RPGM - City of Secrets [v0.08.00] [TheDarkLight]

Review for v0.08.00:

Pros:
- Good worldbuilding. Although there aren't many areas to explore at the moment, the author does a good job at making characters and maps feel filled with purpose and forethought.
- Good corruption. I really enjoy that the game seems to be taking a path of "Here's a dungeon that's focused on x kink, and here are 3-4 ways to explore the kink with 3 different levels of depravity". It lets you know when you've seen all of the content while still giving you new levels to explore.
- Good vibes. If you've played strong open world games like Magical Girl Celesphonia or Caliross, you know that a good erotic rpg can get you excited for its story as much as its porn. I get those vibes here, which is why I'm excited for this game and think highly of it in spite of the cons below.

Cons:
- The boss minigames are easily the worst part of this game. Even if this minigame of dodging sprites were challenging or engaging, NO game mechanic in an eroge will ever be fun enough to make a player want to waste 3 minutes of their life repeating it 20+ times.
- The game still has a lot of missing content. This, combined with how long it takes to reach map locations that provide stat bonuses, make the game feel grindy at times, because you end up repeating the same events over and over just to pass the time/build stats between scripted events. I hope there are more open world events and activities eventually.
- Possibly related to the above, I feel like the game could be doing more with its kinks. Your character will accumulate different "Status" effects, for example "Futanari Lover" if they allow certain events to repeat, but these things seem to have no effect in the game. I'd love if these traits altered dialogues and opened new events/scenes.
- Frustratingly, there seem to be many storylines that force you to lose/make bad decisions. For example, there's a hypnosis bracelet, a hypnosis counselor, a ghost possession... if you don't like these kinks, or if you are the type of reader who gets upset when you see a character do something unrealistically stupid for the sake of plot, too bad; you're going to get railroaded in this game.
- I feel like the possession kink is getting overused. It's in every dungeon and a majority of side characters, and the scenes start to feel repetitive.

Overall, I've got some beef with the game, but I'm interested in seeing more.

I love the game but:
- i had to use save editor to make playing it less of a chore and more of a story driven gameplay
- the "day locked" events are frustrating, because most of them happen on monday and mondays can get blocked by each other, especiall the repeating ghost event that effectively skips the day, it makes me unreasonably angry

This is the weirdest 5 star I've ever given, because I really don't like this game on a personal level.

The Other Big Body Control Game, City of Secrets centers around a not-mage named Emma, and the various things that want to control her body and generally sexually harass people. Unlike Town of Magic, City runs on the RPGMaker engine, and checks the box I like to see in RPGMaker games: it does not look like it was made in RPGMaker.

Like Town, City presents itself in a hybrid VN/RPG style, where many of your interactions and activities in the town take place during certain days and times of days, with most activities (not dungeon delving) advancing the time of day. City, however, goes much deeper into the mechanics of the game; there's tracking for your corruption, soul fragmentation, and even reputation at school. Reputation is nearly exclusively for town interactions, and Corruption can be affected in many ways, while Soul Fragmentation generally just counts down over time. Reputation and Corruption both also have effects ingame, so it's good to see it's not just an empty meter on top of the screen.

The combat in the game is interesting, to say the least; there's two kinds of encounters: Traps and enemies. Traps are generally sprung on you if you can't avoid them (every trap is avoidable), leading you into a button pressing event to break free before it affects you and advances a certain type of corruption. The corruption can affect your choices in game, and even open new dialogue at times. Also, they're generally pretty sexual. Enemies are roaming the overworld, and are exclusively turn based encounters with not a lot going for them. You do receive level ups from them, but the vast majority of your stats will be gained in town doing repeatable training events; the best thing about level ups is the restoration of health and Aura. These training events are either free (at school) or cost a fairly trival amount of money (if you do the work event every part of a day, you can do three days, at least, of training in the town.)

At the end of the day, combat could probably be comfortably removed from the game and not affect quality too much at the moment, but it does slow down the gameplay loops slightly and give you more time to take part in th e events as you level enough to breeze past fights and beat bosses. The bosses, however, are much more about playing a dodging game than truly fighting the boss.

