Version 0.2.8
Carnal Instinct right now is one of the plethora of games that fits the bill as 'having potential.' The game is decent, with nice graphics, an okay combat system, a good-looking world, an interesting theme, and a lot of POSSIBLE greatness to come. As it is now, however, it is only a shell with a handful of sexual encounters, little story, and not a ton to do.
Keep in mind this is an extremely early build of the game, so I don't mean to sound overly critical. I wish them a lot of success and am eager to see the future of the game. It has tons of room to grow, but I can't review what 'might be', so here are my thoughts on how things are.
"Transforming":
Your character begins as simple woman, but you are able to equip and remove body, head, and cock parts. The head and body can change you to the various species - human, feline, drake, or void IIRC. The cock parts have a bit more variety, and removing it completely leaves you with a pussy. These parts of mostly cosmetic, though some sexual encounters require specific genitalia (one woman wants only a pussy, another won't use huge cocks, that sort of thing). There is also a male transformation, allowing your face/body to look like a man's. However the game seems to mostly still think of you as a woman, with sexual scenes still use your female sounds and much of the equipment can't be worn on a male body.
Sex Scenes:
There are a number of sexual encounters dotted across the map of the game where you can go. Each one has at least one scene, some made up of two or three. Some require a quest to be completed, others immediately available through dialogue. The scenes themselves look pretty good and are somewhat varied, though they are pretty specific. That is, one NPC might want you to use a lizard-like tail to fuck her, so there aren't any uses of a cock.
Also, there is no interactivity. You see a scene play out before you, only able to choose when to move to the next scene (when available) or when to finish. There is also a camera angle button that toggles between a couple of views. Unfortunately, sometimes these alternate views are partially blocked by terrain and the like or at bad angles, making them not all that great of an option. Likewise, the game uses whatever local lighting is available, so some scenes in the dark have no torches close enough and you don't get to see much of anything happening. And making the trek to a teleporter to go back to your camp and rest is a hassle to be certain.
Combat:
Combat is adequate, and little more. There are some baseline options available, being a light and heavy attack, a block and an evade. A stamina system is in place to keep you from swinging too much in a row, though it seems to only matter if you fight more than one enemy at once and it returns very fast if you stop swinging. There are also potions you can get to heal your health or stamina from shops or found in chests. Enemies will see you and charge in to attack you, but rarely offer any real challenge between the simple combat and abundant health potions. There are a couple bosses which seem to have awkward movements/hitboxes, but end up actually being easier than some standard combats.
As for equipment, besides the body part modifications, you do end up with a few weapons and a couple of shields. They don't seem to matter much in the current build, as your basic starter item can deal with everything save for a specific quest. But they are there at least and being implemented.
World:
The world design is both great and frustrating due to the way the game works. The layout is nice, with a good variety of things to fit in the Egyptian-styled theme. There are barren areas, rocky cliffs, large stony mounds, rivers with some greenery clinging to them, ruins, simple villages, and temples - all fitting the theme and of fairly good graphical quality. Nothing to blow you away compared to today's graphics, but for such a small team really nice and the layout of things and actual design is good.
That said, because the game is often little more than moving from place to place, back and forth, it gets to be a slog quick, even though what is available of the game is very small right now. They added waypoints/teleporters that allow you to jump from one to another once located. But even with these you end up just holding the forward button as you slowly sprint from one destination to the next. Quests often are just going to get an item or speak to a person, then return. Some quests have you do this several times, sometimes fairly far from any teleporter.
And in its current state there isn't much reason to do anything between these jaunts, so it becomes quite an irritating facet of the game. Quests with multiple parts only give you one 'part' to finish at a time, so you can't even go out and finish them all before returning. Because leveling doesn't matter in this particular version, even fighting enemies is pointless other than those you might want to get off your back while looting a chest for transform options.
Characters / Dialogue:
It sort of fits in the same vein as the world in that there are enough random NPCs about to make it feel lived in, but almost all of them are also boring. The ones with voice lines are well done, to be fair, but they are mostly just there to nab a quest or immediately have sex with, with no real personality to the characters themselves. Only a couple stand out, and those are mostly due to their physical appearance. It could be because it is just so early, but I'd really like to see some of them fleshed out in the future. As of now they are desposible quest givers like in an MMO and nothing else.
The game is obviously focused on sex, and dialogues often lead to this almost immediately. Or they will give it to you right after a quest. It would be nice to see some of these more drawn out and not so sudden, building up characters and their relationships slightly before the pay off.
Saving System:
On the bright side of things, you can save pretty much whenever you want.
A neutral point, but like many games (especially ports) you don't get to name your save, only getting a tiny picture and a timestamp.
On the bad side, it only seems to allow 'quicksaves', which create a new save file every time you hit it. The game even has an in game hint to tell you how to bring up the load menu so you can manually go through and click one, press delete, click one, press delete, over and over as you end up with a huge list of saves.
Near the end of my time with the game, I also had a sudden huge spike in saving times, from a brief second or two pause to upwards of ten seconds (this is on a normal HDD). I worry if it is a bug or an issue that will grow as the game expands, but hopefully it will be worked on. As well as proper 'regular' saving.
Final Thoughts:
All in all, as I said when I started, I think there is a lot of potential. Like all such early access games, whether that comes to mean anything all depends on if the developers keep pushing at it and put those steam sales and patreon bucks to use so we actually end up with a fun final product sometime this decade. Not a shot at them, just we all know the climate of EA games.
What is there is promising and a lot of fun, but you can easily blow through all the content in an evening, and afterwards there isn't much to do other than repeat the short sexual scenes, which end up looking nice but not being anything really more advanced than your RenPy novel with DAZ3d animations - you're a spectator to a generally repeated motion and a finish. Not a bad thing, just doesn't give the replay value of more sandboxy games or options-matter sort of titles.
Definitely wishing them all the best and can't wait to come back to this well down the road and enjoy what they come up with!
