RPGM - Completed - Below Sunshade [v3.2] [Arvus Games]

Below Sunshade is a survival-rpg game made by Arvus Games with a strong inclination towards the elements of survival, time and resources management. As a recently stranded bosun, you are tasked to take care of quests around this island while watching over many different primitive resources to create a decent home. All your efforts will be for nought since the volcano will explode in thirty days and you better have all the items ready to sail off this time bomb. With the protag is a dolled up elven princess that will act like your typical spoiled girl and other four different girls you meet throughout the game. The game consists mostly of gathering resources in a boring loop that also is limited by your stamina use per day. You will learn very early that the stamina management is very tiresome. The game requires a lot of materials to unlock the next step in progression, meaning the player will have to mindlessly grind for long periods of time, and this does not improve much as further into the game. The leveling up works in a strange manner of quest completion instead of experience, so fights will be mostly pointless besides resource gathering. Because of that, the entire fighting system will become more of an obstacle than anything. Upon leveling up I recommend upgrading stamina because it is the most needed resource in the game. The art is fairly above average, with good pencils, expressions and colors, but lacking depth and mostly detail and variety. Surprisingly the art is also very static, meaning there is next to no variation during dialog except a couple of small facial details, giving the feeling of low effort plastic characters. The scenes are very weak and pathetically few. Each character has just a couple of content and it's absolutely not worth the effort the game demands in grinding, moving around the island and wasting time with boring fights. The amount of moving around deserves special attention. Following the map, the island has plenty of areas you will have to traverse, over and over again. The walking required is ridiculous. There are almost no shortcuts or faster means of travelling. The player will undoubtedly get tired of crossing the same maps dozens of times just to check if something happened in a specific area further west or just to pick some random resources to be spent immediately without anything interesting or new happening during those trips. To future game developers, never do this kind of thing. Below Sunshade is below mediocre, with its few praises being limited to a half-decent western artstyle and above average production in graphics for the engine. Besides those paltry elements, the game is lackluster in all its aspects, gameplay, story, characters, amount of obnoxious characteristics and above all, the feeble adult content provided. This is my second game from Argus Games, and I’ve decided never to invest my time in their products again.

Very nice game to be fiinshed in a full day or a week of 1-2h gameplay. I wish that devs made more games like this! Fantasy setting, exploration, adventure, some NSFW and well-thought difficulty. Albeit too easy near the end.

Arvus Games desperately wants this to be a prestige RPG, the best that NSFW RPGM games have to offer. It... doesn't land. The writing and art are solid, but don't back up their vision (and frankly, for an NSFW game, 2 scenes per character is kinda pathetic). The mechanics are decently well-executed, but again nothing revolutionary-- and more to the point, the gameplay loop gets real tedious, real fast.

Despite my review and general negativity towards this game, I think it's *almost* quite good, actually. For the content and CGs as-is: cut the game time by a lot. Like, minimum 50% cut. It's just too slow-paced for what it has to offer. Even with that, I think the game is a little bloated with characters for what is on offer. If, instead of the 2 meh scenes with 3-4 characters, we got a much more focused game that had 8-10 scenes with just elf girl, I would have enjoyed the game a lot more. Again, contingent on cutting out gameplay.

If Arvus actually wants to have the prestige RPG that all their effects and attention to detail seem to indicate, they just need to add a lot more CGs, basically. I recognize that's not always realistic, as adding more art can cost a lot of time and money, but I feel real bad for anyone who bought this on Steam as-is. The time and gameplay investment would feel worth it to me if we got 5-6 CGs per character, maybe. More would be better.

Hope Arvus can learn from this in the future, this does have some promise.

I played this game last year and thought it was kinda cool but the amount of trouble that you have to go through to get scenes and solve puzzles ended becoming such a chore that I finished after getting the scenes that I wanted.

Now that I tried it again, my good memories about the game mostly disappeared.

This games lacks a lot on the amount of scenes compared to the amount of time that you have to play and mainly the amount of trouble that you'll get trying to figure it out how to progress. I had to log on my steam account to see the community discussion to have a clue about where I was supposed to go numerous times.


