Others - Artifact [v0.79.92] [Mesmerizers]

I wish vision for a setting and concept always translated to a good game, but it really doesn't.
Other reviewers have already mentioned most of my gripes (aside from the monetization path), so let me just reiterate:
- gameplay is grindy
- reward is minimal
- time restraint makes exploration feel limited
- player agency feels fairly low
- descriptions are copypasted
- writing verbose, overreaches what the game is
- lots of fluff (UI, font), not enough substance

Great concept and the author clearly knows how to write well, unfortunately it lacks content as of 0.79.74, it's quite laggy, grindy copy-pastes the text from various scenes and the current ending is just a "You Win" screen.

Now, I love games where you are the ones transforming others and I really need more of it.

On the surface, Artifact is exactly what I want and with an amazing Lovecraft atmosphere on top of it. Seriously, the writing, art and music add a lot to it.

But as others already pointed out, the gameplay loop itself is just kind of boring. Go to character you're interested in, flirt/grope them to raise lust and reduce your suspicion over the course of several days until you can fuck them and start changing their bodies, lowering their IQ to unlock other options and eventually drive them to a Frenzy.

Granted, there are some quests you can find that can make flirting easier and maybe make these interactions easier, so hopefully the finished game will be less of a pain in the ass for this. But for now, time will tell. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it, though.

(3/7) Overall interesting but a bit slow to play and the core gameplay is very grindy

You play as a cultist trying to turn everyone into a bimbo by having sex with them. Strong lovecraft horror themes.

The game has excellent presentation with nice music and art for a variety of player and non player characters. There are also some quests which are positively creepy and offer some ominous bargains.

Unfortunately the core of the gameplay is rather droll. You seduce the characters by flirting with them or giving them gifts which is just a clicker game. Once you win them over you get one or two scenes of them fallen. There doesn't seem to be any acceleration mechanics to make the process very engaging.

Overall a very cool concept which is just a little too grindy to really be enjoyable.

Review for v0.79.58

Reminds me a lot of the CoC games, you basically have to cheat your way through it if you aren't interested in being fucked over in various ways. I wouldn't call the game bad though, it was still a pretty enjoyable experience for me as I'm only really interested in a maledom playthrough.

I think this game would do a lot better if the devs introduced more player agency options though, losing control over npcs's once they hit a certain arousal sucks, actually completing the "goals" of the game led to scenes I wasn't interested in either so if there was alternatives I'd probably enjoy the game a lot more. And possibly more content throughout the corruption process too, it felt very 0-100 tbh.

Still felt way more fair than CoC or any games made by fenoxo and co. And no furries, thank fuck.

The game objective is, within a time limit, bimbofy and feminize the town with Lovecraftian vibes. Kind of buggy and uses male assets for female PCs and give you a penis. It at least offers a cheat option to get a jump on the XP grind to see if the end game is of interest, but it seems structured around either everyone having a dick or being bimbos which isn't my thing.

I agree with all the other reviews, but there's something else I want to add here.

I don't think the Dev is trying to 'punish' players by having their dick fall off, they're using dick size as a health bar and the actions that you need to win the game require spending your dick as a resource.

Except that's very silly and not very fun.

It's just broken at a conceptual level. One example: You need to arouse a character to 10 to get them to frenzy and count towards your 'win the game' score, and picking the sex action they like will give +1, and also make your dick a half-inch smaller. When their arousal is above 8, they'll trap you and non-con you, picking a sex action of their choosing. If they choose an action they don't like this will just drain your dick and not give any arousal score.

Okay, so that's... not great, that replaces a deduction mechanic with a roulette wheel grind, where you're losing dick size every time. But that's not why I mention it.

I bring it up because completing a sex action drops you back into their conversation menu and trapping you in it, meaning that if you finish the first voluntary sex action you're trapped in an infinite loop until the end of the day with that character sexing you until you die from dick-too-small.

And it doesn't feel like it's done that way on purpose. It just feels like it wasn't playtested or that nobody considered how its pieces interact.

There are strong artistic and writing ideas here, and the dev *can* write well. But the gameplay is so bad that it doesn't matter. I considered rating this a 2 for its strengths, but because those strengths are so front-loaded it just serves to make you waste your time far longer than you would otherwise.

Not for everyone, but the atmosphere of the game is one of the best I have ever felt, perfectly capturing the essence of what Lovecraft is about. There is a sense of profound wrongness about the place and you really get the feeling this dark power is slowly twisting you into something eldritch and inhuman.

tries to do lovecraft. fails.
pretends to be a sandbox. fails.
does a bunch of railroad fetishes, punishes you for doing stuff dev does not like.
do not bother .

This game forces it's fetishes' on you via it's gameplay, you aren't controlling the game here, you have no choice!

If you choose options that the dev doesn't like it makes your penis fall off then hits you with a Game Over screen, if you quicksave allot/ save scum this game will flood you with save files in no time as it doesn't delete/ let you delete old quicksaves.

I ignored the other ratings and went in to try this on my own, now I wasted 2 hours of my life and am going to heed the warnings of bad reviews more from now on, don't give this time sucubus of a game your attention.

Decent premise, haven't seen much like this done before and the art is really good. But it's very clearly unfinished. Needs proofreading/editing and can be a bit difficult to know what you need to be doing. Deserves more attention though.

Buggy, grindy, poorly explained, unclear intentions, narrow railroading of fetishes, and lacking in content. What little exists is okay but unremarkable, and the existing content doesn't warrant a "v0.7" - maybe a "v0.1.7"

This review is for the demo

So the description does not do the gameplay justice in a very bad way.
Basically your goal is to serve as an "anointed" to some higher godly being by making everyone around you so horny that they all go into a fucking frenzy (literally) without being caught by some other religious dudes.

If you only go after that, the game might be decent, but considering the description of the game states that you are building a harem, it falls flat.
Once you've fully bimbofied someone, they become completely sidelined, only ever able to be interacted with again by "exploiting your power" to rapidly turn them into a bimbo or looking at some artwork of a gangbang...that's it for the rest of the game.

The game seriously fails to make quite a few mechanics clear throughout the game, leading to you just randomly messing around until you figure it out on your own, which could be fun, if it weren't for the fact that there's only three save slots, a lot of bugs, and a lot of unescapable dead ends.

As it is (which is a demo) it is not worth the time required to get to the very few scenes that have artwork.
The writing is decent, but there's so much of it and so many repeated events that you will rapidly start skipping through dialogue.
There's a lot of bugs that either dead-end the game, forcing you to close out and load a previous save, or cause permanent notifications to always be on screen.
It has potential, but it seriously needs work before it could be called decent.