Come for the sex, stay for the depression.
Black Souls is a very high-effort Souls-like RPG-Maker game with sexual content.
I think it's a very good game overall but what really stood out to me was its ability to evoke a fairly wide range of emotions.
There are scene that are genuinely sad, disturbing, heartwarming, and even cute.
It's a much wider range than I expected from a "porn" game.
That said, it's a pretty dark game overall so expect that to be the prevailing theme.
I'll now go into a bit more detail about the different aspects of the game:
General Setup:
As the name implies, Black Souls is Dark Souls inspired.
- Game is set in a dark medieval fantasy type world
- You earn "Souls" which are both your general currency and used to level up
- There are bonfires which serve as heal stations and fast-travel locations
- There are fog-gates before boss encounters and combat is pretty challenging
- The map is not strictly linear and you have some freedom in the order that you do stuff
Additionally, you can recruit quite a few different (female) companions to aid you in battle.
I think there are about 8 companions you can recruit in total, but only 3 can be summoned at a time so don't expect to use all of them in one playthrough.
This also being a hentai game, giving companions souls to level-up comes with a sex scene and you can also fuck them normally in a few situations.
For the more evil-minded people, you can also rape any women you come across (including your companions) as well as kill any NPC.
The "evil" aspect of the game didn't appeal to me personally but there is plenty of lewd content even without it so it's not required to have a good time.
The premise of the story is that you have this fog that is turning people into demon-beasts.
To stop the fog you need to defeat a head demonic princess, and to even approach said princess you need to kill or make a deal with 4 other demonic princesses that are spread across the map.
All bosses you encounter are based off of a fairy tale, though they tend to be heavily twisted in some sort of dark way. As an example, one of the first bosses you encounter, Hansel and Gretel, have the modified backstory of "Abandoned by their mother during a famine, Hansel and Gretel hallucinate a house made of cake"
A dynamic changing world:
One of the signs that this is a high-effort game is how the map changes as you progress.
As you defeat bosses time "progresses" and you have NPCs appear, disappear, have new tasks, new bosses appear etc. etc.
Furthermore, this chain of events is not linear which is easy to miss if you only do one playthrough. Depending on what you do, different NPCs will die and/or turn into demonbeasts.
To give an example, on my first playthrough I rescued a companion after defeating a boss. Standard RPG stuff. On my 2nd playthrough I defeated the boss later and the companion was just dead. Had that been my first playthrough I would have dismissed her as just one of the many corpses you come across, but no. I could have saved her, but she died because I wasn't fast enough. Truth hurts.
The combat system:
Dark Souls has a very skill-based combat system, so you might wonder how that translates to an RPG Maker game where battles are primarily stat based.
You would be right to worry that instead of being fun challenges, bosses are just level-checks that you need to grind for.
Having done my second playthrough on the highest difficulty where pretty much everything will 1-shot you if given the chance, I can happily report that the game is beatable with very minimal grinding.
What makes the combat work are a few aspects:
1. Non-alternating combat turns
In BS each character has an AP bar that fills up according to their "Speed" stat.
When the bar is full, they get to take their turn.
So different characters take actions at different rates, which adds a lot of potential depth to the system.
"Speed" also determines who gets the first action in an encounter, though there is some RNG involved as well.
2. The "Evade" and "Parry" actions
The PC starts with these two actions.
Parry: Until your next turn, negate EVERY standard attack and attack once in response.
Evade: Until your next turn, negate almost everything. (if an action is evadeable, you will evade it every time, but some actions always go through)
Depending on the encounter, Parry can make you invincible while doing damage and Evade can make you invincible in general.
By using these abilities correctly, you can survived encounters even if taking a single hit kills you normally.
3. Status effects
There are numerous status effects, for example:
- Stun
- Sleep
- Poison
- Silence
to name a few. You can probably guess what they do from their names.
Bosses are resistant to these effects, but rarely completely immune.
A lot of battles can be won by figuring out which effects work and applying it at the right moment.
4. Buffs and equipment effects
The character can equip one weapon and up to 4 different rings.
Weapons can be upgraded and at their max level they usually give a powerful new effect.
Basic rings will just give general stat upgrades or make you immune to a certain effect, but some will also grant you very powerful effects.
With the right equipment you can gain effects like taking multiple actions per turn or having a particular stat doubled.
If you know where to find the gear, you can create some very powerful builds.
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With these systems in place, beating a boss is more like a puzzle where you need the right equipment, companions, and strategy rather than just needing enough stats.
That said, the combat is not perfect. My criticisms would be:
1. Taking the first turn is usually essential in order to even have a chance at beating a boss. In that sense, having sufficiently high Speed is a stat requirement for bosses.
This is alleviated a bit by the fact that you can specialize and spend souls to raise only speed, but still.
2. Even a "winning" strategy is usually a bit RNG dependent. It's common that you need a boss to not use a particular skill on a key turn or to not resist a status effect at some point.
So even if your plan is solid, it may only have 20% chance of success and just trying until it works can be annoying.
3. There is no way to check a character's stats in combat. This makes it hard to evaluate whether a buff is worthwhile or not. An ability might say "raises attack" but you have no idea how much it actually raises attack by. You just need to experiment and try to get a feeling for how effective buffs are.
Art-style:
The game uses a very hand-drawn and somewhat scribbly art-style for CG images.
I like it and I think it fits the mood of the game pretty well but I can also see it being unappealing to some people.
Take a look at some of the sample images and decide whether it bothers you.
Quantity of hentai content:
In what I think is a bit of a design issue with the game, it falls into an awkward spot where I don't think it has enough sexual content to be worth playing for that alone, most of the time you are fighting pretty un-sexy monsters, but the sexual content that is there makes it hard to recommend to any normie friends.
So it has a target audience of people who are fine with the sexual content but aren't using it as their primary motivator.
Conclusion:
Anyways, I absolutely recommend this game to anyone who enjoys dark fantasy settings and challenging gameplay.
The game has a lot of care and effort put into it and it really shows.
