[v.0.04.0]
It's a good game with downsides, which is very different from a "bad game".
It's a heroine-game in the standard RPGM-mold, focusing on making a goody-two-shoes MC fall under the influence of various female/futa villains, mostly involving possession, transformation and mind control. The first explicit scenes the game throws at you already make your MC grow a cock and go up against slimes, so you know what you're in for.
The tag-list is pretty much my ideal one, and a game having such a specific focus on hypnosis/mc is even better. Though the scenes are short and a bit plainly written, they do a good job of appealing to the desired fetishes. The theming of the game is great, and the art quality top-notch, especially the character-art. On a conceptual level, the game is great, and it sometimes succeeds in what it's trying to do.
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However, there are still a lot of pretty core-aspects that the game could be doing better:
- The writing outside the fetish-content is very simple. It is good to not get bogged down in the worldbuilding in the introduction to your porn-game, but this is a case of any depth or texture of the story just not being there. Everything you get told about the world that is not fetish content, or part of the main "plot" is fairly obvious and uninteresting. The scene-writing is decent, but also more focused in trying to deliver brief, isolated scenes. In general the pacing of the content is a bit awkward especially for the in-dungeon loss/"punishment"-scenes. I hope the devs pay special attention to the slow-corruption scenes, which are the most important part to get right in a hypno-kink game.
- A heroine corruption-game like this is about "corrupting" "the heroine". That's why it kind of hurts the game that the MC in this is given a pretty bland personality, without a lot of detail to her. Sure, it can enhance other aspects of the writing, but having the MC have very little established personality hurts the game's attempts at trying to portray changes to that personality. It's a fault a lot of corruption games make, but that doesn't mean it isn't also bad here. It also detracts from being able to write relationships between characters.
- When it comes to the mechanics of the corruption and character-building, the game is in a kind of awkward spot. The focus of building your character is on slowly grinding up stats by spending time and/or money, but it doesn't have any kind of story-significance, deeper gameplay-system or opportunity-cost attached to it. So, the stat-grinding in the current game only fills time between the progression of the corruption-plotlines. I think a better version of this concept would have the corruption-themes interact more deeply with the gameplay, without their consequences being purely negative in making the game harder or locking content away.
- The game still uses the default RPGM-battle-system, and relies on those basic mechanics for it's combat and gameplay. Not to say that future content can't expand on that in the future, but to me this system is not only dated mechanically, but also something that is completely detached from the main focus of the game, which is the mind-control/fetish aspects. Using these systems as the basis for the game is "easy", but it also locks the game into creating a lot of content that's mostly just killing time, without engaging with what the game is mostly interested in or connecting with the main character. Nor does it connect with the main fetish, and it mostly just forces the plot-progression of the game to the mold of your average RPGM-dungeon crawler.
- And, of course, because it's an RPGM-game, there's a lot of time filled walking through empty environments. Granted, establishing a sence of "normalcy" through gameplay can be good so you can break it later, but this is still a pretty boring way to do it.
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Despite all the negative aspects, I am glad this exists, and I hope this project has a good future ahead of it. This feels like it has great potential.