Unity - Cloud Meadow [v0.2.3.0 GOG] [Team Nimbus]

A lot of ppl reviewing the game didn't read the rules of the reviewing on this website it seems. The reviews must be about the game itself rather than the developers Patreon (which is the only thing people seems to care about it seems) so im gonna try to ignore everything related to the devs and focus on the game itself.

Game is mid. There's really nothing special about it other than it's AMAZING visuals and artstyle (probably one of the best in all of gaming tbh)
It's main feature: Monster breeding - is pointless. There's really no benefits of doing it, you get nothing out of it. Same thing for another main feature: Farming - except this one is not only pointless but it's also punishing because God forbid you leave your farm for one day... cause if you do your crops will all just die lol. The only fun thing to do in this game is adventuring and fighting... but even that gets repetetive and boring because we still don't have fast travel feature so every time you complete the quest and unlock new level you have to go over same zones you cleared before to get to the new one. Combat animations are really cool tho.
And yeah: Animations - Sex scenes are great... but you've all probably seen them on other websites many years ago, because there haven't been any new ones...

This game really makes me sad. It really could have been not only the best H game but also one of the better games overall, but sadly it's not. Even ignoring all the drama it's still not a game you should play, especially for the H stuff.

Wanted to like game put in about 4 hours and scenes feel lackluster last less than a few seconds than done not worth all the effort in game play which can feel monotonous and just so much text that adds nothing the visuals are really the only real good part of the game.

Great game with the best NSFW visuals, tons of content, good story and fantastic gameplay!
(16hrs of game time review)

Version: 0.1.4.3b

Rating: 9/10

The Good:

• Outstanding visuals and sex scenes, some of the best I've ever seen.
• Vast amount of quality sex scenes and animations.
• Strategic and fun turn-based gameplay with an added breeding farm and harvesting.
• Solid storyline and keeps you fairly interested.
• Huge pool of breeds to choose from.
• Reiterating, this game has some of the best sex scenes with a protagonist that I've ever seen.
• This game has so many good points its hard to complain about anything because I feel so spoiled when compared to 95% of the NSFW games on here.

The Bad:

• Some optional side quests with the protagonist are rewarded with lackluster sprite animation scenes when they should be full sex scenes like every other sex scene with the protagonist.
• The sprite animations lack a climax and are very short animations on loop. I'm a big fan of good sprite animations but these sprite animations are boring and not worth the effort to farm them.
• There should be more than 1 sex scene per gender for the main characters that can be unlocked later on through progress. We should have 2 or 3 per character to motivate the player to continue the story line and use specific characters to unlock the extra scenes.
• The NPC's around town should have high quality sex scenes with the protagonist. Also there are only a couple high quality sex scenes with humans which is pretty strange.
• I have come to a point where I have unlocked most of the amazing sex scenes with the protagonist and I feel like there is nothing left for me in the game since the sprite animations are subpar.

Other Thoughts:

• THIS GAME IS FUCKING LOADED WITH GAMEPLAY/CONTENT!
• This game is far above 1.5 stars, I'm assuming a lot of this has to do with drama around the game. If you haven't been following this game for many years like some people on here you are really going to enjoy it.
• I'm guessing this game had a ton of patreon support over the years so I'm assuming some bitter patrons may have made their way here to criticize. Just my thoughts...

This game is easily in the top 3 patreon scams which is really impressive since it's not made in Ren'Py. It's been active for over 8 years, has about the same amount of content as its (superior) predecessor and fewer mechanics. For some reason the standard has dropped from full-sized animations to just pixel art. That might make sense if you were trying to rush your game out of the door, but clearly nobody is in any hurry to do much of anything. The number of unpleasant OC characters also continues rising which would be less of a problem if this wasn't meant to be a game about making your own through eugenics.
What was being done in the aforementioned predecessor with the ideas behind breeding together different montergirls with traits, builds, hair colors and other genetic traits has gone on to inspire many other games. Unfortunately, Cloud Meadow is not one of those games. I'll go ahead and end my review here before I start getting into (completely justified) personal attacks.

the game is 8+ years old
7 years ago it could be called good, but since then it has been remade and almost no sex content has been added
very small character icons with pixel graphics that are difficult to manage
Now it is completely outdated and does not meet modern gaming standards
completely repeated the path of Breeding Season

Most of the reviews seem to judge the game for what they wish it was and not what it actually is, and I think are being unfair or too critical based on a preconceived notion of the controversy over breeding season.