Basically:

-Few scenes (23 scenes and 27 unique CGs), as far I am aware
-Very grindy with punishment that requires you to load others save (and grind more) to get content that has a time limit
-Some of the puzzles are annoying, but the biggest sin of this game it is the progression (on my first playthrough I couldnt find the last glowing orb because it never occured to me that a thing wasnt part of the scenario and after finally finding out I got the incredible reward of having to guess where I am supposed to use them)
-Horrible gallery, you cant see the scenes, just the CGs and you can see how little content you got when they put shit like the inital peek at the elf girl as a scene. Also, there is no option to unlock it after completing and it cant support thing that you did between the saves (but sometimes it does because god knows why) so go and replay the entire game to try to get a different scene .

I'm just very sad. This game has everything on it to be one of the best, but they put decided to let the game with a bad design, bugs and grind to artificially increase the playtime. Seriously, you cant even sleep consecutively if youre just trying to get others finals, thats how fucking annoying this game was made to be.

All that said, Naipei best girl her scenes are hot the art is top tier

This game truly is a hidden gem.

I don't get the other users complaining about errors, so far I've had none, you just have to run the game as an administrator.

The game is proper RPG with exploration, combat, gathering and crafting with some (very rewarding) puzzles, and although it can be a bit grindy, it certainly doesn't feel like it. If you're in a rush to see the CG's, you might feel annoyed by the need to carefully consider what resources you're going to gather for the day and actually going through the map to do it, but if you take your time to appreciate it, it's fantastic. I hadn't read the walkthrough and yet, in the first 10 days, I managed to pretty much gather everything needed to enjoy the other 18 days without any worry, so it's definitely not a hard game if you're not dense and can figure things out on your own.

Perhaps my only complaint would be towards Talitha. She's an extremely one-dimensional character. But it doesn't matter, she's not my type anyway, Ildrune all the way.

The pacing of the game is very good and the game doesn't feel like your typical RPGMaker game. It's very smooth and it runs very well.

There's like some 20 hours of content in the game, if you're wondering for how long you'll play it.

Worth it!

Great survival concept with great art ruined by bugs, shortness of the game and a timed ending.

Voice acting is good, art is nice and clean (pleasing to look at) but could have been better with some sort of animations. Game is buggy and confusing and the timed ending is annoying but can be "turned off" by selecting the easy difficulty, but it still gives that stupid "everything has to be in a hurry feeling". Too few sexual interactions with the characters, would have been better if you get their affection to the max and you could just ask them for sex in different positions. Endings are nice, but again would have been nice to get a take everyone with you ending or everyone could have had a solo ending (like fuck the elf and go with the vampire or slam dunk the Heart in the boat forcefully and get the fuck out of there). If the art wasn't so great this game would be a 2/5 for me.

Despite my score, the game has great art and the H scenes are hotter than the ones in most of this site's generally terrible porn games. The voice acting is somewhat ameteurish, but surprisingly ok, the elf lady sounding the best.

Now, the main problem of this game is it's terribly clunky UI and poorly designed areas, larger than they should've been and full of poorly placed obstacles that sometimes are hard to see. These factors make the grind for resources, exploration and puzzle solving major pains in the ass when they themselves are already bland enough. All of the above, together with the generic and simple combat, make the generally decent but scarse sex scenes feel like a reward not worth the effort.

Overall, this game's flaws are silly and feel like they come from either lazyness or simply not knowing how to code. You can't even replay the h scenes, the gallery only have pictures and not even all of them are there.

In conclusion, I really wish developers of porn games would spend more time learning how to code and how to use an engine before they decide to release a game and creating a patreon. You don't need a incredible story nor unique gameplay, but for the love of God make sure your game isn't a pain in the ass to play.

It's a beautiful game, but the creator of this thinks that 20 min between hscene and hscene is good xdd

Is a beautiful pictures with a REALLY BAD gameplay, is sooo bored, i just want jerk off bro, can you give me more pictures and less gameplay?

Is rpg game, good art but bad game develop, i don't recommend it.

Version: v2.0.2

Great art and an interesting story, yet terribly painful gameplay that feels like an absolute chore. A game with great pros and worse cons, cannot give it anything more than 3 stars.

One of the best!
It doesn't deserve the low rating at all.
I love the pic and the mechanics. Should be developed more though.
Hope to see more content in the future (especially for the goblin).
I will be monitoring this one closely.

In short, the artwork and overall story is quite good... but the gameplay is buggy as all hell.

In long:
The story of how you strand on an island along with a big-tiddy elf girl is quite fun to be honest. It is not deep in terms of character motivations or plotlines, but it is solid and easy to follow: you're stuck on the island... gather materials to fix the boat, and kill monsters that wander the island. Simple enough.
The artwork is also very nice. The elf girl Idrune, and vampire girl Talitha are very well drawn and the enviroment of the island is well crafted in RPGM. The voice acting that is there is very well done.No complaints there.

