VN - Java - Venture Seas [Sisters of the Abbey - Beta v1.0] [VirtuousDevelopment]

Executive Summary
The artwork is nice, and the game includes a number of pretty interesting ideas, so I wanted to like it, but there's just too many shortcomings - both systems-wise and, more worryingly, in how the main character is presented.

Full Review
The combat and exploration systems are actually pretty interesting conceptually, and really drew me in initially. Unfortunately, this game adheres to the braindead more grind is best design paradigm, meaning you have to run ever-harder variations of the first dungeon about a dozen times to even be able to complete the first main story quest. So at the end of the day (literally, of a day of grinding), combat and exploration will just feel like a fucking drag to anyone who actually has a life beyond porn games.

The artwork is quite good, and the way MC-involved sex scenes get around the issue of not being able to show the fully customized MC works better than I expected. The only potential issue here is that if you're not into dickgirls, you will find the game has entirely too many of those.

The trading sim side is... uh... there? Idk, feels pointless. The brothel sim is certainly more interesting, but it feels tacked on. As far as I can tell, you can safely ignore it, which is not ideal given how much development effort has gone into offering a lot of options and exotic creatures to, uh, "press into service".

The character customization is mostly workable for how simple it is, except for the fact the dev certainly has... quirky... ideas of what certain hair & make-up colors should look like. More annoyingly, there's a truckload of stuff you'd either expect (dyeing clothing items) or get teased with by the game (many transformations) that simply isn't there (... yet?).

There's also a crafting system. More or less. It certainly feels incredibly unfinished; in fact, for the first 2 chapters of the main quest (which take hours due to the more grind is best game desig), it feels utterly pointless (partially due to the sheer amount of loot you get due to the, let's call a spade a spade, fucking braindead mindnumbing shitty padding more grind is best game design). There seems to be an idea there, but for the most part, it doesn't seem implemented (... yet?).

The overarching story seems fine (by porn game standards, anyways)... until you realize the main character is essentially portrayed as a super awesome captain who's super awesome mostly for being the only person in the world capable of finding the right words of encouragement to get the best out of others.

Beyond that? The MC is basically the HR department hiring tertiary characters to work alongsinde the secondary characters that actually take care day-to-day operations. And adventuring.

That's right. The MC can't fight worth shit, so during dungeon exploration, they're along as the pack mule (yes, that is effectively the in-game explanation) and occasional damsel in distress (usually after being either too weak/slow or too stupid to stay with the team).

Now if you think that somebody writing a dumb, weak, super awesome charismatic MC like that in a porn game surely would have the sense to actually write a story very much accomodating a dumb, weak, super-charismatic submissive MC: guess again. Unless you're deliberately playing an asshole, your first sex scene will be with the MC in the more dominant role; if there even is a romanceable character that actually takes charge, I haven't found how to get there (... yet?).

Yet. Yet? This game has been in development since (at least) 2016. One one hand, give the dev credit for delivering way more actual content than certain other games. On the other hand, the frequency of updates isn't good, the communication between updates is basically non-existant (outside Discord, anyways), and the quality of what's there so far isn't what it should be.

Maybe the developer will actually tone down the mindless grind, get around to implementing more transformations, figure out a way to make the crafting system feel meaningful, and generally work on getting past half-baked. If so, it will take a while (the game's been in development since 2016), and even then, I don't see how to fix the bad writing (this side of rebooting the project), so I'm not holding my breath for this to ever rise above average.

Just a shitty roguelite with no content to speak of. Most of the characters are randomly generated and have no personality as well. Game consists of endlessly grinding through mediocre combat to maybe get 1-2 scenes.

Combat is good, characters are awesome, lot of futas and ultimate character customization! First game from here that I bought on steam. The updates are pretty rare, but the animations are really good and detailed. Give it a try if you like futas, dungeon crawler type of games, alter characters or nice stories.

Pros: .The art of this game is gorgeous,
.The story is good
.It hardly have any bugs (at last in my experience)
.The customisation mechanic is simplistic but works well
.The overall game is a little grindy but not over the top on this matter
.The companions are diverse and unique
.Some of the systems are a little clunky (having to open a menu than open the quest menu AND than opening the quest per see is a little bit tiresome with the time)
.Most of the content is optional.

