HTML - Bonds Defiled [v0.7A5 public] [Bonds Defiled]

I really really wanted to like this because the concept sounds awesome. However, once you play it.... well, you don't really play it. The entire combat system is an auto battler that you gain stats for and get currency for to..... buff the auto battler? You don't get anything from it, you are just autobattling to autobattle more. There's no gameplay there in any way. It's a complete waste. I mean that literally, there is no point to the combat system at all, it doesn't gatekeep scenes or anything, you could remove the ENTIRE combat system and it would not affect ANYTHING in the game. Nothing! There's also this night time visit mechanic where you can visit other characters to mess around with dream sequences and advances relationships with characters, but this is not consistent and ends up removing or completely changing this gameplay mechanic as the chapters go, so what is the point?

The other big gameplay dud is that E V E R Y T H I N G is a dice roll. Even content you don't want to see is a dice roll! Do you want to smell this characters dirty smelly feet? You don't and you selected resist? Well my friend, unfortunately the dice roll says you HAVE to. Smell those feet and enjoy it because fuck you that's why. Why are there not even basic content filters? Do you want to see this type of content? Yes or no? That's all you had to do. If you want to keep track of all these different variables for fetishes and such, just keep track of how many times the player chose them over other ones. That's it, no dice rolls needed ever.

As for the art, it's AI art so you will either like it or not, there's not really an inbetween. I don't mind AI art if it's consistent and it's actually high quality and doesn't spit out 6 fingered abominations, and it doesn't do that here so I think it's pretty well done. The characters are all consistent and the UI and everything does look quite nice, so good job on that front.

However, now for the tactical nuke of bad news. The writing and narration is a disaster. There are pages and pages and pages and pages of text, just books of story thrown at you constantly. Even worse, most of this is not even for your character! I have NO interest at all in experiencing flashbacks and views from all of these other characters. I don't care about their AI generated sob stories. Let me just play my character and CHOOSE my story. That is why I chose my character, right? There's also extremely annoying fade ins and transition screens which you cannot skip. Text very slowly appears about some weird shit that is clearly AI written and you are stuck there. You HAVE to watch it fade in, and sometimes it takes up to a minute for everything to finish. That is ABSURD. Especially since sometimes it's for these side characters or flashbacks that you have 0 interest in. Just atrocious.

Honestly overall, this is essentially a kinetic novel. How so, you might ask? Well, sure you can click choices, but are they really your choices? If you choose not to see a scene or to go a certain route and the dice roll overrides your choice, then it's not your choice, it's the games choice. YOU do not get to choose, you are at the mercy of the dice, and that goes for EVERYTHING. Combat, fetishes, content you want to see or not see (even the night time NTR is a dice roll!!!) are all rolled. The only thing consistent here is the AI art, which is impressive because usually it is not. Honestly, this game tries to be way too much and pull itself in way too many directions. As such, the game ends up being a bit of a mess. You wouldn't be wrong to still give the game a shot, but just be warned that it's unlikely you'll be the one in the driver seat.

This one surprised me in a good way.
The story is rich and branching with tons of choices and even though the fetish system isn’t fully implemented yet, it already shows a lot of promise.
The atmosphere, pacing and music all pull you in, making it feel way more immersive than most games in the genre and engine.
Sure, the AI-generated art and writing rough spots are noticeable, but it's easy to overlook given for now. Though I wish it would be updated later on.
Judging by how aspiring it is and how many options in this game are, I hope the dev wouldn't burn out or stretch it forever as a lot of ambitious projects had done.

The game desperately needs health update. This is a mess. Feels like the whole game was made with AI - art, story, systems, frontend. What is the point of "hundreds of variables affecting every interaction" if in the end it kinda doesn't? What is the point of the night interactions if there're barely any? What is the point of auto battler if it instantly skips and you barely see it? What is the point of auto battler if it was later changed to another system?

I am not joking about AI or saying it lightly btw. Art - it's alright. Story - it's not alright, genuinely massive AI slop that you usually cut down by 90% after generating for essays or reports, but the author didn't, feels like they kept everything, such a slog to read and most of it pointless. Systems - so much is getting tracked and calculated which looks cool but I don't see the point of it. Once again - you could cut down 90% of it and it would have been fine. Frontend - there are so many different animations for various things and the problem of it that it's inconsistent as fuck. Like no way you just did this cool animation just not to use it ever again and instead create a new one for the same shit. Chapters start differently, they end differently, POVs change differently, like really?

In the end you have story you don't give a fuck about, characters you couldn't care less, various systems barely doing anything, incoherent use of mechanics, non-existent gameplay loop, animations that take 10 seconds to change one scene to another, barely any porn at all which I think is the worst sin. Sure, you want to make a game with porn and not just scene collector but you surely can do better than 95/5 text-to-porn ratio, which I remind you, is a mind-numbing slog.