Which brings me to the events, and they are well done. City has a consistent and well drawn art style, which really shouldn't be the high bar it is, and work has gone into both CGs and pixel animations to create an enjoyable experience. While City is not a true battle fuck, every trap has or will have one of these animations, and many town events do as well. The writing is actually also well done, making this a rare intersection of good writing and good art. Event writing is flushed out without feeling like it drags on (and there's a button to quickly skip through text), and the world feels immersive, if a little creepy.

That's the reason this review is a little weird for me. The world of City of Secrets is barely concealing how sexual it is, even outside of the dungeons, and there's a couple of running sideplots that deal with these sexual encounters. The crux of the writing in City, however, is how good of a student and person Emma is, and how exciting and embarrassing it would be for the one occupying her body to ruin that. I'm going to be honest, I don't go in for humiliation, nor the kind of corruption that City is trying to sell me (Where are my black-dressed, smirking girls on the arms of a villain?). There's one or two largely good natured people in Emmas orbit, but the majority of the secondary characters tend to want to 'expose her slutty side'.

Despite how much I dislike the themes, I have to admit that City does them well. It's able to excute Emma being uncomfortable with having her body used without dipping into being tortuous, doesn't rush the corruption but does allow it to flow naturally, and makes an earnest effort to make the enemies possessing Emma distinct characters from each other in how they handle using her body.

Developmentally, the dev has managed to avoid feature bloat very nicely, keeping smooth progression through the story without neglecting previous parts of the game or the sidequests. It's not the fastest dev cycle, but it's worth the wait. They've also included anti-frustration features in explaining how to get certain events or advance the story.

It's not a perfect game; I still maintain there's better ways to slow the player down than repetitive, dull combat for example. Going to train a stat 1-3 times a day for a few days before the next dungeon isn't the most engaging gameplay. Some key features are still not implemented, especially combat side, and the art may not work for some people.

The story is done well, there's effective attempts to make the events varied, and what flaws there are in execution are outnumbered by what City does well. If you like Town of Magic, you're going to like this; you'll also probably like it if you're into Star Knightess Aura. It's not my cup of tea, but I tip my hat to a job well down.

Good game, love the futa and hypnosis content. More of these please.

Oh and the content for the classmate's mom as well

Also, a suggestion, add a speedrun mode toggle for those who poay only for erotic content. Which allows players to skip bosses fight/dodging mini game and mob fights. Would be a great QOL improvement

Really like the different fetishes in the game. Would give it 5 stars but ended up pretty dissapointed as the game started off super strong with a hot futanari + outfit, but it was then almost immediately (removed) from progressing the game and doesn't appear to be making any return.

Game is really good, even more if the kink hit the spot for you (Mind control heavy/corruption)
You got some more specific kink in form of the dungeon (First one focus futa, second one focus on skin wearing, third one is about dreaming) But a bit bitter sweet because if the kink of dungeon is something you enjoy you feel like it was too short, not enough. And if the kink is not your tast you just want to rush/skip it (apparently you can dodge the kink in the full version if not your thing)

I would say right now the big thing are:

+ Really well writen
+ Good content, your protagonist get corrupted and attacked everywhere, lot of main character and side character corrupting her.
+lot of diversity, in term of the character, the kink, the way to get corrupted.
+The pixel art animation are really chef kiss, really good top notch. u don't feel the usual "hey i recycle that scene 20times with different face and writing!"

-The gameplay is a chore, and not a fun one. Everytime a mechanic is introduced it's getter overboring pretty fast. U need to travel the dungeon trying to dodge the lewd trap and battle. nice at first but then the dungeon feel long, really long and you bored trying to dodge battle because it's mean loosing time at spamming escape because battle give nothing. The trap get unfun to dodge when u just do it long time because dungeon are quite long and lot of "wrong side, back step dodging again and go the other way".
The second boss have a fun dodging mechanic, but the fight feel really long and the fun you feel will become "oh gosh it's still going huh?".
U need enough stat to fight, so you need to work, get money, buy gym pass, spam gym to increase enough health and attack to kill boss. Spamming gym is quite unfun when the travel are that boring/long.
Same thing about checking "everywhere" to see if u didnt miss a secret event here and there (Event don't have any icon so u need to explore everywhere, everyday talking to pnj)