Cons: .The balancing of the economy in the late game is kinda bad
.The mini quests doesn't come near a worth value in most cases
.It is really boring having to travel so much in the late game to buy some ingredients needed for crafting
.Although the companions are really neat, they lack proper character development, the only time you may speak with them are for function reasons, for some repeatable nsfw scenes and for scripted scenes
>>>The principal problem is the pace of development ( some months between atualizations and when it happens the content added are scarce, but this is not a full time developed game so its understandable)

Cool art and interesting mechanics and i was even interested in the story.
however this game is just too grindy and repetitive for my taste.
it takes you forever to complete a dungeon (normal difficulty) and most of the time you dont even get some action.
The combat animations are too slow.
i liked the micromanagement part of the game tho.

version "Venture_Seas_Bleakfyre_Harrows_-_New_Beta_Build_Release"

The art is fantastic and the sex scenes are animated. Although they tend to be a bit too wordy and there is no "fast forward seen text" button. Unfortunately sex scenes are also pretty rare compared to the sheer amount of time you will waste on this game.
Everyone is a bisexual, almost every male and female named character will make passes at you and then get upset if you refuse. So unless you are bisexual expect to upset people.
Futa is everywhere and integrated into the world and the story. In many games you can choose a "no futa" option which retcons them to be female, but in this game you can only reject fucking them on an individual basis.

the game itself is extremely grindy. you spend most of your time exploring dungeons for gold, which is extremely tedious. It also has a fuckton of completely superflous and unnecessary clicks to progress on each spot. The gold you get then disappears rapidly as you are charged a % of your total gold every time you move.

there is a brothel on top of your ship. the good thing is that it is kept completely seperate. You do not whore out your waifus, nor do they compete with your crew slots. instead you have seperate brothel slots which you fill with hired whores. The brothel like everything requires micromanagement. You have to manually tweak the whores mood, giving them rest days or job days. It requires far too many clicks to even get to the management screen, and then to alter each whore individually. There is supposedly a brothel madam who should be handling this tedium for you, but nope, this is all you.

I was looking for a cool management game with other features and it turns out i love a ton of aspects of the game such as the customization that's better than i expected, you should definitely try it out because it's worth the shot.

Version: Beta

Everything about this was average to me:
The art
The scenes
The story
The combat and its mechanics
The progression
The sounds were a little better

Nothing really stands out for me in this game. But by no means is this game bad, but then again, its not good either.

the sex scenes are a bore, not really well drawn or interactive.
the combat is not horrible but at the same time the player character is pushed into the "cant fight" group which i dislike.
the music and sound effects are shorts loops from free sound collections and they give me a headache, no voice acting but judging by the quality of the rest of the audio thats a good thing.
the arts not horrible but by all means not very good, its something you expect from a decent game, to bad the rest of the game is bad.

in short not much here go play something else.

Disclaimer:
This review is base on going in as a "game" you play, and not the adult/porn game you fap to.
Because to be fair, there is very little porn...compare to the whole day of time I sink into this game.
Also despite the dev said they won't (probably because they can't) do shit here and leave the free version for grabs, I still end up buying it on Steam, so there is that.

Now, before I go into saying anything about this game, I can't help but feel like it is hard to say anything consider the review directly below me have a shit ton of approval and he said the game is not that good.
But then again, opinions are opinions.
Plus no offense but despite that review has great point, their format is hard to read...

Anyway, Venture Seas is a dungeon crawler/High Seas Trader lite hybrid game with some adult content dotted here and there...which for some reason I sink a total of 24 hours into playing.

The premise:
You are [custom character name] who has a weird dream about...things that I won't spoil, then you wake up on a deck of a trade ship, with three philosophical questions in mind: "Who am I? Where is this? What am I doing?"
But your thoughts are soon clouded by the "two giant mounds" of your quartermaster, which proceed to inform you about the fact that you are the captain of a trade ship in a fantasy world, who lost his mind after a certain incident and have just come to now, despite having no memory at all.
Amnesia aside, since the only thing you can remember is your dream, so now you decide to lead your crew to discover that "thing" in your dream...

