Yeah, the devs for this game have a great idea and excellent art but they're notoriously bad at coding and calculating so these issues are way too easy to have if you're not trained in avoiding them.
That's definitely the intended way to go about it. Except depending on your habits of wandering, questing, and dialogue roleplaying, the player can also potentially break the quest to remove their mask and gain a form in one of the following ways:
- Dally around asking the lady in the taberna about removing your mask. Her dialogue will eventually progress to a point in which you are locked out of the dialogue choice to get the quest to remove it. Although you can still find you way to the quest in other ways.
- Wandering and questing. This game's quest code is so fragile you could manage to break the main aesthetic unlock quest.
- Lose the boss fight or save and reload. You can pushed outside of the invisible arena wall region but can't walk back in to start the battle again. Of course this means you can't touch the pillar that grants you the ability to change form.
Bonus: beat the boss then refuse to unlock any form at all. Your mask will fall off and reveal... your still-bandaged body wearing the same exact mask.
"On all levels including emotional and physical, I am a passionless, expressionless, miserly husk of a person."
The comparison to this game and
Wild Life is interesting, because I "played through" both and they're still heavily in-development. Keep in mind, I played through Wild Life without mods which seems important to the game's actual gameplay enjoyment based on what I've noticed users in that thread saying about how to make the game fun.
- Few games have as many animations as Wild Life. Even gallery scene type games like Honey Select 2 (not counting custom studio animation) don't approach the gallery scene size of Wild Life. Wild Life is a sex gallery champion.
- However, for what I witnessed in terms of gameplay, Wild Life abruptly ended. Its gameplay offerings were comparable to a very rough and sparse MMO's new player starting zone on its very first playable day. In that respect Carnal Instinct wins, giving an experience that is essentially Skyrim but based in Elswyr, with more Egyptian culture and more scalies.
- Note that fans of Wild Life claim that replacing the game's content with fan work enables actual gameplay and maps that feature significant scenery and gameplay. In this respect I am not informed because my time with Wild Life's main campaign was so short I didn't think I could find more that was enough to justify staying longer nor did I expect players to put such effort into augmenting such a short in-dev experience.
I would think these games are not very comparable. I would suggest if you want a sexy gallery check out
Honey Select 2, if you want to find sex everywhere check out
The Pilgrimage,
Unaware in the City, or the classic
Wings of Roldea. If you want something like Skyrim but as a standalone porn game instead of Skyrim augmented with Lovers Lab mods, Carnal Instinct is that game. And perhaps
Operation Groundzeroes is the Fallout-like sex game. Wild Life is unique. Maybe I'll revisit it by the end of next year and see more content between dev progress and mods.