HTML - A Spell for All [v14.17] [Cmacleod42]

I am in dubio about rating it a 4 or 5. I must add I cheated from the start, this looking for stones and just traveling around to pass time to get to an event doesn't do it for me. For this game you have to know it is not really made by one dev but is is picked up by someone else and has become somewhat of a community project.
This game is amazingly ambitious and has a huge amount of content. It is a open world and every location has some interactions, be it free or to progress the story.
The story itself is great, there are several paths to play at the moment which give some variations in events. I tried the apprentice path which works well and can be finished, and the hard murder path which got me completely stuck and I couldn't finish, maybe trough fault of my own.
Porn content is not that deep, basically you charm some poor women and you have a bunch of repeatable interactions. Seems strange to me for they chose a lot of softcore models or pictures without sexual content for actual intercourse. But maybe this is just a WIP.

For me a major hurdle was the sheer amount of characters in the game. If I examine the files we have 89 characters to interact with and in most cases can be conquered. After playing some time I just cannot for the life of me remember who everyone is referring to, I am bad with names so maybe it is just me.

Another minus for me is the actual charming people. When the prerequisites are met (right spellbuff/location/etc) you just BAM charm them and they are your loyal slave forever, no questions asked. Only a few characters need a lot more persuasion and setup, those tend to be a lot more satisfying.

Another point is the story progress, sometimes you have to just do a tiny thing to progress but it is almost impossible to find without the guide. For example to use hypnosis you have to master it with help from mr (or ms) Beasly. Afterwards I had to use hypnosis on some chick, but first I had to get to this Beasly guy to ask if using hypnosis was actually a good idea, took me about half an hour of pointlessly traveling across the map to see what I missed. Also, some other time I got stuck I had to visit a supermarket where I have been to tonnes of times before and never anything happened.

Last one is missing content. By user fuckup or just in general. A lot of locations are hidden from the player until necessary for the story. So you have this french teacher with a one time encounter, if you fuck up by not having the correct item or give a bad response you will never know where her classroom is. Another is the shopping street, along the game more and more shops are added? Weird.

Sounds like a lot of rant for a good review but I am a critic I guess, All in all I enjoyed myself, it is a very unique game and it is very absorbing, so 5/5.

I was considering giving this game a two but considering that there is plenty of good I will give it a 3. The biggest issue really is that a sandbox adventure game, and it most definitely suffers from the many issues that a lot of adventures game do, only brought even more to the forefront because of the nonlinear nature of the game. Typically I would say this isn't bad but after I had to restart for the third time because things that the guide said should happen but didn't for some arbitrary reason likely involving doing one thing out of order of the guide I decided that the sandbox nature is a net negative and really brings the game down significantly. Also not the biggest fan that I am locked out of the incest content unless I expressly have a certain character do something, feels really restrictive in a really stupid way.

I'll start off by saying this is a difficult game to review. I don't like to let personal preferences get in the way of acknowledging quality, but I'm torn on some aspects. While there are so many positive aspects to this game, and I reflect in my rating, I'll talk about some of the things I think would matter to a prospective player.

There's a decent amount of porn in this game, and the scenarios in which it's found are right up my street (dominance, control, incest both implied and actual, the odd uncommon kink).

This game reminds me a lot of playing the old point and click adventures. Finding hidden objects, hidden pathways, darting around trying to figure out what this object does, and who I need to talk to to progress the next step. Just like the good old games like Broken Sword. Except with a lot of good sexual content. It's well worth noting at this point that I suck at those games. I pay attention best I can but I'd always hit walls and be mashing buttons hoping to luck through areas.

My problem is, while I look back on those point and click games with rose-tinted glasses, at times A Spell for All has forced me to remember just how frustrating those could be. I've wandered round aimlessly managing to miss the one person I needed to talk to, not figured out what an item does and thought I'd hit a wall, not realised that a certain spell needed to be cast in a certain place in order to find a certain thing. I had to turn to the walkthrough guide more than a few times. For those who love that kind of game, or those who aren't so incompetent as I am, this could be a big selling point.

One aspect I did enjoy was the inclusion of genuine puzzles and riddles (some maths based, some general knowledge, and at least one traditional riddle in my play so far). It all goes to the feeling that you're actually playing an immersive game and not just clicking buttons to get to porn. But these strengths are also the weakness: how hard do I really want to work for a porn game? I play them because I like story and interaction, but sometimes I don't want to sacrifice my wood for a maths puzzle.

Even with that, there's an abundance of good content once you start to "charm" (that is , forcefully submit people to your will with magic) those you come across. Want your own personal "fucktoy" (yep, that's what you call her) to wait for you in your bedroom? She's there for the taking. Want to spend the night at the house of one of your conquests? You've got your choices. Want to take out your frustrations by fucking one of your enemy's mother and sister? Well then do both of them at once.

