Town of Redemption

I am really frustrated by this game - Its another blue balls simulator. I liked the art style and the general idea has merit but oh my god this game is such a waste of time. In general the game executes on the premise of being a potion selling simulator however there are several issues that make it frustrating to play. First of all the grind. you operate a potion shop on minimal margins. The entire thing centers around brewing and selling potions. The problem is that you come away with like at most 40 gold profit per day while the cheapest materials cost 10 and most expensive cost 50. And thats before you get to the actual quest progression. In order to progress character quests you must spike one of their orders. In order to spike a potion you have to use a material (or several) that you arent getting paid for so you end up losing money on those transactions which often bring your profits back down to almost zero. So you never build up a stock of ingredients which is another problem since you dont know what orders you're going to get which leads to incomplete orders and lost revenue. The whole thing turns into a massive grind. It heavily incentivizes save scumming or rolling back the text to the beginning of the day to buy the correct ingredients instead of any sort of honest play. So lets move on to the actual content of the game. You spike orders to transform characters - these transformation include changing the characters gender, the size and type of sexual anatomy, their species and their body size. This is pretty good except for a few things. First of all you dont get to choose who gets transformed and when. You have to wait until the customer gets to you with a quest related order that has an option to spike it, then you actually have to have the stuff to do it. Once the quest is over, you cant spike that order again to realter the character - its one and done. Another issue is that these quest related orders or requests are extremely slow to appear. It seems to be dicatated by some combination of your character level, you quest progress and RNG. This leads to some massive wait times between quest progression scenes. I'm talking like 40 minutes to an hour of real life time between each one even if you're skipping through the dialogue. So you have this massive endless grind on top of an arbitrary hidden timer and randomized encounters, which eventually begs the question, "If I'm going through all this work and spending all this time, are the scenes at least worth the effort?" No. You might expect this to be a porn game..... allow me to correct you, this is a soft core erotica game. There is no hardcore porn. You might see the occasional nipple, a dick bulge or something like that but there is almost no actual sex going on. The transformations are the scenes, any time you successfully spike a potion or product you will get a scene. There are two main types of scenes, either a character sprite transformation or a full narrative scene. Both are completely still scenes consisting of a single image, the only difference is one is usually a full page scene depiction while the other is just a character sprite variant. So with regard to the sprite transformations - these scenes are extremely soft core- they usually dont depict any nudity at all and usually just show the character drawn in a slightly different way- shorter, different species or opposite gender, stuff like that. The main character full scene transformations are slightly more...... adult.... sorta. Theres like 1 instance of actual sexual intercourse (across this game that takes like 20 hours to complete), the rest are like some sort of bad ecchi anime - you know the ones where the main character and a girl are about to get it on and then someone or something bursts into the scene and puts a stop to it. Sometimes one of the character will just be like - "YEAH I REALLY WANT TO DO THIS......but not here" and the scene moves on and nothing happens. Or there were a couple where the scene faded to black...... in a porn game...... what the fuck....... why? What really pisses me off is that the main character is the one turning the characters down most of the time. Why are we bothering to spike these potions with lewd ingredients if we're going to dodge every attempt to jump on our dick? What in the Ludo narrative dissonance is that about? Then theres the gallery which is inconsistent about which scenes get added. It mostly tracks the five main characters, who are on the banner but at least two other characters have full blown scenes that didnt get added, which can be frustrating. So in conclusion, if you are really into spending a lot of time and energy grinding a potion mixing minigame so that you can see an entirely SFW png of a character drawn as a different species once every hour or two, you may enjoy this game. To me it seemed like a waste of time.

v0.4 Cute little 'game' for a bit but after about 15 minutes it's just mind numbing. Wake up, purchase ingredients, mix potions, go to sleep. Over and Over. There just isn't anything else to it. (I played it for 2 or 3 hours off and on..just grind.) While the characters and scenes look nice but they are a single static image for the scene. It might describe a lot of things, but the image never changes for the most part. It really needs a LOT more images. A few spelling issues but not bad, could really benefit from adjustable textbox shading. There really isn't a story or game. Once you talke to the characters and go through their conversation list once there's no change. There also aren't any 'choices' other than which character to speak with. I mean, it's kind of a 2 star rating but honestly it's not 'bad' just really boring after a few minutes.

Grindy RPGM, need I say more? I really wish devs understood that components should support each other and work towards a game where the parts make sense. Grinding does not make your adult game better, it doesn't even make normal games better. If you're going to make a normal game then make a normal game, if you're going to make an adult game then start with the adult content and then add in things that support it, not things that drive away people that actually want to see your content.

Version 0.3 The game world is limited to a few screens, a dozen characters, and about the same number of alchemy ingredients. But this is enough for full-fledged gameplay. Alchemy is intuitive. The dialogue and potion effects are funny. Actually, the game is already complete at this level, so I recommend giving it a chance to enjoy.

Review is for v0.2 This game has a lot of potential, but it just hasn't reached it yet. Given the game is still in a very early state, I'm being a little generous in giving it 3 stars honestly. There are a lot of things the game seems to hint at being possible later down the line that just aren't implemented yet, and while I can appreciate letting the player know what you have planned, it can be a little misleading to have a mirror that mentions that you "look normal", but have no other use for it yet. The game is HELLA grindy. I'm a huge fan of JRPGs and other grind-heavy types of games, but even this was a little bit rough for me, and the game is also incredibly unclear about when you're done with any aspect of it so sometimes I'll just wind up having been focusing on getting the wrong item and that's also pretty frustrating. I want to rate the game higher, but in its current state I just can't bring myself to do that.

I see potential in this game, it is clearly a demo, the art designs are cool, and the characters are good as well but, the UI is so garbage, like for some reason you can't open your inventory while shopping? And potion ingredients are so expensive, that you barely make a profit, this game is grindy just at version .2, I'd wait for a bit then look into this game.