Breeders of the Nephelym is an enjoyable, interactive openworld 3D game... This is gonna be a long review... Now, where do i start?
Well, first things first, even though furry stuff isn't even close to any of my kinks, no offense to anyone who loves that, I managed to like this and played it through the end and most of the stuff didn't even bothered me. Why i started playing, is the tag of incest, which i love as a pornographic concept. The original state of the game doesn't include incest. Not anymore that is. It used to have that as a mechanic and you didn't have to mod incest in it back in the day, but it changed because of the bullshit decisions of patreon. Thanks to an awesome person called Poplan, who restored incest into game so you can enjoy it to it's full potential. Seriously, world needs more awesome people like Poplan. Good job bud.
Ok, let's continue with gameplay. It's pretty straight forward. Controls are fine and responsive. You can run, sprint and jump. Walk & run animation for male character looks horrible, feels weird and screams at you that it is copied from female character. Kind of a downer but game redeems itself by it's other great animaitons.
You have a lust meter that fills when you rest or interract and satisfy the creatures you find on the map. You have another meter that unlocks after a certain event and it morphs you into a creature you captured or brood, but i have never used it after seeing what it is so i can't tell you more.
There is a mouse-click quicktime event when you are engaging with creatures, if you fail, you'll lose your lust and the chance of capturing the creature. Make sure to find the NPC that builds the correct housing for the creature you want to capture. You can't keep them otherwise. Don't forget that you can be forcefully used by creatures like you do to them. For some positions, you have no control over the outcome. So watch out, no quicktime event for some animations. And if you lack the lust and get attacked, you'll go down under. There aren't any dangers on the map. If you fall to you death or get snoo snoo'ed to death, you are resurrected by a mysterious figure and have to pay a toll. I'll let you figure out what's the toll.
Once you capture a creature, you can keep it or walk away. If you capture it, you can use it in your homebase to create creatures with simliar traits or sell it to a certain NPC to gain some sort of currency. You can use that currency to learn new positions from an NPC but you'll get to that NPC in very late game. This is a poor decision on developer's part and needs to change immediately to prevent burnouts in my opinion. You keep doing the same thing over and over again up until that point of meeting her. There are different size of creatures and not all positions work with all of them. You'd think at least some animations would work based on the size and animations of some other creatures that corresponds to other creatures, but it doesn't. Also, some animations you are using isn't available at your home base but it is while you are capturing the creature, which is a bummer. But developer is working on to add more or make some animations compatible with other creatures.
Game's main currency is very important. There are several ways to earn them like milking your creatures and selling the product to a certain NPCs. Or you can try to breed a certain kind of creatures for some anonymous requests that are sent to you via a quest board. You can use this currency to build houses for different creatures or to increase your stats. In all forms, trade system works great. I don't know what the developer did different but i didn't feel like i was running a chore once, no matter how many times i did the same thing. Normally stuff like this feels tedious, but not in this game. Just awesome.
Your objective is to open up all the gates on the map. You need keystones to open up those gates. To acquire most of them, you have to do favors to several NPC's around the map. But there is a catch. Keystones need precise know how and there are no hints on how to proceed in game. Certain NPC's are at certain places on the map, and they give their keystones for you to open gates in condition of gettin specific creatures with specific traits. And not all creatures are at the same part of the map. You reach to them by opening gates, and there is a high chance you will lock your progress in one wrong move if you open a gate prematurely and waste your keystone. I was extremely lucky to save my progress to a different slot each time. My suggestion is that if you don't wanna use a walkthrough, save your game to a different slot before opening a gate. About the story of the game, having it is a plus in games like these. Although it is extremely ridicilous, isn't even consistent in itself, you have a story. You don't play games like these for the story anyway.
This game made me wanna wish it was longer even though it kept me busy for a couple of days. While i played, I thought it would be good to have some options like fps mode while engaging and to have two protagonist as male and female to try different stuff. Also, would be great to see some other action like combat, with all those creatures going and lumbering around. Like you have to beat the alpha male creature to get your way with the ladies but oh well. It is not necessary i guess. This is a pretty casual game that doesn't wanna test and stress you out. All the things i wrote would need fine tuning the challange and what not. So, i guess it's tough luck.
With all that's said, Breeders of the Nephelym is a unique and fun game to play. Give it a try even if you are not into furries. It is better looking and balanced than most of the 3D games out there. If you do, you'll have options once you start playing depening on your preference. Like it was so nice of the developer to turn off futa for people like me. But the downside is that it's necessary if you want to see every single combination of creatures you can create, because there are no male counterparts for most of the creatures. I only had access to limited number of hybrid creatures but i don't feel like i've missed so much.
And that's it, that's all i can say about this awesome game. It has it's quirks but good parts redeems all the bad ones. My rating is 4/5, I strongly believe that it can be made and engineered to perfection.