-Scene are short, the art is good the writen is good but the scene really feel short, usually u will left horny without fapping because the space between scene and the short scene will block u to fully enjoy them. And no recollection room, only the first dungeon is available inside, so the only way to enjoy some scene more would be to follow a guide and save before any scene to keep a save for your favorit one. Really bad because some scene don't have any animation, but next patch they got one but you already saw it. So now u need to redo the boring grind if u don't keep some random save ready and remember which one have seen what.

-The game take a long time to progress and get update. Rpg maker is quite limitating and dev probably doing is best but usually waiting so long for few content, also waiting for the artist to catch up. You need to wait long time for enough content to be available so u want to redo the boring grind.

Overall game is really good if u are into mind control, and the quality in art and writing can even get you if you are not that much into corruption. But gameplay is a chore.

[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.

***
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.

***
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.

Great game! Amazing Game! Fantastic Game!

My only complaint is that the corruption stat is silly and doesnt go up organically. You barely get it to rise at the start but then you go into a dungeon and it skyrockets up! my recommendation is to set corruption to cap with soul fragmentation. Or somehow cap how much corruption you can get from dungeon events.

also maybe make it so she is made to watch hypnosis porn on top of getting hypnotized to watch porn.

also I didnt notice anything happen with the will power stat going up and down. Maybe its to be added in the future? but some ideas that im sure you already thought of: have some will power draining events that you have to manage, you can get it to go up and down temporarily... or in a few cases permanently. make it a percentage willpower check to advance on getting hypnotized with the bracelet. While some people would dislike this slow down... this would be amazing to me.! And for those people that dislike this slow down you can probably just add a prompt to ignore the willpower check and get hypnotized anyway. Make it like the therapist in the game Girl life with the therapist where each time you go to get hypnotized, its harder and harder to resist for each new thing with each visit, requiring more will power.

This is one of the Top 3 games in development on this site!

An excellently put together game.

the story is intriguing, Emma is a very endearing main character despite being a naive straight a student and the supporting cast are all very well done, especially the monster girls such as Victoria, a ghost who is also an exhibitionist and masturbation addict and posseses the mc to carry out these lewd acts.

Visuals are great, especially the pixel art and cg. The sex scenes Have all been really great So far. the open world is also quite nice to look at and dungeons are decently atmospheric.

combat is relatively interesting though nothimg really groundbreaking, though being honest nobody plays these for the combat.

so far it’s a relatively modest amount of content but I’m very interested to see what else gets added in future.

Very fun and lewd little adventure. In this one you take control of student lady which mind and body is subjected to plenty of outside control, being hypnotized by a fellow student, being possessed by a ghost, sharing head space some sort of rogue soul, and a very kinky futa-loving slime. The animations and art are simply awesome, if you're into hourglass H-cup ladies. Though there's lots more lesbian content, than futa content, so don't dive into this expecting to see tons of cocks.
The story is a bit more than you expect from an adult game, it's very intriguing, and dialogues aren't too cringy, the characters for once actually feel kinda real.
The gameplay itself consist of a time management type of life sim, where you need to balance your budget, training, your soul being fractured, and killing monsters. It's a little bit better, than your average RPGM game.
As of v0.02.02 it's quite unfinished, lacking continuation to both main and optional storylines, some animations and CGs. I'd say at this point in development it's worth a go, and it's only going to get better as new updates come out.

It is a very good game, the designs and animations are fantastic and the story is interesting, it reminds me a little of Jujutsu Kaisen in a way. I don't give it more stars because it has many black screens where there are no images, only text. I understand that it barely The game is in development but that's the only negative thing I can say about the game. For the rest I hope they release an update soon with more visual content. I give it 4 stars for that but this game deserves 5 stars

I am a big fan of pixel art, so this game caught my attention. I am glad I decided to check it out because it has a lot of potential. In the current version, there are two dungeons that are well-designed and different from each other, not only in terms of aesthetics but also enemy types, which I appreciate. However, the main downside is that leveling up doesn't seem to have much effect due to the gym and library increasing your stats. Despite this, I highly recommend checking out the game.

