Ren'Py - Love & Sex Second Base [v24.4.0a] [Andrealphus]

Compared to visual novels, this game is much closer to a strategy game, with a profound strategic component.
The victory condition of the game is simple: raise the love index of any one or more girls to 100, save enough to buy an expensive engagement ring, propose to her, and the game will end in victory. Purely for this goal, it's extremely easy.
However, if you try to achieve some non-mandatory personal achievements based on your preferences, such as establishing all the harems or preventing all NTR scenes from triggering, you'll find that it's the real challenge, even on the easiest difficulty! You need to carefully design your steps and face failure repeatedly, which is where the game demonstrates its strong strategic nature.
This game offers three levels of difficulty, with each level having a huge gap in difficulty, almost tenfold. If you just want to quickly unlock the game's scene content, you can simply start a new game in NG+ mode or use the easy difficulty and advance the game with the girl you have in mind as the target. But if you have other self-challenges, depending on what your challenge is, this game can provide extremely high difficulty content.
Therefore, based on the depth of the game and the incredibly rich content relative to its size, I give this game a 5 out of 5, despite its countless other flaws.

TL/DR: The game elements, variability/customization of the LI, and the pregnancy content on every (YES EVERY!) LI are what make it good. The hit or miss art, somewhat sloppy NTR vibe gating, and wimpy MC are what keeps it from being great.

+ The degree of customization of the female characters is really unique for a H game and by far the most superior thing about this title. You can decide what rings, tatts, clothes, and even attitudes (on a few of them) that the girls will have in the game and it is reflected pretty robustly throughout your play-through.
+ Second best thing about the title is the VA. It isn't always great- but it is always decent and some of it is pretty hot.
+ The game systems are pretty fun and I generally like how the pathings are gated.
+Having lots of ending options is fun.
+Game play elements have actual character growth fitting a RPG game.

Neutrals:
The whole title is very vanilla. Even the kink pathing such as every character having the flexibility to be submissive or pregnant is pretty cursory. Don't get me wrong- it is incredibly impressive to have ALL these scenes reflect the appropriate changes. Having it be deeper would be almost impossible from a resources / time development standpoint.


Negatives:
- The MC mike is kinda a pussy. He can slightly more impressive if you choose the "hung like a horse" option at the start of the play-through- but he is still significantly weaker/smaller than a suite of various other men put in the plot to allow for NTR sub-plots. A generic reedy af half asian / half white lookin bro who is maybe 5'6" 5'7"?? He has maybe a 3" through 8 " pecker depending on your dick size choice at the early game. He sucks. Bro is a wimp. Wish I could pound all these great women better in the title. Easily the worst thing about the game.
- The sex scenes are a bit too homogenous.
- Incosistent art / some really low quality art in some places.
- Sloppy NTR gating.
- Some of the relationships aren't very naturalistic / believable. (Mainly b/c mike isn't very impressive). This is mitigated out when he is literally a CEO, b/c a lot of women are like moths to flame with money / high-tier jobs, but prepare to suspend your disbelief re: why women are actually interested in him for a long time in the early game.

It's EXTREMELY grindy, but there's a lot of depth and variety to the characters, their paths, the events etc. so if you don't mind the grindy mechanics of making money and improving your own and the girls' stats, it's a very entertaining game with a ton of content.

It's also the only dating sim/AVN I've ever experienced with a NG+ feature and it actually works well. It's been updated regularly for years at this point and the updates are still coming, so there seems to be plenty to look forward to beyond what's already there, including new characters being introduced beyond expanding the existing ones.

Use the wiki, though, because a lot of things aren't that intuitive. It's part of the grind, but again, if you can live with that the game has a lot to offer.

I get that its supposed to be semi realistic but come on. The sheer agonizingly slow grind really makes it hard to enjoy it. It takes so long to just get a single scene at times. Not to mention the triggers for some scenes are just so cancencrous to meet to the point where you think the game is broken. And managing your energy, mood, hunger and hygene becomes so much of a chore. They add nothing to the game while taking away from it.

If the game was more fast paced and grind was made less of a chore of just clicking different buttons for over an hour it would be a 4 star. But as it stands now it is barely a 3 star.

Good premise, but awful sandbox ruined it really fast, alongside really soulless affection system that turns story game into numbers game.
If I wanted to watch stats and graphs, I'd turn on Excel, not VN.

a decent sandbox game filled with an insane amount of content and system, the kind of game that really click when you want to immerse into it, that's why it still deserve 4 star imo despite some pretty big shortcomings below:

-The art is just one more step into being called ugly, also very inconsistent in style, at least the cast has somewhat unique personality to back that up

-The grind itself is bearable when you don't have your dick already in your hand, but it will keep players from a second playthrough

- There's still need to be a guide to thoroughly get all the girls, and players can fuck up easily sometime

Overall, if this is your first time playing this, definitely try it for sure, but to try it again? Maybe in 2 or 3 years

This game just isn't for me from the start, so it's hard to be objective. Almost all harem games have a depth problem. The more characters there are, the less they are fleshed out. But the main problem for me was the gameplay part.

I didn't find the story interesting and I think this game is just bloated with excessive stuff and grindy gameplay.
The gameplay is just a chore and the reward doesn't feel worth the effort. The art is inconsistent and boring most of the time.
I had to follow a wiki to avoid the risk of being locked out of content.

I would give this game 3.5 stars, mainly because this game is big and I'm trying to be objective here.

One of my personal favourites. It is a massive game, probably too big a game for Ren'Py to handle. There are dozens of girls with different personalities, a plenty of activities to do. Writing and visuals is alright-to-great. Still, I believe there is a fundamental problem that needs to be adressed. It is the conflict between the story this game tells vs. the gameplay it provides.