Currently the game is barely a game, more like like curious experiment how ChatGPT can enhance your game development experience. 1 star minimum + 1 star for Serin's scenes, they were hot ngl.

In finishing this review I've read roadmap and discovered the author plans to add dungeon management mechanic, you can't make this up man. Might as well add deck builder mechanics and survival horror elements, why not? The more - the merrier!

I think this game is a rough gem, a gem that is not sure at the moment in what form it want to be sculpted.So what it's like? It's a story driven VN with scenes collection element and a random dungeon exploration.

So basically, you follow the story, during story interim you explore the dungeon for loot and at night you collect scene.From those three elements only one feel really grounded, the other two feel hollows. Let's drive into them a bit more.

Story: Dev give us a bunch of characters, some are habitual cliché, some are more original.

we have at first:
-The perfect (boring?) girlfriend,
-The Frustrated (adoptive?) mother,
-The Jealous ( bodybuilder ?) childhood-friend

Then a bit later one:

-The failed (impotent?) Father figure
-The ( chivalrous? ) Bull
and
-The manipulative (Yandere?) Gremlin

...we also have Sora, I like her but she don't like me

This is where the corruption system will, I hope, come handy. We should be able to make the boring characters more interesting.

On that front, nothing much to say, I like the cast and the story is nice, I just hope the first three character will get a little something to make them more interesting, the mother and the girlfriend are basically the same character and the Childhood friend just doesn't do it for me...

Give black magic to the girlfriend and make the childhood-friend the mind slave of our Gremlin and we will talk

The dungeon pat is pretty bare bone at the moment and there nothing much to do with the resources we gain from it, we get a scene from time to time but sadly we can simply miss it if we win(fail?) a dice check... I would personally completely skip that part for the moment, maybe it will become more interesting in the future idk but at the moment it is not.

And for the scene collector, at night the Gremlin can enter the dream of the characters (not much atm) and alter they dream. This could be very interesting, but at the moment there no impact on the story/Gameplay or characters them self (maybe in the future?) so it's only a scene collector 100% skip-able for now

I overall really like the game and I can see the potential there, I think that with this cast of characters the dev can make a very interesting story, but careful to not add to many.

So this is very well-made and has some amazing corruption ideas behind it, but there are some issues that push it down to four stars.

1. Is the number of essentially unskippable dramatic cutscenes; these are fun on a first playthrough but this is a game that very specifically has branching paths; being forced to sit through a long dramatic monologue just to see a different corruption outcome is annoying.

2. A lot of the AI art pushes way into the uncanny valley. Trying to get a more cartoon-y style, similar to what already exists for a couple of the later Mariel scenes, would make things much better on that regard.

3. The game handles the jump from drama to comedy quite poorly; right now its essentially divided into 'Comedic light-hearted scene' and 'very dark drama scene' in a way that gives boner-killing tonal whiplash, making the lighter scenes darker and the darker scenes lighter would help things feel more consistent.

Having said all that, the theme is great, the corruption mechanic is splendid, I really like that the game is very upfront about what decisions lead to what fetishes, and the sound design is perhaps the best I've seen for a HTML game. There's a classic here, it just needs a bit of work.

This game is ambitious but poorly done. I would forgive the AI art (which mostly keeps characters consistent) if the writing was any good but I have a bad feeling that a LLM had a hand in writing it too, given how over-written it is.

Again that would be sort of tolerable if anything else about the "game" worked. Skill checks pass and fail with out discernible impact, except some minor flavour-text changes but leading to the same outcome. It makes the unnecessarily complex (and poorly controllable) fetish system feel very superfluous.

Combat is an auto battler but I thought it had glitched the first time I saw it happen - it happens so quickly that you don't even see the outcome of each combat action. You don't have any clue whether your characters are doing well or poorly, and if you should bother with the opaque training system.

As you get further into the game, it seems to want to try and force you to slow down and engage with its laborious text. There are forced, unskippable animated fades filled with cliches every scene change that could easily be removed without impacting anything. If it's to try and set the mood, it's not doing its job well for me. There's also an artificial delay when changing character perspectives that does not seem to be performance related - again it could be removed without impacting anything.

This game is pretty story-heavy, but in a really good way. If you’re looking for a sandbox-style game where you just grind to unlock scenes, this isn’t for you.

It starts off feeling like a pretty generic story, but it picks up and gets interesting really fast. The author doesn’t hold back on kinks, and I like that there’s queer content too. Plus, you can filter out anything you’re not into through your choices.

The music and songs are fantastic, the writing’s solid, and the update speed is insane. There aren’t any animations, but there are tons of images, and honestly, that’s more than enough for me.