For what it's worth I think the game is very good, and being an actual game I don't know the whole process but understand that the menial, unshowy work done under the hood is the most time consuming of all so I'm a bit more forgiving of real games and not ren'py trash. The animations and visuals in particular are incredible, probably my favourite of any western H-game to date and certainly up there with the best Japanese games.

My only real complaints so far are that sound effects are absent in many places, and the UI design drags your mouse across the screen quite a bit. For example, there are number hotkeys for farming and monster interactions but not in battles yet. That way you don't have to drag your mouse back and forth to target enemies and pick skills. Other than those two things I think it's great.

I was unaware how much backlash this game was getting but I do like it a lot. The breeding system is like a more interesting (and sexy) take on pokemon and it holds a special place in my heart because of it. Keep up the good work!

Game is good. Ammount of handcrafted stuff is staggering, I know that people are interestedonly in HD porn gallery, but this game have much more than that. Drawing hundreds of SD animations of objectively high quality, hundreds of unique NPC portraits, maps and other stuff is not an easy feat.
People malding too much over it. The fact that they stay mad for almost a decade is funny tbh.

so much to do, yet little content that is not worth wasting time. the content are pixel animation that a few are good but majority are low quality. too much dialogue that feels extremely tedious to go through. fights are repetitive and boring. I hoped this game would become better after a year or two, but barely anything got added. I don't recommend playing this.

They have been milking their patrons for years with little content. Their last real sex scene released was years ago and all they are doing is constantly pushing out "fixes" and readjusting some combat shit in order to make it look like they are doing something.

If you're reading reviews to decide if you should play this - you shouldn't. Google the sex scenes and move on with your life or find a cheat code to unlock the cheat menu where you can unlock all animations. It's not worth actually playing it, unless you're a big fan of grinding in games. But even if you are, the game is too boring and you have to do too much to see all the sex scenes.

EDIT: this is my opinion based on few hours of gameplay, maybe I got too excited and set my expectations too high, and that's why it seemed boring to me. On the second thought, maybe you should at least try it since we're getting it for free, because I'm seeing a lot of people saying it's a good game.

Man, this game is just too big. Came for the great artstyle, left after the first 60 minutes of playing. The world is TOO big. There is too much going on. People play adult games mainly for the lewd stuff and the fap. Sure, a good world and gameplay can enhance that, but the NSFW part must be the focus.

This is like a real game. With tons of RPG elements, stats, things to manage, dungeons to explore.. why would I play this deep into a game for fapping? If I want to play casual games I look at the huge market out there.

As an NSFW game this is a complete fail.

Also the MC has boobs despite that I picked a male MC.

I'm not going to touch the drama associated with this game with a 10-foot pole. That element has been rehashed so often in the comments and reviews that all of you get the gist at this point. As a game itself, it's actually decent, at least when it comes to some of the other games I've played and reviewed on here. Again, I’m not here to review drama, but the game itself, and offer criticism on ways in which the game can be improved.

Not Enough Focus on Your Monsters and Farm:
Now, Cloud Meadow was designed to be a successor of sorts to Breeding Season. Anybody who knows the history of this project knows this. However, unlike Breeding Season, the monsters in this game seem to take a massive backseat. The dungeon crawler quests seem to take the most precedent. If you don't really want to go through the dungeon crawler quests, you're shit out of luck as you need to do the quests to get upgrade shards to upgrade your farm. It feels like a weird balance, since the breeding aspect is what the game primarily advertised itself toward, and while you can do that in the game, there's a ton of other elements that get in the way. Chief among them though, being the dungeon crawler quests.

The dungeon crawler part of the game would be a lot better if it wasn't pushed so much. The dungeon crawler portion is pretty much mandatory if you want to upgrade your farm and streamline it to your liking. And because you're pretty much forced to go through the dungeon crawler portion, it's just a painstaking ordeal that I and many other players here would love to avoid. Now, there are probably some people who enjoy the dungeon crawler and find it enjoyable and engaging. If that's the case, then by all means, have fun! But for those who aren't interested, or simply prefer to focus more on monster breeding and their farm, the dungeon crawler quests shouldn't be all but mandatory to do. When it comes to farm upgrades, I should just be able upgrade it by getting money by selling crops and other such things. Also make the dungeons more worthwhile; you should be able to capture monsters that you beat in the dungeon if you so please, and the different monster color palettes shouldn't only be acquired by breeding two different monster species, you should be able to catch them in the wild too as a kind of rare occurrence.