The following is some 'too long: didn't read' ramblings which you may find interesting, although the most important points I've already made.

Look. I see two ways of playing. On the one hand, you can go bareback, find a girl that you like, progress her story-line and, well, get married (that is the ending that we have). On the other hand, you have so much content and it is so grindy to go through all the steps again (it is a Ren'Py game!), that this game practically begs you to try it all (or most of all) on the current run. I simply cannot imagine anyone who will play 'Love & Sex', say, three times or more.

How does the game handle the seeming abundance of content? You can make all the characters in the game your lovers (or sex slaves, duh). It is exemplified in 'harem' feature. Some of the girls in the game can go together. You can 'marry' your harem, for instance, which leads to a different ending.

We've come to the root of the problem. As a developer you simply cannot tie all these knots. You can argue that we don't have to be completionists, which is probably true, but open-worldy nature of this game kinda promotes this behavior.

And this is where it all comes tumbling down. The stories are vastly different in terms of how well they're developed. There are girls with unique mechanics, and there are more 'generic' ones. The ties between harems are non-existent. So you practically have a game, which will always have a half-baked feel. You can argue that this is a gamer-problem (you can progress some polished route, finish it in an hour or so and be on your way), but that doesn't really convince me. It is an open-world experience, for fuck's sake. The limitations of making it with Ren'Py, combined with this constant incompleteness, make it difficult to be really invested in the particular story or have a perfect power-trip.

Doest it make the game bad? No. It is great, even if a bit repetitive. The visuals are ok, the writing is nice, occasionally great, the variety is something to behold. It has a certain wow-factor when you see new routes opening during the playthrough.

But you practically see the mountains the developers will never be able to cross. Combined with ugly animation here and sloppy writing there (again, it is difficult to make everything perfect when your game is so big), it makes for a rather so-so wank.

The game delivers visual splendor and adept guidance, yet occasional missed scenes detract from the immersive experience. Nevertheless, its charm endures, leaving players craving a more comprehensive narrative. A captivating odyssey overall.

I am blown away by the amount of content in this game and not just content for contents sake having most of it not all the girls have a decent amount of development meaning there is more then enough for everyone's taste would recommend this game to anyone who is looking for a fun and enjoyable way to pass the time and meet some fun characters along the way

This is a really bad game.

The story and characters are very uninteresting.

The art is inconsistent and most of the time pretty boring.

The music generic.

The voice acting is very bad and too quiet.

The UI and menus are just too much and look terrible.

And even the gameplay is bad, it even took a while for me to figure out where the option and exit button is in the gameplay.


I really wouldn´t recommend it to anyone.

Amazing game with insane amount of different content and characters. The only downside for me is the amount of grind it takes to make stuff happen, but even so the result felt as if it was all worth it.

I was putting this game off for what feels like years. If you are like me and wasn't sure if you want to try it — now is the right time to do so

Cz of insane amount of grind — more like 4,5/5

It's one of my favorite games here, if not my favorite. It's very unique. Its flaws (and it has many) are actually its virtues too:

This game has plenty of content and is unforgiving with choices, which makes it chaotic at times, but also makes every playthrough is different. It has a ton of characters, which means unfocused on one hand, but also means it rarely gets boring on the other. The drawings ar very rough at times, but they're absolutely not the same faces you see on other games. There's a lot of conflicting feelings towards LoSeSB for me, but this game is still one of a kind. Props to the author, keep up the good work.

I have no words to describe how good is this game, I love it. The graphics, the game play , has a good history with an excellent character development, if you have the chance, try play it,you will no have regrets.

Really addictive, although not for every one.
+ Simple but engaging management/daily sim
+ A whole lot of diversity in love interests and "paths"
+ Not the best story but good enough for get things running.
+ NG+ is a game changer
+ Has an in game cheat system that helps get things running, despite its con´s.

- Good enough lweds, but very simple, static and not quite as good looking as the in game stuff.
- Grindy...in a good way if you ask me...but really grandy.
- The gallery is atrocious, but at least it now has one.

There is too much dialog and text. It makes no sense to have 1.8 million words to read in a game like this. There are also too many requirements to interact with girls that can become a grind to meet. I don't think it's worth the effort and I don't want to deal with cheating.

+ Lots of options and different kind of kinks with differrent characters.
+ Cheats
+ NTR/sharing/pimping (could be more with some characters tho)
---- No gallery
- It's a shame that the different kind of clothes are not always applicable to characters even if certain conditions apply (maybe the cheat spoilers could be more clear).
- Don't play the game without cheats, too much of a grind.
- It's a shame how you can't get everyone and that there is a certain sequence to it.

i cant even think about the amout of hours ive sunk in to this game. def a good dating sim. Ive done many play through to get all the story lines and it seems to be getting frequent updates. it is a tad buggy for something but theyre never game stopping type of bugs.

crazy grindfest, and strange decision to not allow right click to access option/load game etc, art is unique and the only thing going for the game, cheat is absolutely necessary to play the game which is never a good thing, i like the art so hope eventually gameplay improves but this game has been around for so long, the grind has only gotten worse

Quantity over quality. I loved the game at first, a solid concept and I thoroughly enjoyed it when it just had a few girls and a few things to do. But then new stuff kept being added and it was just bloat after bloat after bloat.

Picking it up again and trying to get through is just a chore, a massive chore and while the renders and LIs were at first worth it, it's now bloated with ones that aren't, so the reward doesn't feel worth the effort.