Again though, with this ambiguous review of mine, charming takes up mana. A lot of mana. And there's a lot of people to charm. Even people that you need to charm. Getting mana is an absolute chore. Being completely honest, I made a real effort to play the game straight up and quickly found myself adding in mana and money through the (thankfully in-built) cheats. The puzzle aspect is enough in this game to not need to make mana acquisition so tedious. It distracts from the quality of the gameplay, the story, and the sex. This is the one aspect of the game that I'd suspect most players would be put off by. As you progress you come across a way to essentially generate infinite amounts of money and mana, but it would take time, and I'd honestly given up and cheated long before I discovered that option.

I can't give the game full marks, sorry. And I can't call the game "average" because it's way beyond that. If I were to judge it as a game and not a porn game I'd be sat here very impressed by it. I'd still hate the mana grind, but it would be a decent game without the porn aspect. I imagine a lot of people will try this and give up before getting anywhere good, and that's a real shame, because it is exceptional in what it has to offer as an HTML game of this type. Choices, tension, espionage, puzzles, kinks, and some straight up fucking. Not particularly into it usually, but even a bit of (fully optional, and decisions to prompt it are marked for those weak of heart) gay content kind of adds flavour and spices it up next to its rivals. Still, that mana issue...ugh...

i rarely give games 5 stars, usually 4 and in this case im not comfy to go with 'above average' score .

my thoughts on its sandbox side.
-clumsy navigation. im bad with street names (which probably of no help to develop some muscle memory of its locations) so i use tons of extra clicks. partly it is mitigated by teleport spell which u get at some point but ofc u need to click on phone and then its map (so at least 2 extra clicks)
that game will benifit from having interactive map or classic approach with named locations and pics (maybe with several thematic regions, like downtown for everything governmental etc) or at least extra info of what is on that street (before going there); maybe 24/7 taxi as well
-ui is not comfy enough. if i keep book/inv open on the right i cannot see time. if i use left panel to check time i cannot have access to cheat menu with time skipping. i need all those things at once without extra menus closing-opening.
-ingame cheats are alright but game's VNy nature demands having something like quests, events and other variables tweaking options.
-ingame tips are insufficient. fan-made walkthroughs seems to be tolerable until you reach some info gap or vague description or something different from results you getting and that kills lots of your gametime. you can try to use alternative w/t but no guarantee that it will clarify things. so if you feel like ragequiting - i totally get it.
-most issues emerged due to its being de facto VN. (now, surely we all know that most if not all sandboxes have quite straightforward narrative, just divided by a number of npcs but here things feel more chronological and interrelated. usually it makes vn with sbx ui only easier. here is a rare case when it is contrary)
all those routes is never a good idea as replayability of those games is rather low and non worthy of routine re-clicking (basically ud have to repeat most things, to unlock some variations, which will be perceived as a grind, unlike renpy_vns where you can just instaskip text from answer to answer)
running into gameovers or locking the content due to wrong answers is not welcomed.
sandboxers (who dont read, hence the majority of) d prefer narrative emerging out of quests ( tips, options, visuals ) not otherwise. so anything writing-orientiered is never of help when it comes to understanding of what and why is going on. it is not a minus per se but definitely not a plus.
-pics as lewd visuals are not rewarding enough (mod can help with that)

conclusion: to be enjoyable it needs significant reworking (ui and cheats optimization, vn approaches removal or mitigation) and extended tips with corresponding step-by-step w/t. rn it is somewhat playable, i think i covered more than a half of the content .maybe 2/3, hard to tell.

This might sound weird, but the flaw with this game is that it's really a VN pretending to be something else. In A Spell For All, you wander around a town and find stuff to do only... you don't really. There's a handful of very specific things you need to do to progress the story and finding them is very difficult without following the included walkthrough. If the world you're supposed to wander is pretty much empty until you find the right scenes... why isn't the game just a VN instead?

It's really unfortunate, because I think the game concept sounds very cool and it's obvious the dev put a lot of work into the world. I like games that allow me to make significant choices about how I want to do things. However, I'm just not willing to navigate through the clunky interface in order to follow a step by step guide towards advancing in the game. Maybe the game opens up past a certain point, but I certainly didn't reach it.

Version: v14.11c

Well i dont often play puzzle games on this website, but i quite enjoyed this games puzzles, they arent too difficult if you pay attention and it keep me focus on the game and its story. The characters are also nice in this game, they nothing too complex for a HTML game, but compared to many other games they are more defined.
The biggest plus in my opinion is naturally the magic, it helps you continue your puzzles and unlocks more scenes with the many characters for you to "enjoy".
A real solid game, but puzzle games are not really my thing, so considering that, i cant really go to deep in this review of the game because quite frankly i dont know if this is a good game or not for the vast majority of people.

