This game looks and sounds great, so it's damn shame you actually have to play it.
A combination of clumsy, frustrating platforming, and a bunch of tedious, unfun enemies makes this game a great example of how hard it can be to make a compelling platform side-scroller game.
I didn't even end up getting off. which may be the biggest failure a porn game can be. The last thing on my mind after spending twenty minutes bashing my head against one of the hardest boss encounters you can find on this entire website was masturbating to the 15 second porn scene at the end of it, and I'll be damned if I replay the entire fight to see the 'alternative' scene.
What does this game want to be? Something you can, pun intended, take a load off and masturbate to? Or something that redirects all the blood to my brain and forces me to pay attention to master precise parry and dodge timing? You can't have both, and you're only wasting your time trying to implement two entirely diametrically opposed game ideas.
If you want a hard as nails platforming and combat challenge game, then put long-form porn scenes between these segments so the player can relax between moments of intense gameplay. If you're going to go the 'defeated enemies have animations' route, your game can't be this complicated and challenging because no one is gonna be able to sustain a boner when they have to repeat a platforming challenge three times in a row because they didn't tap the space bar on the flying bug at the right time.
To elaborate on what I mean, here are some bullet point issues with elaborations to each point below:
- Awful precise platforming with these bugs:
These bugs require you to carefully time your spacebar press, and in some cases you have to balance on a moving bug. I'm on the first level of this game, and doing movement tech that you wouldn't see until the White Palace in Hollow Knight. Missing these platforming challenges can often cause you to lose a few seconds of time, the worst case being about a ten second loss. Wasting time like this is an absolute boner killer.
Even the mushrooms feel really janky to jump on. The kinda have to time my jump the same time I land on it to get twice the height, and it just feels bad.
- Extremely annoying enemies that deal high damage.
I didn't enjoy fighting anything in this game except the slimes. It felt so janky and weird. The only consistent way to deal with them is spamming a basic combo attack and occasionally pressing the jump button to deal with these nimble enemies. And everything deals so much damage, even when I'm blocking, and you can't get your health back if you walk over a checkpoint you've already unlocked..
- Frog boss was way too hard, and even the minotaurs took a few tries
Like, yeah, I can see myself eventually 'gitting gud',. but I'm not here to 'git gud', I'm here to 'git off'. Good game design here dictates that I should beat it first try, and within a reasonable amount of time, i.e.60 seconds or less. Why even bother adding a porn scene at the end when I'm going to be thoroughly unaroused by the time I get to it?
- Lame CG rewards, half of which is currently gay content.
Yeah, funnily enough, I didn't expect one of my rewards in this game where you control a female to have gay porn in the rewards. If you wanted to make this game some kind of bisexual's paradise, you should have built the game like that from the ground up. Since the gay content is just tacked on, who is it for really? Gay people aren't going to play this game because it's mostly straight porn. Straight people aren't going to want to see it. So all you're appealing to is a very niche bisexual audience and not effectively because they'd have no idea this straight bait game has that kind of content.
- Fairly messy, boring open ended levels.
Rather than a tight, linear experience, the dev has chosen to make levels about twice as long, and twice as empty. The incentive is to find various secrets, or do various platform or combat challenges around the arena to pick up these collectable crystal things, but as far as I'm concerned, it just feels like padding when the reward is a mediocre flat CG. I mostly put this complaint down to the game not being fun to play though, so the fact there's more of it just annoyed me more.
- Camera you have to fight with even more than the enemy.
For some reason, this camera does this very unique thing where it kind of drags to your current direction, and gets stuck there. So if you suddenly need to, say, turn around, your camera won't show you where you're going.
- Way too many buttons in awkward places.
I know there is remapping functionality, but the current positioning of the controls is concerning to say the least. A for Attack, S for Dodge, and then randomly Special is on R and Block is on T? From a fairly natural keyboard stance, sending your forefinger to the 'T' button is extremely uncomfortable. Why isn't block on D, or something? Or even better, put Dash on Shift and then Block on S.
- Test Level 2 reveals that what's coming in the future may be even worse.
Did you hate the annoying platforming? What if it was even harder, more flying bugs and more punishing if you fell. Because that's where this game is inevitably going to go. It'll only lean harder on the challenge and precision as a platformer inevitably does.
I didn't even finish the Level 2 Test, it was too annoying.
Some things that could dramatically improve this game, IMO:
- No more flying bugs and stupid platforming. If this game was entirely grounded and didn't have any annoying platforming it'd probably have 5/5 stars right now.
- Make the mushrooms always bounce you at the same consistent height, no more of that timing a jump press.
- Make the current difficulty a 'Hard' mode, and make a 'Normal' where all enemies do 50% of their current damage, and maybe make blocking cause you to take 0% damage. It may hurt your ego to make your platforming game easier, but you're not the one trying to fap to it, are you?
- More linear levels with smaller secret offshoots. Don't let the secrets system encourage larger levels that weaken your game design.
- A short tutorial level to show the character what they're capable of, and what the buttons do. and what their effects are. I couldn't really tell you what any of the special moves did beyond face value. Nor did I ever really figure out what the game expected of me when it comes to parrying.
I'd easily give this game a 5/5 if every single instance of platforming was removed and the damage from the enemies was toned down. It really is that simple sometimes. I'm not saying that's what should be done, I'm just saying that it's
possible without making a single new asset to turn this from a 3/5 to a 5/5, and I'm certain that goes for the other reviews too.
OVERALL: My real gripe with this game is that it wasted my time, and that's just plain annoying. It wasted my time with a big, empty level design, collectibles with boring rewards, inconsistent platforming challenges that cause you to lose progress every time you fall, overly tuned enemies and bosses that can kill you in 3-4 hits. What do I get for in most cases? A single nice animation.
In its current state, this game would be better if it was just a gallery of animations.