But the game is extremely buggy. There are a dozen or so moments that i had, without completing the game mind you, that were next to gamebreaking.
- Quests that do not register properly
- Quests that do not finish, despite that all tasks have been completed
- a irreversible black screen that will prevent you from playing entirely
along with a 'guide/walkthrough' that offers only info on the items and where to get them... but nothing on how to get them, where to advance first, how to complete quests. Some items are missing entirely in this guide, despite that they are quest items.
Leaves? Here is where you find them. This book that is a quest item? ..... ..... ....

If the author would come back to this game and flesh it out a bit more/ remove the completed tag, or at least fix the bugs that are definitely there... this game could be quite enjoyable. But for now, based on what is there, it is only half enjoyable... as long as you can dodge the bugs.
Those odds are not in you favour.

It is sad that this game is not better made that it was. It started of as quite fun....

LATE EDIT: After downloading the correct version (the initial download link was the wrong one apparently) i can say that the bugs were reduced to only a handful. A few still existed... but it was not nearly as bad as i first described in this review.
2/5 at first is now a 3/5 stars. The ending did not work 100% with me, and i get random frame-drops... but aside from that and 2 other minor issues. This game became quite fun.

This game does not deserve to have 2 Stars, as its glaring faults can easily be cheated away. The H-Scenes are of the highest Quality and the Voice Acting is very professional. If you play it without cheating however, i pity your soul, for the grind will *grind* you down. The gameplay itself is solid, if uninspired, normal RPGM stuff really.

Beginning was fun but really soon it become boring and time wasting.
Very long game with very few and really small scenes which is nothing but images with no sound.
If you looking for action definitely not for you.
Doing tasks takes a lot of time and the reward isn't even worth it
Really Disappointing/

The art is 5 stars for me, if it had more it would be even better.

Now for the rest of the game, I didn't track how much time I've spent in the game, but I do remember playing it for at least 4 hours, and well, despite of the bugs that the other users mentioned, when I got to play the game I don't really remember having a problem like it, I believe that it worked pretty fine, even with me messing around with the save editor(I used it more on the Items, other than that I only used it on the stamina/energy variable) it worked pretty fine.

The grind surely is annoying, because of the limit of items the game has, even if you go and add 9999 to everything, it'll change its quantity to 80 when you use it, so you'll need to go back to the editor and change it again. But in the end it is part of the game, and considering that the version I used is new, I do remember reading some answers from the Dev about doing some tweaks on the grind, so it might be better now.

I'm not sure if the lewd pacing is better on a clean game, but for me it was pretty slow, considering that after I accomplished most of the objectives in the first days I didn't see much, seriously, at some point before the first lewd scene unlock(besides the rope scene), the game could totally pass as a "No sexual content game" considering how much I've played. So far, what I could understead from the scenes is that you need to sleep a lot to get them, and well, even if you go and simply sleep, sleep and sleep, there's some things that happen when you sleep to make this action a little slower, you can even get attacked during the night to make it even slower. I'm fine if this is how the lewd scenes progress work, but some scenes out of the "You need to sleep to progress" would be totally welcome, oh considering that I never died in the game, I don't know if you'll get anything out of losing, I didn't even bother to try it considering that the player character's is pretty much alone most of the time.

The grinding mechanic is ass , the survival aspect of the game is ass , the few artwork are pretty cool . This game is a typical case of "I need my game to last a good amount of hours, but I don't have enough content to do it, so what I'm going to do is add some shitty mechanics and make it as buggy as possible"

The idea of the game is not bad, for it she gets 2 stars.
Protracted entry for 15 minutes, protracted dialogs and other actions, protracted transitions between locations.
Horrible ancient RPGmaker with uncomfortable menus, which authors of the game managed to make even more uncomfortable.
For half an hour of the game I saw 1 picture of a bare ass, that's all.
Instead of naked zombies and vampires in this game there is a voiced dialogue of the captain that appears in the introduction for a minute, this certainly should attract players (sarcasm)
Maybe this is a good game for fans to suffer, but if you came here for an erotic game, I highly DO NOT recommend this to you.

This game could have had a lot more potential, but as it is, I can't really recommend it. The concept sounds interesting and the art is quite nice, but...