WOW,
Fantastic game, I have now played it for hours, yes hours, and I have been totally absorbed by the game play and the story arches.
I would recommend this to anyone who wants more then a simple mind numbing experience.
This one gets the mind going.
Thank you.

[v14.11a]

I can't believe I have not rated this one yet. This was one of the games I played in my early days on F95zone. It was quite complete already at that time, and the game is nearly finished at this point. From this point on, it looks like it's just adding small things here and there. You can already go into a pretty nice ending.

So what makes this game so good? Well, let's just say that this is a real sandbox. It's the closest we will get in a porn game to a fully fledged sandbox. The map is huge. The characters are numerous. There is sort of a main quest line, but you are free to go wherever and explore the extensive world. You progress in your powers as you explore and progress the main quest. The goal? Well, it's mainly a "gotta catch em all." You charm (mind control) the girls you find to be your lover or slave. Some girls are straightforward, others take extensive work to get the right opportunity to charm them.

I played it as a major power tripping game where you just enslave everyone. I didn't find too many other games that satisfies this itch as well as this one in a sandbox environment. The writing and story surrounding the town is quite rich. It's not the main focus in the gameplay loop, but it's nice to have this world building.

If there is one thing that seems underwhelming, it's that some of the sex scenes are still place holders. There are quite a few scenes, especially the newer ones, that just end with a single sentence along the lines of "You fuck her hard." The scenes that actually have writing for them are quite good and steamy though.

The gameplay is mostly about freedom and exploration. It really does feel like a big world. The early game could be a bit hard on the player due to having limited powers, but it's also part of the charm. Later on, you will unlock a teleport spell that lets you go anywhere for some mana, and you also get a chauffeur at call to pick you up anywhere. Many girls and quests can be completed in different ways.

Basically, if you want to see what the sandbox tag can really offer, try this game. I suggest playing this blind on your first run. Paying attention to the text will generally give you a good idea about what to do next. If you ever get stuck, the dev is always available on the game thread to answer any and all questions. What a guy.

Just came across this game , I like it alot
First of all , this is one of the most story rich game I ever played. In fact there might be too much lore for ppl to keep up with. But personally I like a good story.

And not much grinding mostly required. The gameplay is pretty story based trigger and not stats triggered which is a great +, however being a sandbox , without a proper walkthough , one can wander around without clue what to do to advance the main plot. But being sandbox , it also meant u can wander around and explore without being forced on a dedicated path.

The credited actresses are all very beautiful.
The only - I feel is sometimes there can be excessive text -1 , again one of the few html game i enjoyed becoz of the great lore immersive that make it different from the many generic incest/school theme games with nada story

I wont beat around the bush, the beginning needs some work cause as of right now you need to have played this before if you want to truly start playing properly. But once you do (or if your like me and are extremely adamant in not using a guide and sooner or later stumble on how to continue the story of this game), it is an amazing html game.

I have played this since the early days and the creator has done his best to make sure there are no dead ends. Most problems have several ways of solving them, so the solution now maybe different from your last playthrough depending on your choices. It really makes the world feel alive cause while the story flow might still be the same the small differences really makes it feel like you are changing the world. A small example would be a specific characters death. You will still need to meet that persons child but how you meet them will be different, how they will treat you will be different and how your dynamic is will have slight differences.

It really has come a long way.

its a pretty good game, i enjoyed it for the new kind of follow up route, topics and the self included mood its awesome, include walk but it could be better, ahm i mean about the walk if you choose some specific parameters it could be only show you those, or maybe its my browser? idk.

Beside that the atmosphere, the some puzzles and riddles are good and not many of them, just the necesary to make you take a break and remember that its a game and not some simple visual novel.

It could be improved well depending on what you like, i have some toughts, but its my particular choice of style to make the game more mhm how could i poind it easy? but it depends on the player stile, also since english isnt my main it could be a reason so why i feel like it.

If you wanna download and support it i promise, you wont regret of it, it could maybe cost you a bit at first, but trust me, its envolving and youre gonna be playing it over and over trying to find out more of it

"A Spell For All" v14.10.3

Another "must have" HTML title with a solid storyline, great developement, and neat interface.

Its not a walk in the park though, as I find the difficulty curve is quite high for newcomers, even when the walktroughs included (that must be followed to the letter or you'll miss quite much content, or worst: a bad ending); so save oftenly.

Besides that, Its a very entertaining and "fap-friendly" game.