It’s a bit railroaded at the start, but not in a bad way. The further you get, the more freedom you have, which makes the progression feel really satisfying.

I also like the unique take on NTR. It feels different from the usual stuff. I played the latest (paid) version and really enjoyed the new features with transformations and the daily schedule. The author’s super active with the community, both here and on discord, which is rare to see. Overall, it’s easily my favorite HTML game right now and can't wait for more.

I like the idea of the game but the execution feels very poor.
There is practically no gameplay. The game keeps introducing new systems, but never really lets you use them. For example, in the beginning of the game it introduces this night time mechanic where you as the protagonist choose whose room to go to and who talk to, and how sometimes there will be the other male character in the room up to no good and you can intervene etc. Except, after playing through the rest of the game up to the end of the available content, there were maybe a handful of other times where I, as the protagonist, could go and talk to other characters, one being in the morning, and that was it. So what is the point of this mechanic? Why isn't this a thing that happens automatically every day?

The game is entirely on rails. You have a quest log, but you have no choice in accepting or even doing quests. You can't control where or what you do. Same with the money. You can spend money at a book shop to raise or lower fetishes, or spend money to reroll/remove corruptions (not that any of these things matter much), but you have no way in the game to really make money, because you don't get to choose when to go to a dungeon, the game decides when it is time to go.

All of the battles (not that there is many) are auto battles. You have no control. What is the point of all these character stats when battles are over in like 5 seconds and just RNG dice rolls? You barely fight anyway so I guess it doesn't matter.

There is a "fetish" mechanic, but what is the point to it? What does it do? For example if I were to spend money at the book shop to buy books raising one of the protag's fetishes, what impact does that have? To give you a higher chance of losing dice rolls against said fetish? But losing a dice roll only means you gain more fetish etc and some lust. Very very rarely does actually losing a dice roll result in some different content, and even then, it is still a dice roll, so it is RNG that you can still easily succeed or fail regardless of your fetish stats.

You also maybe only spend like 10% of the game as the "protagonist". You do one thing, then have to sit through a hundred pages of text from different perspectives of different characters. This is constant throughout the entire game. It is insufferable. It feels like the game is doing everything in it's power to prevent you from actually playing the game.

It needs a gameplay loop. ie morning activities (prepare to go dungeoning, talk to characters, buy items/gear), afternoon (dungeon crawling), night time (talk to characters, sexy times, whatever) and put other story events in between. You might have a story event in the morning, then after it is finished you are at the morning part of the gameplay loop, then you choose to go to the dungeon and you have a story event that plays on the way to the dungeon, after which you are dungeon crawling, etc.

As it is the game has a frustrating lack of control from the player, and overall feels largely directionless with the way it is setup and the introduction/use of mechanics.

Sorry but this is just not good. This game is just a Diary Book where you click through. There arent even Videos in this game, just pictures.
It's just an endless click game where you get massive text and some pictures.
Not recommended for those who want to see something.

Completed Chapter 4 and can't wait for Chapt 5!

Firstly, thanks for creating and putting in so much effort into such an enjoyable game. Really love that there is world building, interesting characters and kinks to explore, option for straight and gay, and an intriguing magic and corruption system. It is also refreshing to see a dev so involved in the community and discussing feedback and roadmap!

Several hopefuls for future development
1) hope to see more character development for Seryk.
2) saw some hints of body sensitivity? curious how that will be introduced in the game
3) hope the masculine transformation for MC will give more
4) hope for future gay characters

That is all for now, back to playing the game

Finally, a game that doesn't resort to cheap interporn.

I like games that build up slowly. In other games, I often find it implausible how quickly a “normal” man becomes a super submissive person.

Here, it's different and builds up nicely and slowly.

I also really like the graphics. Very sexy images and different body types. I can actually tell the individual protagonists apart in this game.

I'm already looking forward to the next versions, and since I like the game, I immediately became a Patreon member.

Very promising, I just think it needs a sandbox cycle before each chapter so you can enjoy some day-loops and watch all the scenes you can access before going to the next chapter. Also need more futa.

Really enjoying the game. The story’s fun, music fits perfectly, and there’s a ton of different kinks already for how new it is. Lots of content, and the dev hangs out on the forum and actually listens to people. Super promising game.

Normally I don't mention art because you can look at previews and quickly know how you'll like it. But this really has a lot of errors, poor anatomy details, everyone's so greasy, a lot of art is adding absolutely nothing to the scene, sometimes there's multiple generated pictures for the same act and none of them are good. You might think AI art is low effort, but this can show you lower effort than you anticipated.

The writing is intensely uninspired. Character writing feels generic, plot is honestly garbage, and it all feels made up as it goes along with no planning. Maybe they did plan it, I can't tell you they didn't, but doesn't feel like it.