• The game is buggy as fuck. To name the most prominent ones I encountered:
  • The game prompts you to save when you wake up in the morning but, that ends up corrupting the save file. Instead you need to save the game outside that specific prompt for the saves to work.
  • Severe bugs with dialogue. Most egregious example being one of the NPCs that first needs to be given a specific type of item to continue talking with her, after which you need to find quest drop items for her. When you give her the quest item, she gives her usual "wrong item"-response. If you now try to talk to her again, she will be locked into the answer she was supposed to give for said quest item for rest of the day.
  • With the same NPC as above, if you just spam dialogue with her she completely randomly gives you a scene that I assume should trigger from something else.
  • After giving her quest items, she will randomly revert to 2nd part of her quest line.
  • I assume it is a bug, but I never actually unlocked one of the NPC's affection meter. Her dialog seemed to garble up when I was prompted to meet her, after which I never unlocked the ability to give her any gifts.
• Terrible design choices, of which there are multitude:
  • Hidden enemies: Some of the enemies hide behind the foreground graphics. This is especially bad design since these particular enemies can't really be beaten without any upgrades... And you can't escape from combat.
  • Ore veins that provide iron, gold, obsidian and coal deplete. Every time you mine them they give random selection of their respective ores and have a chance to run out. This means that to ensure that you can actually finish the game you have to save-scum or use save editor.
  • Scenes are locked behind day counter. You need to meet the NPCs initial affection meter requirement by set dates. If you don't, you can't continue their story at all. After meeting said requirements, their content will progress forward regardless of what you do.
• Puzzles are hit or miss. Some are extremely easy to figure out, some seem like they are easy to figure out but are either buggy or require very specific way to accomplish them and some just have no clues and require trial and error to complete.
• The game forces you to deplete your stamina every day before you sleep. The game also can't be finished in any other way than hitting the final day. This means that if you finish the game's goals early, you still need to go out of your way to use all that stamina to progress, even if it doesn't really do anything anymore.
  • This is made worse by the fact that you have cap to how many of each item you can carry. Oh and you can't throw away stuff. You can also waste stamina by handful of actions, but those tend to be slower than just finding resources to collect.

Overall the game could have been significantly better if the developer had bothered to iron out the bugs and touch up on the mechanics.

So I decided to revisit this game after over a year, and let me tell ya, I'm not disappointed. All my main gripes were corrected. I said this

Pros
+Grind has largely been removed. Gathering materials isn't difficult. Combat can be challenging but it isn't unfair. Everything is reasonably balanced.
+ The game is significantly less buggy. All the core functions work properly.
+Easy & hard modes were added, allowing the player to chose a playstyle. If you want to take it easy and search for secrets and easter eggs you can now in easy mode, there is no consequences to playing this way. All h-content can be unlocked this way.
+ Much more content was added. There are more monster girls to fuck around with, in addition to the main two.

Cons
These are not major complaints just sort of nit picks.
- The background is buggy. Sometimes the paralax that makes the level doesn't load properly. Usually this can be resolved by opening and closing the menu but not always. Sometimes this causes the night time map change not to take effect. This isn't the fault of the devs. Animated paralaxes in Rpg Maker MV bug out constantly, it is a reoccurring problem with the system.
- Could there be more content? Sure. However with that being said, there is still quite a bit here. I mostly started fucking with this game for the visuals, the art style as you've surely noticed it pretty damn good, but there's actually quite a lot of text based erotica here. If you're into that, you'll love this, but if you're a more visually oriented person you might want a bit more.

Conclusions
In conclusion this game had a lot of potential and has largely lived up to it. It's got plenty of H-content, and is fun to play in my opinion. Survival/crafting focused games are pretty well suited to the RPG maker engine. If the devs kept on making games of this quality i'd be perfectly satisfied with them. There's enough h-content to appeal to degenerates like us, and it's become a decent enough game to enjoy playing on it's on.

If you've been skeptical thus far I say give it a go. It's pretty damn good.

I'm playing 1.0.4 right now. Why in the hell did the developer consider this a 1.0 release? It has a lot of bugs, and it is extremely grindy. The art and the idea is nice, but right now there's too many negatives holding it down. If they fix the bugs and make it far less grindy, I could give it a 4 or a 5.

Survival grind and porn are two game genres that do not go well together, but when the porn part is so lacking it's almost non-existent (think 2 scenes in the entire game), you end up with a shitty survival game that doesn't even make up for it with good porn