VN - Ren'Py - The Survival of Sarah Rose [v0.9.9.9] [HappyDaedalus]

So, I played Sarah Rose a few years ago. It had a charming art, intriguing story, lots of choices and, it's consistent and authors clearly made some groundwork developing setting.

Going back to it, the game clearly expanded in width (in all senses), but not necessary in depth. First of all, style has changed and not to the best. There are a few of them actually, the original one (better one) seems to be replaced by ugly (AI generated?) art with small heads and weird body proportions. Another style is western and totally different from game's presentation. It's a mess.

Another problem are routs: there are a LOT of them. Which could be a plus, but the problem is: authors are firmly against merging or ending them, and also almost every choice spawns a new route, so... If you want to play the game when it gets completed, there are some bad news for you - it never will. There's an exponential bloat as a part of overall gamedesign: a lot of content is added, but if you don't go after every route you might not see it, and each update adds even more work...

Definitely impressive in scope and has a few hot scenes, but is it really worse to read all of it? Probably not.

As of 0.9.9.9 Sarah Rose is more impressive than good, if that makes sense. There's a hundred branching paths and if one day the majority of them reach a satisfactory amount of content and cohesion then this becomes pretty amazing. Right now though, the game is extremely wide but shallow, with only a couple distinct routes feeling good.

One thing that must get sorted out is the art. There's like 4 different art styles that we randomly jump between. Some stills are great, some bad, some are just okay but at least very expressive, the AI ones are kind of blurry and soulless. But just.. pick one. Ideally not the AI one but if you gotta use it then at least keep it consistent.

Also on the art, there isn't quite enough of it. Stills get reused a lot. An entire lewd scene might just have one still. You'll often a still of Sarah with a dick in her mouth or getting fucked while the text is still building up to the lewd scene, the action shouldn't have even started yet.

QOL features like a Gallery and some sort of in-game guide or pointers to different paths would be appreciated. One of the deepest paths, the Mage path, is reliant on you picking "Scream" when attacked. You basically accidentally fall into it. There's too much content out there that's way too easy to miss. We shouldn't need to rely on a million replays and a fan guide to see everything available.

I am this type of almost invisble member of the community. A shy reader that is confident in his criteria. I have played countless games and laughed at thousands of your post and comments, admiring most of the times the ability to resume with concise words a several hours novel. Most of my collection is based on brainy reviews. But there is big amount of my favorite games that i have discovered following this lines: "Unnecesary reading", "Too much text". Maybe cause im a divorced 46 years old fuck who has spent all his life reading the spanish classics, maybe because i like the plot to grow as a rhizome, maybe because im a pedantic bastard i love this novel. Even if i dislike ai cg its a 5 stars game.

I wont say anything else but give it a try.

I'm giving this game 2 stars. The story is really good, with many twists and plenty of choices, but there's a lot of unnecessary text, and while some images are decent, others are clearly AI-generated. This is based on Version 0.8.9.9.

The Good:
-The story is the best part; it's very varied, and the protagonist can be and do many different things.

-Some story arcs (which are already complete) are very well developed.

The Bad:
-Too much unnecessary text, a lot of filler that leads nowhere. It could all be simplified.

-The same image is repeated many times, making everything feel more repetitive.

-Again, too much text—so much that it's unbearable.

-There's no gallery.

-I'm not sure if I already said it, but too much text.

In summary, if you love to read and read, and keep on reading, this is your game. But if you don't want to waste a lot of time, just hit "Skip," and you'll still understand just as much, or more or less.

A hugely disappointing game.
Based on the rating I expected the game to be great, but I simply couldn't enjoy it.
It is one of those rare cases when bigger and more does not equal better.
Sure, the game has A LOT of branches and choices, and those choices are really meaningfull. But the problem is that as a result many branches feel very shallow and not well developed (at least those three I played).
Also, people blame AI art, but here supposedly a real human being (or probably several) has been making the pictures, but the result is below mediocre. Many pictures are plain ugly, the female characters on many of them are often unattractive, and yet still all the time it is felt that more pictures are needed for the events that are happening.

Maybe this developer is just not for me since I hated his other game about aliens, but I simply cannot justify this game having any rating above 3 stars.

Great Visual Novel with a lesbian path! The art is very nice and the strory is deep. The choices make sense and you can follow significantly different paths. The only issue for me is that while there is nice erotic content at the beginning of the story, the erotic content thins out at the end. It would have been nuicer to keep it spicy throughout. But still, very nice work overall!

The makings of a truly 5 star story - lots of branches and plenty of lovely art. Minus one star for the jarring change in art halfway through certain paths, including one with a fiverr watermark still on it. I get it, it was terrible artwork completely out of context for the rest of the story but this would be one of those cases where a placeholder or wall of plain text might be an improvement.

That said, I added the one star back for the amazing amount of content and dialogue, clear and interesting love interest and branches etc. In this case the story made up for the visuals which I assume will eventually get replaced. Keep it up, I foresee a brilliant finished product because it already has a handful of complete endings!

I don't know how I feel about this art style being changed. Sarah just looks bland now with less detail on herself and the others. The older art had way more detail to it with the shadings of her hair, the blemishes from everything to her top to feet. I'm assuming it changed to allow for quicker updates to the game? I feel like this game has lost its quality over quantity aspect.

Now I'm not claiming to be a professional in art styles, but from my consumer point of view, it just looks boring, less personality and just outright lazy. I'm not criticizing the game, in fact I really love this game and want to see it work its way up to completion. It just hurts that developers from time to time have to make detrimental sacrifices towards the game and the people will just have to deal with it. The story is decent at least.

I'd rather have to wait for months or even a year for something special, than faster updates with less quality.