The Monsters Aren't That Engaging:
With other characters in the game, you can romance them and have a more meaningful connection with them. The monsters that you have on the farm are sentient, they can talk to you, you can add them to your party to help you with quests, have them work around on your farm, and you can max out their loyalty so when they graduate, they choose to stay with you. The only downside is, outside of that basic stuff, there's no real connection or depth to your relationships with your monsters. Sure, you can have them breed with you to your heart's content, yet for some reason, you can't romance them. On the game's roadmap, it says that there's going to be more in-depth romance for the companions, but nothing for your monsters is mentioned. Let's say that you wanted to romance the Centaur in your barn; you like him or her and want more than just mindless fucking. Well guess what? Fuck you.

It doesn't even have to be the most in-depth dating sim about it either, just give me a better reason as to why I should want to keep them around besides them being in my party for the dungeon crawler and helping on the farm. Give me a better reason to have them in the first place instead of them just being glorified sex and menial slaves. I want to have more of a connection with them, I want the game to make it feel that keeping them is a good thing besides that it would just be an inconvenience to have to get a new monster and level them up again. Make it so that if they leave, I feel bad, I miss them and want them back. Not me being like "well, I can just get another one, no harm done. Sucks that I have to level them up again though."

Make More Unique Scenes:
Now when it comes to pairing your character with certain characters, companions or even your monsters, it plays a well animated sex scene which is honestly incredible content. With other characters, it's just 16-bit pixel art sex scenes which are incredibly underwhelming. Look, pixel art sex scenes can be done right, just look at Degrees of Lewdity. In Cloud Meadow though, I would be fine with them if they were placeholders for future animations or something, but they aren't. Look, when the well animated 2D animations are in the game, why would I want the pixel art scenes? Why not phase them out and replace them with well-drawn and animated 2D scenes like the other ones? Give me and other players a reason for wanting to pair up with these characters instead of the ones that have the regular scenes.

Considering the massive amount of time between updates, the developer and artists have more than enough time to draw and animate these new scenes and push that out as an update. People wouldn't be mad at the prospect of more well animated scenes. Hell, most would be thrilled at having them, and very few players would lose sleep if the pixel art scenes were slowly outmoded. The well animated scenes are part of the reason why I play this game in the first place, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Save File Formatting:
The game's save files are run through an in-game save converter where it formats everything into Base64. Now, if you have the right software, you can decode that long Base64 string into readable text that you'd think that you'd be able to edit, right? Wrong. Even if you convert whatever edits that you have made back into Base64, and try to load it into the game, it will tell you that the save is corrupted. The game has an in-game cheat menu where you can give yourself more money, change the day, weather, and things of the sort, but if you dare to edit your saves, it's verboten.

This isn't some major game where it needs borderline encrypted saves like a AAA game; this is an indie porn game for fuck's sake. So, why pretty much encrypt the saves? It's unnecessary. If people want to cheat in a porn game, honestly, who fucking cares? If this feature was removed, honestly, the developers shouldn't be losing sleep over it. They aren't going to lose Patreon supporters if they remove this one element, but I guarantee that the developers view this encryption as necessary because if someone found out how to cheat in the game without pledging on Patreon to get the existing cheat code, they would be worried that somehow, they could lose money over this.

Conclusion:
Again, not even touching the associated drama, this game could be much better, but contrary to some of the reviews here, trust me, it could be a hell of a lot worse. It's a reasonably entertaining little game for what it is, and it's honestly better than several games that are on here. It's honestly nowhere near as bad as some of the games here where it can be summarized as generic 3D incest game which is undoubtedly a Patreon scam #562. I have my doubts that with S-Purple's slow updates to this game being outright malicious by scamming people. Rather, it just seems to me to just be a gigantic case of laziness.

I listed some very valid criticisms of the game itself, and there are many areas that leave much to be desired. I honest to God hope that Team Nimbus holds themselves to that 2025 deadline of releasing version 1.0. Until that time rolls around though, I am a tad bit skeptical. If by sometime in 2025 that release does come out, you can definitely color me impressed. As for now though, it is what it is. To use the line from HBO's Chernobyl miniseries, "not great, not terrible".