The Gameplay:
Aside from standard VN storytelling (turn off "animated text" if you are a fast reader) when there is plot. It can approximately be separated into two types: Dungeon crawling, and High Seas Treader lite.

Dungeon crawling:
Trading stuff for profit aside, there are some locations you can stop by and have your crew scavenge for cash or items, aside from being the more efficient way to make cash before you have enough capital to grind. this also is how you advance the plot, by completing the quests within the "dungeons".
Most of the random events are text-based, and the whole thing functions like a VN, until you enter combat.
The combat is a turn-based deal, you only control the party leader, using different "combat ruins" to deal damage base on your stats, and all you need to do is to defeat the opposing leader and you win.
It is very variant base on different classes, weapons, and armor, but I end up feeling the whole thing is merely serviceable for one reason:

High Seas Treader lite...and by lite, I mean very light:
(This is probably not the main point of the game, but it can work if you need the cash.)
Basically, you sail from port to port that you discover from plot development, buy and trade shit for money.
You can also hire crew members and prostitutes for your ship, which are all fully customizable, more on that later.
It is rather simple and to be honest, and it works...but you need some "suspension of disbelief" for it to work.
Despite this, it works fine enough, and maybe it is because deep down we all love capitalism when it makes cash, virtual or not. I end up making tens of thousands through this along.

Other:
The two main types aside, there is some other gameplay in between them. There is a brothel on your ship after completing certain condiction, you can hire/enslave up to 14 prostitutes (with ship upgrades) to generate profit. Sadly since you are basically the pimp, so you don't really get to do anything (or see anything) yourself...aside from some text when you are training them.
There are some side quests that can be unlocked with certain conditions, which is just another way of making money and stuff (some comes with sex scenes).
Finally, there are some romance scenes with your named crew members...which I think is more a bit too little, the concept of balancing between different crew members that hate each other is fine enough, but it is not very utilized much-

Okay, I am aware I am still missing some gameplay elements here, but we will be here all day if I keep going, so Imma gonna move on, the rest is more of a side-line deal anyway.

The Artstyle:
You can see them in the pics, it is fine enough.
There is a minor case of "everyone looks similar" due to the fact you can customize most of the crew members, including yourself.
The not customizable characters often seem to have better design, at least for me.
One thing worth noticing is your own looks are still rather irreverent at the current state of the game since you don't physically exist within any scenes. (aside from sex scenes, but that is just a part of your body)

The Story & Writing / presentation:
It is also "fine enough", but often spread a bit too thin between all the other gameplay you will be doing.
There are serval choices that will affect the game going forward, but otherwise, it is one of those ordeals of a story of a sea expedition, and discovery of the unknown, with a bit of sexual stuff in between.
The world and setting are actually quite complete if you really dive in, but as said, they are fairly scattered within the gameplay.

In conclusion/TL;DR:
When I start writing this, I thought I will have a better impression of the game.
But it turns out the impression I have is not that good, and now I think the game suffers from a bit too much feature that is unfinished.
Nevertheless, I have fun even in the grind phrase...do I mention grind? In some cases, you will be under level that you need to grind, but it is not that serious, and with good strategy, you can even not grind at all to beat some obvious level blocking boss.
It is a weird case of a game that has a lot of minor issues here and there, but I still like it, for some reason. Even with a serious lack of actual porn for the 24 hours I play.

TL;DR A dungeon crawler/lite trading hybrid game that has serval minor issues and unfinished concepts, while being a bit lacking in the actual adult content department.
But the game is functional enough to have fun, and even though I am aware of the unfinished concept and sometimes grindy combat. I still end up enjoying the game despite awareing all the short commings.

