HTML - Life Choices [v0.8.8.62] [Burningsun]

The game presents itself as an HTML alternative to Girl Life - a sandbox where you can take whichever path you like.

However, the sandbox is not what it seems to be: your actions are limited by arbitrary stats that make very little sense. I'll give an example:

You can usually work and then go jogging once before your character decides to go back home because her hygiene is low. Has she ever heard of deodorant?

There's millions of people who work and then workout every single day without having to crawl back to their home in shame due to their stink.

There's plenty of silly mechanics like that which will limit what you can do and force you to go back home to fill some stat. On the other hand, you can go for days without eating or drinking water without your character ever talking about it.

The game also features bugs: I have a phone but can't use it at all, maybe because I found it on the ground? For a game that's been in development for almost a decade, that's just unacceptable - that's the kind of things that you patch on version 0.2.

The art is mostly low quality stolen porn gifs, and as with most games of this kind, the characters won't remain consistent between scenes.

The sexual aspect is just as random and arbitrary: for example, I can do topless yoga, but not topless walking in the same area.

All in all, an interesting concept that fails to fulfill what it offers.

Very ambitious sandbox project for a HTML game with plenty* of content.

HOWEVER, you cannot access most of those content even when you met all the STATs REQ and CONDITIONs to trigger. The Dev need to learn to chill with calling random function and nesting if-else statement as consequence of overuse. If you read most of the bugfixes in changelog, it really paint the picture of the dev not able to reproduce bug scenario most of the time. Started in 2016 and still making a major rookie mistake like this is a big yikes.

Career progression need to be shorten by a lot and the hint/tip missed represent how awful long these progression are. For example, the flowershop is not a slow-burn but in fact a dry-burn. To be more clear, all other career paths are slow-burn but they are represented as "quickly pick up the pace". In addition, the game really doesn't need a storyline that is completely lock behind random function call (Adam storyline). Difficulties have any miniscule impact whether you will receive bad or good events to the point it is hardly justify whether difficulties is even necessary.

There are way too many of non-adult events that just revolving round asking players money... Like why? Don't dev understand their game is a RNG grind game? why the f would any player give away money voluntarily???

Meanwhile adult events are lock behind rng function! As long as you don't go to the club get yourself black out drunk, your character will remain as a virgin with 50+ days in game playing legitimately with no bj either. That's SSS rank of insanity for an adult game!

This game on the site since 2016 at the beginning of the game on the HTML engine
The game was interesting. This was the first game where I spent hours exploring the world. There are characteristics, needs like in The Sims. The text and story are well written. BUT for so long, really worthy games appeared on this engine and this game was lost in 2016. Here, too, everyone’s unloved grind. Pumping the heroine and progressing through the plot.
But why this game is abandoned I have an idea. Just like the game is popular Young Maria. These games were the standard for how to write and develop a game. But a strange thing happened and the more content in the game, the developers made their game - bad
I don't even recommend wasting your time on this.

If you respect your time STAY AWAY

It's bad, VERY, bad, I don't understand the high rating this has.
Where to even start?

UI
- not mobile-friendly with 2 tabs to keep track of info.
- Stats that are supposed to be important are under a tab, why?
- Date/time that has little impact takes a huge space
- Pictures that are irrelevant to gameplay but are there just for iMmErSion.

Gameplay
Grindy as in all hell, imagine a Story that stops to require you to play a loopx5 to x10 times before it continues with the next part of the story.

Doesn't respect user time:
The game has a VERY distracting stat called hygiene, which u need to upkeep daily AFAIK it doesn't give you any perks, it is just required to play the game normally, HORRIBLE implementation.

One of the selling points of the game is "corruption" but there is no progression for it or threshold, you can just grind the stat and go from innocent girl to town bike.

The game goes HARD into "life simulator" totally forgetting that it's supposed to be an ADULT GAME first and foremost, that is to say, plenty of smut portrayed in a fun way, this games fail at that. Massively.

Don't take me wrong on paper this game should be fun, but sadly, it is not.

Constant stat juggling and barely anything sex related in a sex game, genuinely fucking awful. Every single job is a constrictive bore that grinds at your patience as much as you grinds for some nebulous points towards the job itself, its just fucking draining. And fun? Forget it, there's none to be found.
Why did looking up makeup tutorials almost never fucking work and suddenly later just full stopped? Why do you have footage of kids in a sex game? The fuck? Gross.