This game stands as a shining example of how masterful art design and a captivating story can elevate the gaming experience. The visuals are breathtaking, with each frame meticulously crafted to evoke emotion and immerse players in its world. Beyond the surface beauty lies a narrative of depth and complexity, filled with memorable characters and thought-provoking themes. From start to finish, this game kept me engaged and invested, earning a solid 5/5 rating for its exceptional combination of artistry and storytelling prowess. A really original game

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Story }---
☐ It'll replace your life
☑ Lovely
☐ Good
☐ Average
☐ Some lore
☐ No Story

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average (not finished yet)
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ At least i didnt see some
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ H-Content }---
☐ Almost too much
☐ A lot
☐ 50/50
☑ Could be more
☐ Not enough
☐ Even children could play

---{ Do i keep the Game? }---
☑ Yes
☐ No

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

Last words: I only recently started the game and therefore can't comment on the accusations of the long development time. However, you can see exactly what is planned for the year on the developer's website and according to the developer, v1.0 should be released in 2025. We will probably only see if that is true then. Regarding the game itself, I can say that I personally think the art style is beautiful. You can tell that a lot of care is given to the game and I'm glad that not everyone just brings half-hearted garbage onto the market. I also think the gameplay mix of rouge like and farming sim is a fun idea and I like spending my time with the in-game mechanics without getting annoyed too quickly.

Okay... Cloud Meadow

Perhaps someone really likes it or enjoys disrespecting themselves and deriving pleasure from masochism. But everything here is bad. Okay, the art is beautiful, I won't argue about that. The sex scenes are also beautiful. But as for the content...

There's a sense of neglect and chaos throughout the entire game. The illusion of strong, shit-to-death work on the project, which I fucking don't see, both now and 100 years ago. it's practically pointless after an hour of gameplay.

The gameplay is not fun; it's dull. This project exists just to watch porn animations, and playing it is practically impossible, not only due to bugs (although you can play a bit with bugs), but playing and simultaneously struggling to the death with your boredom is impossible.

Guys... indie game devs consistently output fully completed games that are bigger, have better art, better writing, and better game play in much less than 7 years... and they don't get paid 20k per month if they even get paid at all.

If you want a review of the game itself, it's just an overcomplicated gallery viewer. The gameplay is bad, the story is boring, there's no connection to the character. They are just a random monster breeder. Okay...? They meet bossy quirky characters that lead them to other parts or events in the game, but you yourself have no personality or say. The original unifinished breeding season still somehow manages to be better than this.

I've tried to play this game several times over the years. I like the art of it, but the gameplay and game design is sloppy, imo. It's an unintuitive mess every time I've tried to play it. Navigating in the town feels like a waste of time because it adds nothing to the game itself. The optional explore the town at the start adds no indicators of what doors can be entered. If you can't go it a place, it should be obvious. I would prefer we just click on a map where we want to go. The way it is currently is unnecessarily complicated to have to run to a shop. Quest locations are not obvious. It needs to be easier to find where to go.

I also think the font choice is bad. I'm dyslexic and it's hard to read for me.

Over all, it's not a fun experience to play this.

absolutely no progress in years. has to be some kind of scheme. wish it were something better cause the premise is awesome and some of the scenes are fantastic but it's been spinning its wheels for years now with absolutely no progress

this games idea is cool, i like its style with how you can lewd these creatures. but my problem is, its almost like this game is trying to hard to be every genre of RPGM game (i know its in unity).. but the combat is essentially a smoother RPGM experience. idk man, i feel you should just scrap the idea of the combat, and just have this dude be a farmer, with the occasional combat with pests and such.

the farming side of this game is confusing, and lacking to other management titles out there, but atleast as its second portion of the game (being farming and combat), the farming is alot better. same with the breeding, however, the breeding element is severely lacking, with a lack of detail, lack of freedom, and just *click this feral, heres that one single animation for it*.. so after a couple hours, you get bored. i think it needs to heavily focus and expand on the breeding and the features/options with that, and the farming side as the priority.


that aside, development is incredibly slow, the communication basically mute. too many individuals get into games development because they posess the skills to create a game, but most of these developers lack the most important part for the longevity part of games development.. and thats improving, and maintining your product, as well as clear communication, and regular content. most of these NSFW creators fail at the second part. they create something, and thats all it remains because they simply cannot keep up with the suggestions nor demand. this could be great, but lacks effort and direction