Normally, I try to play through most, if not all, of a game's available content before I give a review, but it was honestly just too painful to do so.
I wouldn't call the overview an outright lie, but it's definitely not at the point where it's as advertised either. The most damning thing is its pacing. This game is the randomly generated dungeon crawler equivalent of an open world game with nothing to see. You get the freedom to a number of things, but not the things you necessarily want to do. You get to sail around to different islands and cities, but sailing is expensive, so you spend a lot of time just farming loot to pay for it. Which leads me to the next point.
You have to micromanage the shit out of everything. For all its features and art, you spend a lot of time just grinding gold. Oh, you want to change any ship policy? Have to go all the way back to town, paying fees and taxes wherever you land. You don't even get the true freedom of initially choosing your respective policies because they're all tied to at least 2 people's opinion of you. Choosing one policy over another means one person liking you more and the other feeling offended. And these things aren't some arbitrary decision; they affects your dungeon crawling crew's morale as well as profits. And that's a really shitty thing to do, considering half the gold you're earning is spent on transit alone. And you can't just mindlessly grind for gold. You have to go back to port every once in a while to resupply, sell your loot, or even heal (we'll talk about this in a bit). RNG can be a bitch and you're not automatically healed every time you go back to the ship. Depending on your policy, you're either not healed until you go back to town at a flat rate, or you're healed on-demand at stupid high prices. And don't get me started on the price of healing items. The cost of enough bread to heal your party costs more than the trip itself. So depending on your luck, you might have to go back to town sooner than you want, even at a loss of profit. And dungeon exploration is straight up unforgiving. Every time you complete a level, you can either go back to your ship immediately, or you can continue to the next map. Choosing to continue to the next map gives you a profit multiplier (and trust me, you need it), but getting a party wipe means losing the loot you got from the previous map too. And party wipes can come suddenly and without mercy. Each time you revisit a map, its threat level goes up by one. Now you have to either get lucky and find the necessary mats to reset the threat level when the map becomes a death trap, or you have to buy them overpriced at town to do it. But resetting a level means you also have to suffer the shittier loot that comes with the lower threat rating. Is all this theoretical math making your head hurt? Have you forgotten that romanceable NPCs exist yet? Because I sure as hell did.
You have a variety of NPCs to talk to, but they aren't interested in talking to you for the most part. Even your crew doesn't really want to talk to you. Sure, you get the occasional sex scene, but I feel no emotional investment in any of these people. After a while, you finally leave the jungle area and get into the desert area, but all of a sudden, one of the characters leaves your party and another one takes their place. God damn came out of nowhere. Had I kept going, I could have probably gotten her back from progressing the story, but I was too tired of the micromanaging bullshit to be assed to do it. I genuinely can't tell whether the devs actually think cutting profits from everything is fun gameplay or if they're just doing it to pad out the play time.
From the Steam page announcement, it looks like they're making strides (or at least planning to) in the right direction, but it's probably going to be a while before the gameplay is enjoyable. I don't believe in giving bonus points for "having potential" because I don't want people going into the game thinking it's better than it actually is. If I come back to this on a later update and enjoy the changes, I'll be sure to change the review.

Awesome game that will become even better as time progress.

Try the game but dont expect miracles as its early access.

Future looks bright here!

The only negative is that its semi turn based and it feels really awkward.
Its healing system is also quite wierd because it costs a lot of cash.

high quality game concerning both gameplay and graphics. options to not see specific content (futas etc. ) would be nice even though most times the game is giving you choices with hints in before! another alternative for this would be to make m,ultiple versions of the same scene (yes i know that requires a lot of work) for example if you have futa content disabled the futa is not having a dick but a strap on. its only a small diffrence and not efficient but for me for example it would make it even more enjoyable!
also an animation system for the brothel would be nice instead of the text based system currently.
othwise i can just say keep the good work up devs!

I feel compelled to leave a review after reading the rest of these reviews, since I feel like this game deserves a better rating.

Bugs:
I've played it for 8 hours, and haven't run into as many bugs as the other reviews would have lead me to believe there would be. Maybe they've mostly been fixed in the version I'm playing, or maybe I'm just lucky.
I've crashed 1 time and lost a grand total of 5 seconds of gameplay, since the game autosaved right before it crashed.
I've only even noticed two bugs otherwise. One was during a fight that got stuck in a loop of skipping my turn and my crew auto battling, which went on endlessly because the enemy kept healing and so did my team. This didn't actually end up being a problem, though, since there's a cheat menu where you can force a battle victory, which is the only time I've had to use the cheat menu.
The second bug is selling items to the shop, it only lets you access the inventory tab you most recently accessed on your ship, which you can work around by just going to your ship to switch tabs, although it is tedious. At the same time, money hasn't been an issue for me at all and I've only even tried to sell items the one time

Gameplay:
It's a dungeon crawler, I haven't felt like any of it has been a grind so far. It's pretty basic tile based dungeon crawling, but if you enjoy that kind of game, you'll likely enjoy this. I think any comments about it being grindy are people who want to skip over the gameplay and get to the porn. I can't really say that's wrong considering this is a site for porn games, but I personally would like more porn games to have real gameplay like this, rather than just filler gameplay that most of them have.

