Man, I love this game so much it motivated me to stop lurking and write this essay. Completely divorced from the pornographic content, Corrupted Saviors represents an impressive achievement just as a 'tactical making the number bigger' game. Reloading the same turn for way too long only to finally put together a commander and decision tree combo that produces a jumbo exponential multiplier and trauma numbers that need to be expressed in scientific notation is an endorphin rush that puts mere pornography to shame. The game being so good makes the fact that it’s also damn sexy and presents an excellent sampling of some truly high-quality fetish content all that much more impressive.
Did CSdev study game theory to come up with this originally, or was this cribbed from some mainstream game series/genre I'm just not familiar with? Most games that nakedly pander to the monkey brain with buttons that make number go up have ankle-deep mechanics, I’ve never seen the concept combined with tactical decision making before. I mean, this is just extremely well-conceived and executed. Like, if you were to sanitize the flavor content surrounding the number-embiggening core for mass consumption and add real graphics and sound, you could have a hit indie game on your hands. Like, if you told me this was a fan project to mod porn into a beloved classic puzzle game, I would never doubt it long enough to double-check, it’s just that well done. CSdev has my utmost compliments for this impressive and entertaining game.
Now that I'm done gushing, I'm going to criticize a bunch of stuff, too.
Mainly, the documentation and in-game tutorial are woefully insufficient. Its kind of remarkable, because all the necessary information is there, but its spread out between the tutorial, the text files, and the tips, and inconsistently wrapped in obfuscating language in some places while explicitly spelled out elsewhere. The obvious intent is to have players explore the game and learn its mechanics by practicing them, but when the core of the game is a logic puzzle featuring undisguised math, ON A TIME LIMIT, its difficult to put up with having to switch between so many different sources to learn the mechanics. Even the promise of niche hentai isn’t enough to mitigate the intimidation and confusion/inconvenience. I was ready to give up on this myself before I read Tomfooleryer’s advice posts, which finally bridged the gap for me between a heap of inscrutable mechanics and an actual strategy I could approach the game with and refine through practice. Well, that and learning how to activate the cheat menu to finally relieve the agonizing FOMO that comes from feeling like the EE resource isn’t being spent efficiently.
I think I read somewhere that overhauling this was on CSdev’s to-do list, so great. Might I recommend including a strategy guide, or a least a hyperlink to advice threads like this one somewhere in the new in-package documentation? Perhaps simply the single sentence ‘Focus on stacking as many multipliers as possible, while preventing divisors--its geometric growth, you dumbass’ in the tips section somewhere? That certainly would have helped me. My only other suggestion would be a ‘free play’ mode, which would be as simple as taking the time limit off single play and making it so that the only way to trigger the final battle is the EE purchase. An alternative would be a (single play only, obviously) EE purchase that extends the time limit. 50 days is already a plenty generous time limit, but any limit at all is a huge buzzkill for someone who wants to enjoy the game casually or learn the mechanics without feeling punished by the sinister brain chemistry of FOMO. Right now, I feel like the cheat menu is the real tutorial, which is fine, honestly, except that it’s hidden by default.
Other than that, I have to say, I’m really impressed by the way CSdev assembled the flavor text from variable-linked strings to produce descriptions that change dynamically with your current score. Considering the scale of the game and the sheer number of variations that need to be fit together, its amazing how few issues arise where the variable text doesn’t parse correctly. With that said, for a game that encourages obsessive replay, only having 4-6 descriptions that loop can be a bit underwhelming. The space between T3 and T4 breaks where you are waiting for chosen to become corrupt enough for a punisher to trigger is an especially tiresome slog, particularly when compared to the amazing variety of content in the T2 double-chosen breaks. Its funny because T2 breaks are so well done that triggering the comparatively bare Orgy descriptions seems like a downgrade you are forced to put up with for the score multipliers. And then, the absurd amount of work that must have gone into the variable descriptions for the mix-and-match commanders leaves me feeling bad for wondering why there is no double-capture or capture-orgy or capture-surround interactivity. Evidently that was set aside to focus on forsaken content? Acceptable trade, then.
I’m not going to beg for content in a free game, especially when implementing it represents geometrically increasing work on the programing side, regardless of the effort to write it all. I’m doubly not going to do so since I’m already skipping the text after only 20 or so hours of playing so I can focus obsessively on trying to make the number bigger. However, I do have a list of content suggestions, because I think this game is delightful and can only get better.
