simpsons uses these days.

Solid 3 star game, but I gave it a fourth for not adding Patreon exclusive scenes and content starting out.

Currently there isn't much to this game, the RPG elements seems like an after thought and you can only hook up with one character as of writing this.
The art is pretty poor and animations are just a 3 to 6 frames loop and there aren't many of them,
Overall 2/5 but when more hook ups are available (I mean a lot more) I can probably bump this up to a 3/5.

This game has great potential. Good art and not too grindy, I really hope that you can deepen your relationship with the characters in future versions.

I guess one negative is that the updates are kind of short, but it has still gotten updated pretty frequently so far.