The customization is pretty great. You can customize your own character at the start, and there's a good variety of clothes to choose from for yourself and your crew. You don't see your own character very often, though.

The brothel system runs on customizable characters too, who can wear anything you can wear. You can customize their body, but via consumables that transform them.

Porn:
There's plenty of nudity, since you can toggle the clothes of most characters whenever you want. If you can jerk off to still images of naked characters, you'll be plenty happy.
For actual sex scenes, it's pretty sparse. I've come across a couple in dungeon encounters after winning (maybe for losing too, but I haven't lost any battles yet). I've had a couple random ones with story characters during events and one from increasing my relationship with a story character. I've also had one or two in town tavern scenes.

There are also text based sex scenes with your brothel employees which can happen once per character for every time you dock in a town, which is basically as often as you want.

I'd say there's been about 1 sex scene per hour, and they're animated. That's fine for me, maybe not for others.

Good Points
+ Renders looks good.
+ Animations physics are well maked and they do look good.
+ Story is cliche but seem interesting.

Bad Points
- Story telling and plot was empty.
- You need a lot of grind for getting any content (story or sex scene) and this makes gameplay boring ASF.
- We have lots of bug and game gives a lot of crash. You can get 4-5 crash in a hour and if you are in dungeon or in treausre hunt you are losing every progress you made... This is probably worst point of game. Its literaly kills your enjoyament to play game and a lot of people stopped playing game because of this reason like me.
- Update takes to much time and their content is not worth waiting that much time.

For The End
This game could be far more better with fixing bad points but im not sure thats what DEV wants...

Great art, but i think the RPG elements are kinda hard in someway but refreshing, still pretty fun and sometimes you even forget about the porn just because the grind, cant wait to see more, and see in what direction they gonna take the new art

Waste of good art, this is what happens when you have no idea how to make a game, and try to do it anyway.

Just poor overall, from the boring dungeon crawl to the horrible town and inventory mechanics.

Use the amazing art to make a visual novel, or a trainer if you wana go the extra mile.
Art looks good though.

I want to like the game, but it's underwhelming most of the time. The art is great, and the few sex scenes available are great, but the dungeon gameplay is pretty dull (and it makes up a majority of the game), and there are so few sex scenes sparsed through the game that grinding through the dungeons isn't really worth it.

I like the character creation system, and the potential of how much you can do with your character (and npcs), but the npcs suffer from same-face syndrome, which kills the feel of the game.

This game could become great in time. It has a solid base, and it seems to know where it wants to go. But it's just not enough yet to be worth any sort of time investment, especially if you're interested in the sexy scenes.

Great visuals and they aren't even the best of it.
Definitely this game is not of my kind. Not only for the paraphilias (? is it the correct way to call this? sexual categories maybe knowing we are talking about a game?) which it envolves but for the play mode too, I mean, I prefer more sexual encounters.
Anyway, this is the only sex game that I played which entertained me in a not sexual way (that also). And of course the point that I think that is the best, the characters. I FELL IN LOVE with some characters, in a more special way with one of them, what I want to say is, whoever does the dialogues does them pretty good and with a sense of humor very exclusive which I really loved. Have to say that I played this game months ago in a very old version even for the date (v. 1.8).
I gave 5 stars because taking away stars for not being of my kind doesn't seems fair, the other reviews don't mark correctly from my point of view so yeah 5 stars is the less I can give.
PS: I got 0 bugs

Pretty good. Customizable character design could use work. Had a bug that crashed my game when trying to go into the forest. After the 5th time attempting it, I reloaded the game to find that my manual save and the autosave were gone.