Based on version, v0.8.8.52
A very good game.
A little grindy in the beginning, and still needs a lot of fleshing out to make it a truly wonderful game, but overall a very arousing experience.
The story is pretty typical for a girl's life sim.
In my opinion, there does need to be some more sex based events/jobs though. Let's be honest, nobody plays these games just to have the girl live a normal life, and right now there appears to be very few ways for the girl to proactively look for sex. On the weekends you can go to the club and pick up dudes, but other than that, all I have been able to find is ridding around on the bus all day trying to sell myself. On that note, the jobs start off fine, but keeping them ends up being complicated. The library job and the flower job (if I remember correctly) both require intelligence, but you loose intelligence smoking weed and having sex... so being corrupt makes those jobs exponentially harder to keep. The modeling job will auto fail after a while, so that just leaves the cleaning job (which possibly also requires intelligence, but I can't remember since it's been so long since I've gone that route all the way though. I know it's no a requirement to start it). In addition to this, once your reputation gets so high, at least the modeling and flower job won't even hire you anymore.
What this all boils down to, is that you are kinda doomed to fail after a while of doing the sexy stuff (aka the main point of the game). I'm assuming there is going to be more options with further updates so based on this, my rating isn't too harsh right now. This may sound very critical, but under the assumption that there is going to still be a way to progress, then this is actual really good game design, which would lead to the game not feeling to repetitive.
tl;dr A really good game that not only has a good start, but also has a pretty well designed middle, it just needs an end game
Update for v0.8.8.62
Still an amazing game. not a lot of changes, but that's not all bad. My only complaint is the lack of story. It's a sandbox game so I understand why,, but the more hours I put into the game, the more I want there to be characters and stories I want to interact with. There are some of these things, but they appear to be only linked to jobs and are very repetitive. The sexy stuff has been fleshed out really nicely though.

Here is the game design 101 according to the author:
Grind is king .
If u are a girl, sex is bad and makes u lose iq.
if u refuse the sex u lose your job, enjoy.
Gave it 2 stars just for the effort and the fact that i fapped to it years ago a couple of times.

This is "the" HTML Female sandbox game, ive been following the since 2019, and im sorry burning sun for not supporting you on patreon, im just a guy living in a 3rd world country so money is kinda tight, the reason why im giving this a 5 star because of the improvements the dev has put in the game and the consistent updates, yes the game is grindy and really tedious but i like the build up to the MCs corruption

Never stop Mr Burning-San

Buggy, grindy, and lacking in solid content. Most of the NSFW stuff is just randomly thrown in and there is no effort to have any kind of consistency in the types of women in each scene. There if very little story build up to anything and most of the content is simply unlocked by grinding levels of various attributes. This game is a time sink more than anything and not even an enjoyable one.

6 years ago it made a good start. 6 years pass but they add nothing. "Take wallet or leave it" not a life changing choise. npcs are poor. You dont do anything whit them.
Six years man, its a long time. This game is a waste of time.

I like the content, the "lifesim" is enjoyable to a degree until you meet a wall and you don't seem to be able to progress anymore. Having an event that has X % of chances to pop up in a porn game isn't enjoyable, I wouldn't mind grinding the stats if I didn't have to replay the game again to get other paths, this is the biggest problem in this game. I don't think spending 10-20 hours grinding to view the majority of events in a porn game is something I would consider enjoyable. I played for 4-5 hours and didn't even finish henry storyline because I had no idea what I had to do. Didn't finish the photoshoot storyline either because it took ~ 10 work days to get to the next stage.

What I think would make the game more enjoyable for people :

I think adding an "fap mode" where events have better chance to pop up and where you can get stats easier would be a good addition, especially for people that play the game update to update.

Adding a quest-tracker, in-game guide or hell even a guide on the front page that you update everytime you add more content, this is very much needed in a game as open as this one. It's nice to have a sandbox and be able to do whatever you want, the issue is that after you've spend quite a while wandering around and hit a wall you have no idea what to do and searching the forums for 5-10 minutes isn't good in a lifesim.

Being able to use the keyboard to navigate the blue options like in Degrees of Lewdity for example, it makes the grind even more painful when you have to click on the same things multiple times in a row.