Modding tools / templates would be amazing. Something to allow the replacement of current chosen descriptions or hell why not entire content blocks from the assembled sex flavor text. The repetitive nature of the content would be effectively crowdsourced by creating and trading custom text mods. Even recognizing how obnoxious it would be to write porn that adheres to a template of countless variable text strings, I’d like to take a crack at overhauling, at the very least, the depressingly lackluster ‘tickle’ events universe. That stuff doesn’t seem to have even been aimed at people with an actual tickling fetish, and instead appears to be little more than a placeholder for people who aren’t into over-the-top ryona/guro/despair porn of the Pummel event universe.
Speaking of which, its great that the tickle option is in there, even if it is a content desert. Not to kinkshame anyone who is into despair porn, the pummel events are really well written, they are just tonally dissonant with the ‘corruption through pleasure and shame’ theme of the other content trees. Sodomize as a source of high-octane agony in the t2 single + combo events and pummel commanders is strongly at odds with the regular buttsex it becomes when it combos with morality events. Descriptions of bones shattered to flinders and thoroughly destroyed internal organs don’t mesh with ‘orgasming continuously,’ not even within the context of the game.
It really seems to me like the theme of confidence-crushing levels of pain can be achieved through sadomasochism tropes of a more reasonable degree, such as spanking, canning, whipping, electrocution, piercing, and trampling. The initial stages of slapping and punching wouldn’t even need any changes. I’m just saying that there is a masochism fetish middle ground between the hard ryona/guro fetish of ‘she exploded herself in a suicide blast to escape the agony and was sad when her immortality reconstituted her from dust because the torment can continue’ and the ‘tickle’ fetish of ‘someone kinda touched her armpits a bit’ that could do with exploration.
More quickly then, and keeping in mind I haven’t looked into any of the forsaken content yet, sorry if I mention something covered there
-needs more tentacles and tentacle vore. The Pleasure commanders are great, also parasitism punisher—fantastic, but tentacles otherwise being restricted to a handful of vignettes and repetitive high-corruption sin collection blurbs is just a bit sad for magical girl corruption genre. I’m just saying the tentacle fetish enjoyers are jealous of the love shown to the futa dick enjoyers
-its amazing that there are male/trap chosen and TSF content, thank you so much for that CSdev, you absolute connoisseur. However, TS magical girls just switching over to the unaltered female event track really sucks the air out of the fetish, to the point where you might as well just leave them male and get some bi-sub thrills and variety of content. I understand the expediency of programming involved, but if there is any reference to the TF after the actual transformation event itself outside the char profile, I didn’t see it yet, which is a shame.
-is this really an entire lust corruption thing that never once features a single lewd crest / estrus crotch tattoo? Talk about abandoning a genre staple. Well, I haven’t seen all the content yet, it must be in here somewhere.
-Some kind of highly visible message beside the ‘choose your action’ prompt, informing you that a new vulnerability break took place in the current session already, would be hugely helpful. When you start skipping all the text to trial-and-error you way to a better score, its really annoying to realize you accidentally triggered a break you were attempting to avoid only 5-6 turns later, because you weren’t reading the text and were already up way too late from hours of trying to make the numbers bigger. If the game ever gets sound, vulnerability breaks would be a great place for an audio cue.
-sounds would be great. Even stock hentai soundboard classics playing once on each flavor text generation and such would go a long way to upping the eroticism to the next level, even if number-embiggening addicts would just disable them
-As someone noted earlier, when a chosen has a minor and core vulnerability that happen to be the paired set from a surround action, that makes breaking the core vulnerability first really much harder. The chosen will use the amoral defense of the minor vulnerability to protect against the core vulnerability growth if you start attacking the core while the minor has a higher score and she anticipates the core will reach the break limit--even if the minor vulnerability score is not currently rising. I get wanting each tactic to protect two stats so that they can double up, but maybe adjust their logic so they pick the primary defense tactic of the stat being attacked first, when both the core and minor would each reduce the damage, and the minor is not being attacked?
No comment on distortions since I haven’t tried them at all yet. Except to say how brilliant it is to put in the rivalry system and distortions. A weakness of this kind of game is the urge to devise and settle on a META for creating big numbers, such that you quickly must give yourself artificial challenges to keep the logic puzzle interesting. Built-in goals and content rewards for especially challenging alternate logic solutions to the core number-enlarging process is Apex game design, bravo.
