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

I played it for a good 6 to 7 hours. It's a weird game all in all.
It offers some good ai art, scenes, and choices. But I feel like the game re-invents itself with each new chapter. The introduction starts off by saying it's a slow-burner and not sandbox and story heavy, etc. And suddenly, as of a later chapter, it's a full on sandbox game.
I understand, of course, that throughout the course of development, you want to try something as a dev, but it just seems a bit inconsistent.

But all in all, I had fun for a while. (Although it was a bit "smell fetish" heavy )

The ART sits right in that uncanny valley of AI stuff, not a dealbreaker per se but definitely enough to be offputting at times.

The WRITING though really reads like if you asked an AI to throw out a story but only gave it Wattpad fanfiction as training data. At least if it was unapologetically bad because the game is not about its writing, it would be tolerable. But this game puts its entire focus on the bonds between characters.

Honestly, this is a very good game!

• The initial learning curve for the mechanics can be a bit tedious, maybe even frustrating. I was close to saying "to hell with this," but I held on. Something about the facial expressions, the music, and the overall vibe whispered, "Wait, you won't regret it." I listened, and I’m glad I did
• Once I cleared that hurdle and dove into the story and relationship dynamics, I was completely hooked. The emotions, the writing, the tension, and the superb execution of the romance and NTR elements—the atmosphere is just immersive. The characters easily find a way into your heart because they feel alive, thanks to excellent writing and those very good facial expressions which really elevate the experience
• Approach this title as a brand-new experience. That is actually one of its biggest selling points: it doesn't feel like just another generic game. The novelty of the experience is a major strength in itself
• Other highlights include the serious tone of the narrative, the high-stakes tension in relationships, and the solid internal logic of the game world. The sound design, special effects, and especially the music amplify that tension. The soundtrack is impactful, perfectly timed, and fits the mood of every scene flawlessly. I will definitely be following this project

Suggestions (I haven't played all the content yet):

• Combat System: This feels weak compared to the rest of the game. It’s currently too simple and lacks tension, excitement, or emotional weight. Adding specific attack/defense arts, paired with reactive facial expressions and other mechanics, would solve this
• Game Engine: Is HTML the right choice, or would Python/RPGM be better? This isn't a demand to switch, just food for thought. I’m sure many players are fans of the Ren'Py engine rather than HTML. Migrating to Ren'Py could significantly boost the game's popularity and revenue, as it generally outperforms HTML in every respect for this genre

No other suggestions for now. I highly recommend this to anyone with a bit of patience—it pays off

Honestly, I don't get all of the good reviews in this game.

The writing is atrocious. It's not QSP level bad, but it's pretty terrible, sometimes you can't tell if someone is talking or thinking their lines. And the Constant * in front of every dialogue box is I guess a style choice?

One of the things that gets me though is the constant POV changing. Do you want me as the player to feel attached to the MC? Well changing POV while one LI has a sexy scene with another LI just breaks any kind of attachment I had to any of the characters.

The 100's of variables, that you have almost 0 player agency in affecting is annoying too. It does a check, and either shows a pass or fail text, but the story still continues as if the check didn't mean anything. Want those scenes to actually mean something? All the checks should've been done prior to rendering the scene, and then only show the success or failure. And because there is so much POV changing, you aren't actually sure who the checks are for or against.

Still confused on why the GF grew a dick one night. And your free roam options are: watch an NTR scene or give a handy to your girl friend. Hell I'll give you NTR if I make choices that follow the NTR path, but there aren't options.

And when you get to the end of chapter 6, the full screen pop-ups? You aren't pacing the story by slowing down the enjoyment of the player, you are just annoying the reader.

There's a distinct lack of explanation on what the "kinks" actually are and 7 chapters in and almost no Kink progression doesn't give me any kind of hope for the future of this game.

There are a lot of interesting ideas in this work, but all are poorly executed and really destroys any semblance of fun or interest.

I really like the slow corruption in this game. It's a different kind of approach of NTR for once. I really like Seryk and Serin. The story is amazing well written and the music is superb! Love it and dig the fetishes!