It would be nice to see Dom-Paths of Sarah... It's always being a sub here and there and just 2 endings i think, where she comes out as a strong woman. I even hoped to see some brother-sister love Or she being the queen doing some orgies etc. ^^

The game itself is very well-made. Story-wise its a 8,5/10. The art is okay, maybe a 8/10. I like the diversity of fetishes in it 9/10.

Since it's not fully done yet, i hope to see some dom-paths and another fetishes.

Wish you a good success further dev

The story is great, you have a lot of different fetishes depending on your tastes and can avoid scenes that don't fit the story you wish for.
you can have romance/toxic romance/humiliation/lesbian/monster/...
all depending on your tastes, and you even have the option to get revenge on a specific hateful character.
so if you like stories and reading, it is great, if you don't like that and want just straight up porn i think you can knock down a star or two

The story could be good, but at the end there was way too much text for me, even for a visual novel. Between the "choices" were 3 to 5 minutes of pure text skipping, which are clearly not my cup of tea.
Art is also all over the place, from very basic comic styles (not shown in the screenshots) up to quite detailed illustrations. It feels like multiple artists working at that game, everyone with their own style because nobody can decide on one style.

I would rate it a 4 if the art didn't keep randomly changing each scene. It's really too inconsistent and keeps bringing me out of immersion, which is a shame because there was a time I enjoyed reading through this game.

That said, if it does get finished and retouched in the future and becomes consistent it's going to be one of the best games in this site. It's a complete VN, that's actually written to have a story and not an excuse to get the mc pregnant.

VN done right. You get to choose your adventure hardcore, visuals are on point and the topics the game touches are actually somewhat interesting(surprising for a porn game).

As always you gotta ask yourself why play a porn game instead of A)play a game B)Have sex or watch porn, and this one has compelling reasons to sink teeth into.

The plot is really intriguing in some places, but at the same time it is quite predictable.

But you could close your eyes to this if the game did not jump from style to style, it looks very terrible and ruins the whole atmosphere.
Bed scenes suffer from the same problem, which is critical for a game of this genre.

Now I would recommend this at most for familiarization and wait for the full release so as not to play a mishmash.

I recently played v3.9.9 of The Survival of Sarah Rose, which follows the story of Sarah Rose, the princess of Rosanna. In the game, your decisions shape her journey, leading to various outcomes like the "Royalty Paths," "Adventuring Paths," and even the "Slave Paths." I mostly stuck with the "Adventuring Paths," especially the "Mage Apprentice Path," and I was hooked right from the start. The story and subplots are set in a dark fantasy world, and they’re really well written.

I usually don’t go for games with female protagonists because a lot of them treat the main character like a cumbag for all the monsters and jerks to abuse. While this game has its share of those types of characters, it also has genuinely nice and likeable ones like Varga, Vaelen, and my favorite, “best girl” Samayra. My favorite part, hands down, is the yuri/lesbian content—it’s really well done, whether it’s Sarah X Kate or Sarah X Samayra. Though, I’d love to see more scenes where Sarah takes on a more dominant role. Most of the time, she’s portrayed as submissive.

When it comes to the art, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. It’s clear multiple artists were involved, and the early styles are noticeably different from the later ones. Personally, I prefer the later style, but overall, the art fits the game well and is pretty solid.

Overall, TSoSR is a solid game, and I’m excited to see how it evolves from here!

Great production values, solid plot and beautiful visuals, let down by the author's verbal diarrhea and love for complicating simple situations.

As I was playing along, the balance between "oh, beautiful" and "this is so annoying" increasingly shifted towards annoying. Holding the skip button helped for a while, until I reached the point I really couldn't be arsed anymore.

On the first glance it looks good and very abmbitious. I would even say overly ambitious, there are too many paths, and within those paths there are even more paths. I'm afraid this game won't be finished until 2030+

I'm honestly not understanding the hype. I was drawn in with the splendid artwork in the screenshots... but what you see there is basically all you get. There are mountains of text between H scenes, and the H scenes are limited to 1-2 CG's with more mountains of text. I couldn't even be bothered going back and holding ctrl to find all the scenes (no gallery either). It's not a game you can get off to, which means it has no business being an H game. I didn't find the story particularly engaging either, with 0 interesting characters presented right up to the 1st big choice.

Edit 4.9.9 : now after new updates they are remaking everything into Ai, the style is now really unattractive to me, the lighting is wrong and traces over the Ai which are the only excuse of a reason they are still denying they are doing it look pretty amateur and the opposite of sensual. is a shame really story was interesting and there were many possibilities, full lesbian routes, the teasing of incest, ruling leaving, corruption, purity etc but quality and HONESTY about using Ai matters a lot more than quantity

Old review 2.9.9 :It may sound like a joke but i literally played this erotic game for the plot.

there's many routes, so far I'm more invested in the princess one

The writing is good, some jokes made me laugh and some events made me feel things, only problem here is if something, environmental descriptions can be dragged to much between narrated actions.

the erotic in the princess route is quite low but is the story that more has me invested, only complain from my perverted heart is that i wish there was the incest option with thomas, my sweet Alabama deserves good representation and a kingdom setting fits perfectly.

the mayor unpleasaness you will find is the constant change of drawing style and styling of background places sometimes makes paranoid that is all IA, i wish to see an style get uniformed or at least things like accessories and background places fixed into the written description because otherwise it really hinders immersion, example of this is sarah suddenly having a differently crown when inviting lily into the room, sarah balcony looking architecturally very differently in every art style, or a modern businessman seated in the counsil room for no reason when disscusing the letter of the rumandi queen.

i wish to see that image coungrity fixed at least if the art style cannot be uniformed and i sure hope there's no IA being used, until sure i will refrain from buying but i truly endorse anyone to play this, mostly for the plot