I played up to a little bit of the first dungeon, but currently have no interest in playing further, despite both yuri and mind control being among my absolute favorite subjects.

This game does a lot of things right, but it's being held back by some extremely lackluster writing. Obvious grammatical mistakes like missing commas and apostrophes plague almost every line of dialogue, and the phrasing itself is often truncated in the way that you might see things written on a message board between friends. It's clear that someone without writing experience has a story in mind that they're passionate about (and the story itself isn't bad) but the implementation is too flawed for me to feel invested in it.

This is why the game seems to "start slow": despite being a plot-heavy game - which is totally fine, if that's what you're going for - the plot itself is delivered too poorly to be engaging, and there's nothing to be interested in until the sex stuff finally starts up.

The pixel art animations were the definite standouts. Though I only saw the first one, I would love to be able to access more, but again have no interest in slogging through the game itself to get there, and I wasn't particularly tantalized by the accompanying dialogue either.

I hope this gets addressed in future updates, but without a full rewrite I doubt I'll be interested in playing again. It's entirely possible some people might not be bothered by this: if so, enjoy. Good luck to the dev(s).

Starts out pretty damn slow, but the dialogue fast forward is really, REALLY fast if you want to use it, and you can save in the middle of dialogue.

If you like mind control or possession this one's bound to be a gem.

Review for v0.01.52

Exactly the kind of game I love to see. Art is amazing in all instances, plots nice, characters work well, so on and so on. A couple of problems as of the current version though, stem from managing stats and resources.
- grinding at the gym for stats I wish I got from level ups
- restaurant work for small amounts of money
- ever present accumulation of soul fragmentation
- school rep after getting possessed by Victoria
that's a lot to worry about for each time slot not taken up by school, etc. I hope to see either better ways for the player to deal with these problems, or number changes as the game is developed, but aside from that this is already one of the top games on this site IMO. I WILL be buying the full game on final release, which says a lot on this site.

A game about the MC being mind controlled, posessed, and raped by other women. Larger focus on possession than other games. The game is still in its early stage so there is not a lot of content, but there is potential here for something great.

My main gripe with the game is that there are no males in the game who want to violate the MC. Lack of males is fine but please include penises so the MC can get pregnant. Thank you.

multiple forms of possession? yes please! this game despite being new has by far exceeded my expectations for a NSFW game involving bodily take over. I'm a sucker for ghost possession but this game surprised me with slime possession as well. If you love possess content then I recommend City of Secrets

Game is very good, playing the game is just following the quest main story and side quest is good. Genre mind control + possession is excellent genre my favourite. more art sex scenes which is more interest (hoping add art harem scenes too).

[v0.01.01]
The game is basicly done, but there is no content...
A big and empty game at the moment.

-Story, Originality
You are a woman and other women want to hypnotise, posses and plainly r*pe you.

-Renders
Cool 2D artstyle.

-Sound
Okay sounds (overall).

-Playability
1 dungeon and several events you have to actively look for.

-Performance
Runs okay.

-Bugs
If you use mouse to move, there is bad pathfinding and player character zooms around corners getting stuck.

When a cutscene starts player model becomes bold (without clothes, hair and everything else).

"Possession" event can overlap other timed events (because you skip yhe day until evening).

-Animations
There are 3-4 animations and they look good.

-Voice Acting
No voices.

-Grammar
Didn't see any mistakes.

-Amount of content
There are a lot of scenes that are described with words.
I hope all the h-content gets at least a still image...

Now it looks extremely empty.
There are around 10-15 h-scenes, but only 3-4 h-animations/pictures/visuals.

It will certainly get a lot of attention in the future and I think the most important to add visuals.

I quite like what I see so far. Good art and I love the way you slowly corrupt the mc from different perspectives. Also that an in-game guide is provided helps a lot for those who might get lost. The only thing missing is the addition of CG. Great game no doubt!