I rarely give AI cg games a chance but this one ticked the right boxes and seemed to want to do something interesting with it's systems so I decided to give it a go and though I was at first pleasantly surprised, the game got worse and worse as time went on.

The story is a bit generic, and I dislike the presentation of it. Every text is too long and repetitive. I don't think it was entirely written by an AI, but it was definitely written with one. This makes the moment to moment reading a slog, but it's not as bad as the overarching narrative.

The writing has no sense of tempo. Half the time I can't tell apart important moments from mostly inconsequential ones because everything is always happening all of the time. There's no breathing room, no moment where the characters actually look around and evaluate where they're at.

The developer tries really hard to sell you on this "slow burn corruption" theme, and to their credit they try really hard to achieve it too, but it fails hard, not only because the game narrative is built upon the crutch that Nimeria can get anyone to do whatever she wants whenever she wants, overwriting any ethical or reasonable concern, but also because none of the characters give 2 fucks about anything to begin with.

The characters are all constantly conflicted about doing all these 'o so wrong things but it's almost impossible to read them as anything other than looking for an excuse to do just that when they will accept any justification to go through with it. I'm not talking about the player choices, I'm talking about how those choices are internalized by the characters textually. It's a joke.

But the worst part is, maybe everything I've said is completely wrong, and the game has great pacing, andthe writing is natural and characters develop rationally. And I will never know. Because the game is broken. A lot of events clearly happen out of order. Serin's event of "holy shit, why do I have a dick" happened after the game was already treating her as having a dick for the entirety of the gameplay. Characters show up before they were actually introduced, and are treated with a level of importance after the one appearence that makes me wonder if there were supposed to be more events inbetween. Mariel seems to be the only person who notices or cares that the MC is turning into a woman, and that's really weird considering everyone in that house wants to have sex with him. Liora has been so completely absent from any instances of character development that I simply must have missed some mandatory events with her.

The vibe I get is that as new systems kept being introduced, not enough care was put into making sure the effects of the new systems wouldn't sequence break the plot. And since the game is basically 19 different game systems in a trenchcoat, everything is messed up.

It's kind of entertaining I guess. And there is some real potential there.It might even get a fan remake one day to fix all of the problems. Until then, I'm done with it

Gave this a try because of all the praising reviews it has on here. I must say I'm a bit let down considering how much praise it got and how difficult a 4* rating on this site is to maintain.

I'm not going to bark about the "i chose not to do this act, and I still did it!" crew because the game literally tells you "this is how the game handles the seduction/failed resistance checks immersively. I'm tired of the games that SAY you will be seduced, and then you still have to click "are you sure you want to be seduced? yes/no"". It works here and I kinda dig it. It has enough complete shut down options such as for gay/futa/fem content, and I skip through the things I'm not overly involved in.

It is an autobattler novel, and to it's credit, the story is really good. It's a damn good premise with alot of setup and twists. If you go at it as a story rather than a H game then you might be pleasantly surprised.

The problem is after those hours, when you have been patient and now want the H in your H game, from chapter 6 onwards there is no organic development. It makes this HUGE bluster about fetishes, and dynamically developing, and girls remembering your choices and adapting to them, but the problem is; the big H scenes never happen outside of those first few night visits/training sessions. There are still cutins and dreams, but it's not the same organic development as it had in the first few chapters such as with Serin.

It's actually impossible to initiate, and you soon realise that this whole thing is actually just 2-3 preset dreams/training sessions, and you can never repeat or advance them after that. I thought once I got into chapter 7, had the dungeon and the sandbox, I could at least select "visit girl" or wait to be visited again or something, but absolutely nothing happens after chapter 6.

Because of that, I can only go 2.5/5 middle of the pack. As a visual novel it's great for the story, as a combat engaging game it's....it's just not, and the H is only 10% of this H game. Seryn is a true bro though

UPDATE: I need to acknowledge one thing, the same day after posting this review I received a PM from the dev detailing every single scene in chapter 6 and 7. Now while it is still presets to be repeated, rather than dynamically shaped, I have to recognise and respect that level of involvement and responsibility, upping this review to 4 stars.

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.