Review for 14.10.2.4

Used the conspiracy route

The game could be greater. I feel like there are too many gameplay-related issues for it to be better at this time.

It's constant grinding. Now of course you can just cheat mana, experience and money to remove that aspect, but it defeat the point of those grinding mechanics in the first place. They clearly do not contribute much to the game.

The navigation itself is challenging and often frustrating. The game is obviously made to be played alongside a walkthrough. Pick the wrong choices in the incorrect order? No scenes or even game over for you. You didn't leave a character untouched or in a certain order even tho there is no way to tell in the game that you could get better outcomes out of it? You fuck up the story and get soft-locked.

While it has a complex, full story, and many characters, it can get confusing very fast and you lose interest as the game progress. The plot didn't seem to intrigue much, the characters don't seem to have much interest either. But hey there is a lot of them.

The lewd scenes themselves are boring most of the time, consisting of mostly static images with the occasional GIF. So if you're looking for action or something dynamic, you won't get any.

Sadly, that's why the game didn't click with me.

Normally i would give two stars, but I'm giving an extra for the quick response and fix of the devs to solve an issue i had during my playthrough. They seem to be very active and care about the game, i wish them the best.

This is a pretty monumental game. It has a large city, lots of characters and complex plots with several branches. However, these ambitions fall under their weight, and more than once I had to use cheats to progress being soft locked. It could be because of some NPC being missed, or not choosing a magic training important to progress, or making wrong choices in the story... anything. The game does a very poor job of explaining and guiding, which is OK for sandbox - but this actually isn't. So for the love of god, use the walkthrough from day one, it accessible right from the game itself and you should follow every goddamn step.
So I was going to give 3 stars for the effort, but on the second playthrough I've installed the mod.. and it is awesome. It changes visuals for the better, adds heavy BDSM theme to the world, and overall makes a very good impression. It's 8 GB, but it's a must for the game.
Overall, can I recommend this game? it's definitely not for everyone. If you have mind control or slave kinks, you can try, If you are curious what monstrosity you can build on Twine, check as well. Otherwise, better ones are waiting for you.

Definitely in the top 3 adult games i have played. Right now, the only thing that's keeping me from giving 5 stars is some quality of life and some convenience features, some personal preferences, as well as the fact that the intro part without any lewd or nude content is a bit lengthy (i would love it if it was shortened or if a 4th path was introduced where you don't use magic, just charm and seduction). But once the real game starts, MAN, it is awesome!

One of only 2 adult HTML games I've ever seen with enough of a storyline to really be considered a game. That really doesn't do this game justice though. This game really does have an engaging plot and interesting characters despite having to rely on whatever real porn images the dev could find.

There are some cases of some mismatched body switches that happen, presumably when the dev couldn't find images matching the scene he wanted from the correct actor/actress but overall things seem to sync up remarkably well. Wife Trainer is the only other HTML game I've run across with comparable polish to this one. Great job.

-pros

1. A well written (thought out) story... if at times a little hard to figure out.
2. Interesting "puzzle" solving mechanics.
3. One hell of a branching storyline. Most of the branches seem pretty fleshed out too.
4. And the most important positive is... all (or all I can think of at least) possibly "objectionable" content is completely voluntary.

-cons

1. Sometimes it is very difficult to figure out what to do next.
2. And if you're annoyed by it... it uses all "real porn" images (most of which actually fit the scenarios the creator puts them in... so that's something.

A spell for all was my first game of this sort I've played, one of maybe 3 games which I've replayed more than once and the only one I'm following with anticipation for the next update. cmacleod42, you are a genius! What you've succeeded to create is incredible: doesn't matter how many times I play it - it doesn't feel repetitive, there's no "grinding" issue at all and it actually gets the player involved because of the story elements and development and not only because of the lewd content - which becomes some sort of an award for completing the storylines. And most importantly, the potential to expand the story and the in-game world is limitless!
Once again, a sincere thank you for brightening the covid lockdown and can't wait for the next update and where it will lead.

Really like this game. Follow its creation for several years already. Interesting story, unliner development through story, freedom of action. And I really like mind controlling setting presented in this game. Just love being a worlock, desiding who to seduice and conquore.

Note to all game Makers: If you want to make a game designed to be played with a male character, please don't include a female PC as an afterthought and then claim it has "Female Protagonist".

Had the same issue with this game as with The Company. Game is clearly designed to be played from the perspective of a Hetero Male. Every character you meet is female, baring a slim handful of male characters with zero content.

To make myself clear, this score is not indicting whether the game itself is good, but rather that it should not have bothered with a female option and should not carry the Female Protagonist tag. Simply put, there is no content that I could find that actually seemed like it was made for a female PC.