I’m not mad at it, but I’m not loving it yet.

The UX is almost good. It's partially user-friendly in how things are organized and accessed, and there are some decent cinematic moments created by changes in music and background changes during important beats in the story. However, the delayed text appearance is just flat-out bad UX—users should never have to wait an arbitrary amount of time progress to the next page. I also think there’s an overuse of padding and borders in the dialogue bubbles in some pages, which results in 5 lines of dialogue requiring a user to scroll.

The story is okay. The sex scenes are pretty good, and most the nonerotic scenes are tolerable, but it’s absolutely filled with fantasy clichés—The late-blooming hero who’s finally going to prove himself. The powerful, misunderstood bad boy who becomes the protagonist’s friend. The sexually pure girlfriend who’s the party’s healer. The tomboy friend who’s hiding a crush on the hero. The friend of the father who turns out to be more than he appeared…

The (AI) art is hit or miss. Most of the women’s models are fine (aside from always looking like they're glistening). However, the demon guy looks a bit too fake with a 10-pack of abs, 0% body fat, and a cock wider than his arm. The fact that even the father’s wizard friend looks like he’s yoked under his robe makes me wonder if this is some kind of Jojo world where HGH is in the water.

The really interesting thing this game has going for it is the soul forging/fetish mechanic. The way you can shift the variables of (at least) SIX party members’ kinks means there COULD be some exciting branching coming soon. Of course, this is barely used at the moment and entirely contingent on the author being able to juggle the MASSIVE matrix of variables they’re creating. If they can, this game could turn into something pretty damned good.

Overall, as of version 0.43b, there’s not much to see, but I’ll be cautiously watching its progress.

This game is very thought-provoking, I like the ideas they've implemented so far with the corruption, it's well thought-out. For me, the most important part of games is the story and imperfect yet likeable characters, which this game has done well on both accounts. Looking forward to future releases!

Really enjoyed the writing and quality of the story. This is based on finishing version 0.21a. (prologue and 2 chapters took a few hours).The AI images work nicely and the relationships/dialogues between characters is done well. It'd be nice if future updates added a few animations for sex scenes or more sound effects but it's still fine the way it is. The mellow music coupled with writing and images still conjures up a believable erotic fantasy set in ancient times. Fetish choices are well defined for the routes you choose for your character.

It gets points for style and scope, but is incredibly verbose in it's writing to content ratio. Plenty of systems aren't very well fleshed out, and given the bredth of it's various modifiers that the game keeps track of, you might be mistaken at first for assuming it's sandbox - it isn't, it's very much on the rails at all points. Not quite kinetic since there are choices, but with a very limited approach so far.

The AI art is also quite soulless and basic, some of the artwork feels very disjointed to what proceeded it.

It seems to be quite the slow burn also, with limited content in chapter 3 so far which is the current limit as of this review; that said it does try to do something new and for that it has my respect.

3 stars is all I can give this project at this time, it definitely needs a lot of content, and in my personal oppinion perhaps a little more sandbox given the various attribute systems the game keeps track of seems to lend itself to such projects.

Love the game, love the concept, love the art, love it all! The story may not seem interesting or unique at first glance, but in truth this is a rare gem: the plot is really interesting and despite being still in an early phase, you can clarely see the potential, the intriguing plot moving behind the scenes, the characters relations that will evolve. I really appreciate that it includes both gay and straight content, it's not easy to find good content that appeal both inclinations, and I really love that here I can see that both are equally important. Ok, the gay content is not really equal, but it's relevant, it's there, and it's really good. Kudos for that, at least one person appreciate that choice. The writing is interesting, captivating and, generally, well written, and the art is also really good. It's in an early stage, yes, but it deserve support and attention. This could be a really epic game/adventure. 5/5!

the def if obviously trying to create a game where every importand char is well... that.. importand...
dev is not ruhsing anything but is rly going all in on the premise of giving every single character and couple time to develop and explain thair relationship.

this might seem tedious for the everage modern audience, but if you want to make game like this,with as many possible branches, there is no other choice.
the AI is also rly solid, just another field where the dev rly tried to keep a certain standart and it looks good.
there are only 2 thinks in this game is could falter:
one is just how ambitious it is. i mean, if all the dev said is rly possible i praise him from here to mars.. this game is rly one of a kind.. but it is just sounds to good to be true.
the other one is that i wish the MC would not just be sidelined for other relationships couse i thing main point should still be MC (no matter the gender).
def has already pointed out that MC would be persued and i know this is probably my " i -hate-hard-ntr" voice talking, but the chars so far are writen rly well to the point where it rly feels that they are real friend and dont wanna hurt eath other.
im probably to sensitive but it feels like there should be no need for conflict between the main cast.
anyway dev is rly good at writing relatiinships and so far i trust in his abilities