Too grindy. Content is hard to find and you're kinda clueless on how to go about finding it. I try lowering my dignity to be more slutty but the weirdest most illogical things raise my dignity back up so I make no progress. Tons of other aggravating areas but that's the main points I guess. No progress in these areas from when I played this game probably a year ago. Dont waste your time

I want to like this game, but apparently the porn content is actually difficult to find and requires failure. The closest I got was getting a noncon fingering. I tried to play this game multiple times now, and for the third or so try I actually got by pretty okay. There seems like there's been some streamlining over time, but the game still feels unintuitive. Are there storylines? I don't know, but I gave it a good amount of time and couldn't find a hint of one. I actually like HTML lifesims too. Even when I wasn't finding anything interesting I still had a tiny amount of enjoyment. Still needs work

Games like these are severaly underrated. It can be a bit of a grind sometimes but the reward is worth it. There's very many option and choices and so many different outcomes. I like for instances how the main girl slowly and slowly gains corruption and you really have to try hard to achieve it. The setting is great too. At least I get to know Amsterdam a little, haha!

I can't really speak for what kind of content this game has... because I couldn't find any. I decided to play a good girl and go work at the library. You can do that. You go to the library and work every day, maybe pick up a yoga mat and stretch in the park, buy a book and read. That's what I did.

For about an hour real time.

There weren't any random events trying to corrupt me, nothing happened at the library to spice things up and keep things interesting, no guys hit on my character who apparently got pretty hot doing yoga every day, there weren't any roommates or city folk to meet. Nothing happened at all. I finally got bored and gave up.

I've really gotta wonder what the point of programming or writing any of the library job was. I've played some games with questionable design choices that weren't really finished yet, but they were at least designed around showing the player something, even if only a single scene. If I can durdle around on normal difficulty without being confronted by a single interesting scene, something is pretty wrong.

I don't think pregnancy has been implemented yet.
I played on hard and issue I run into Dignity recovers at alarming rates where I can't gain Free/Liberty as easily. Do more crazier actions. Character I play can't be more liberal be exhibitionist. Is there level where she could be quit and rehired by former bosses?

I hope that helps where ppl understand. Where I hit snafu. There no way she gain sex and I learned with dignity I can never get character laid.

Really loved playing the game and note that it's still in development so it can only get better and can't wait for more updates both for Amsterdam (new job options) and even the promised new cities... I've added a notes on some thoughts about future development of the game. Whilst there is a lot of clicking and choosing, especially early on I quite liked the element of control provided albeit it takes a while for the content to develop; for me this was well worthwhile as it's a great game. Thanks!

For a sandbox game there's barely any freedom, and I would prefer if this was a completely linear game that railroads you towards inevitable sexual content.

The game has plenty of things to track and to do, but they inevitably turn into a grind that's not even supported by sexual content. The thing you came for is mostly locked behind failing to grind, and I didn't find that out by myself: I got disappointed too early, if an hour or two of seeing only mild nudity can be considered "too early". All this time was spent on repeating same actions over and over without even a hint of some other way to progress.

I probably would've unlocked some actual porn scenes, but I failed to understand that saying "no" to the photographer, that slowly makes you shoot more and more explicit scenes, would completely end that storyline.
It was a scene where he offers weed to the protagonist. Not demands. Thinking that I don't want to track addiction on top of everything else, I declined, to which the photographer responded by telling me to get the fuck out. That's where I gave up. At this point the photo shoots had only mild nudity, two girls just showing tits.

From forum posts I found out that you have to take a loan and fail to pay back to get to most of the other NSFW content. Everything in this game prompts you to keep struggling, because, you know, it's a game. You want to win.

I can't vouch for the statement of "you have to go into debt to see porn", but I still can't rate this higher than 1/5. It's clunky, it's mind-numbing, it's annoying. It can't deliver neither a good management sim experience nor a good erotic content. If this is version 0.8, version 1.0 can't possibly be reworked into something fun.

amazing game i keep coming back to it its fun got hot sex and interesting characters and honestly makes me wonder if Europe is like this and if it is im living in the wrong place and need to move to the EU asap

I've played several iterations of the version 0.8.x.

The author calls it a "sandbox", but that's a bit misleading. It would be rather pointless to "play" it as a sandbox life simulator, as most of its actual "content" is what leads you to one of its "endings", there's no "game" to play in it. So, in reality, this is actually a highly grindy visual novel with multiple endings and to be honest, none of the endings is worth all that grind. The author also has really strange ideas about how things should work, some of which are not only highly unrealistic, but also quite annoying.

If you REALLY want to give this a go, keep in mind that there are points of no return for each story, at which you'd want to create a separate "save", because after that point you're going to be taken to one of the endings, one way or another and the author never lets you know that you've arrived one those points of no return, so save often.

Once you've reached a point of no return in the story, you'll not be given any option to back out, the MC will become a total idiot. Her skills, such as intelligence, self defense, and so on will all be ignored completely and the more you try to avoid a bad ending, the quicker you'll get there.

I'd recommend not to waste your time on this annoying clickfest of a VN.