Java - Corrupted Saviors [Release 58] [CSDev]

So you are reading reviews to judge "is this game worth my time?". But before passing judgement on this game based solely off of my or any other review look at what a few of them they say. You'll find them very polar, 1 star or 5 star, with a few 4 sprinkled on top. Why? Well, confusingly enough, non of them are wrong in their judgment, so let me sum up why you might end up on either side of this experience.

To start off, this is a porn game, its main premise is smutty - "corrupt the magic girls, called Chosen", but it doesn't mean it's all porn no game. The gameplay is a main point here, with smut being the outcome of correct play, which at first might be difficult to reach, but which makes it that much more rewarding to achieve.

But why bad?
1) Well, because game is quite hard to learn. Actually the learning curve is steep! Which means a load of information needs to be absorbed to get through the basics of gameplay loop. It's a game like no other and it requires it's own set of understanding which will not come easy or fast. Some might say the informatioln is scattered and unclear, but guides within a game provide with most of need-to-know basics. But using it in practice is a bit diffrent and raises more questions. Guides from users will help and asking questions in thread might clear some mechanics up. And there is a lot of them, the mechanics I mean, little interactions between factors, that cause things to change. You might have already noticed that those "things" are mainly numbers. So onto the next point.
2) UI is...a text window. Experience what it was like to play the games in the dawn of gaming, this text game is white on black, with most things happening with numbers. To know information push the button and more text will appear, no nice windows and graphics. But what do these text windows show?
3) Gameplay, that is based on numbers going up. The main gameplay loop is a puzzle that you solve in a way that you want, and the sign of success is numbers going up...some times. If you are here for text journey of magic girl corruption, it's not that, it is a "outplay, outsmart, and catch the magic girls off guard turning their weakneses and their friends against them". But you do that not with some buttons that say "make lewd" but taking direct control of a daily fights, where you lead demons and attack chosen, each attack and surround being a part of puzzle to conquer. So when porn?
4) Well...depends on what you consider porn, as said previously the porn is a part of gameplay, everything you do is lewd, but to get to spicy stuff you first have to actually do something to girls, and they will resist. So most of smut, in game and in events inbetween is later in the loop. Also, because it is pretty much an array of small puzzles, repetion will be encountered at some point.But is there a lot of porn to begin with? Not a huge amount and most of it contained in variety of choices you can make, if you don't include smut happening as a part of gameplay(mostly because you can't play the game thinking with your dick)there is not a big amount of it. The biggest joy comes from context of interactions and the story you weave in you mind, but considdering the outright descriptions of fucking, you will enjoy them for quite some time,and whenthe variety ends you probably learned the game by then, and can enjoy the other things game has to offer.


So, you trying to say it's good?
For me and many others who rated this game as 5 stars, this game absolutely deserves it. Why?
1) It is a game first and foremost, so gameplay is its main attraction. And this gameplay has a lot to offer. The system of closely knit factors, which interact with each other, makes you consider your approach to every girl. What is her weakness, how does it help me, how does it make things more difficult for me? Every girl interacts with another 2 so you have to consider how to exploit it, how to avoid making them friends, what weakness to abuse in each girl. And all of that comes in a form of numbers that have 0 randomness factor, so a comparison to puzzles is apt - once the girls are defined, only you decide how things go. How can they go?
2) Well apart from failure a way to succeed is simple - corrupt them or make them kill each other out of hatred. I mean it's not simple, they are superheroes with set morals and desire to save and protect. So it will take some time, but how exactly they break is up to you. In game there are 8 separate way to make the girl corrupted, each of them folowing its own path, but mainly can be equally split into "overwhelm with depravity" and "distort their sense of morals". And I have to point out that the goal is not to have the biggest numbers, the point is to figure out what numbers need to be big, so they allow you to break the will of the Chosen. This give a gameplay loop replayability like no other, giving you variyety of ways to pull apart diffrent teams in diffrent way. But why do it at all?
3) There are single games and campaign. I consider campaign to be the main way to experience the game, and single play being more of a sandbox. What you are climbing toward is total domination, and on your path you will encounter more and more difficult chosen, with modifiers that make you consider how to best approach this particular fight. Basically there's is a progression during the game, where you start off as a group of weak demons led by demon lord, to a horde of unending monstrosities that overpower chosen defenders, corrupting the sheer reality under their feet. There's also a inter-loop progression in campaign mod where you get items, which change what you can do and opening new opportuinities of play, achievment system, that counts every time you break a chosen, giving you bonuses, as you infamy throughtout the land increases. So the game is hard to learn but it gets harder?
4) Well, once you climb that steep slope of first few loops, and understand what to do with simple chosen, you'll find it extremely easy to do, so you might say "oh now game boring" but following the campaign progression you will encounter your next challenge - chosen species. Superior Chosen - better in every way, requiring you to focus your best effort to best her. Next, be it Undead that drains you resourses or Animalistic that is so much harder to corrupt than any previous ones, you will need to rethink how you approach your game. So stronger chosen is just extra difficulty?
5) If you manage to corrupt them and sway to your side, their strength becomes yours to command. Forsaken is one of the main mechanics later in the campaign. They are your strength you wield and every new conquest fills your army of corrupted chosen. Experiment with them, and test how to break others so they become the best forsaken you need. Yes, the way you corrupt decieds what Forsaken they become along with their species, making variyety of them quite huge and something you will enjoy long into playing this game. What else?
6) Community and developer. Both community and the dev help the game to be better every day, or every once in a while. The portrait packs help to give some visuals to purely text game. Guides help understand the game. People on the thread are happy to answer your questions and dev listens to complaints, suggestions and bug reports. So...what should you do?


Summary:
As of today, version 60f, the game in a great place, reminding me of rogue-like gameplay loop, it's a kind of game you actually enjoy to play, with some added bonus of seeing magic girls unravel at your feet. Some mechanics like personally interacting(and fucking) chosen and forsaken adds interactivity, if you take time to read some of the descriptions and dialogues that fly by during the game, you might enjoy seeing their reactions and words. But it's not for everyone, and as many reviewets experience, you might not get to the juicy fun part, so my take: either do or don't. And if you do, don't push yourself to understand in one big swoop, take time. Take victories here and there when you achieve them and ask others when qustions arise.

It's one of those games where you regularly find yourself wishing it would just play itself. Extremely grindy, extremely tedious. When you don't know what you're doing, it's frustrating, and once you know what you're doing, it's excruciatingly repetetive. I can't give it a 1-star rating though, because the trial-and-error grind of learning what you're supposed to do was engaging enough to get me to that point.
I'll say this though, an eroge about corruption magical girls has no business being this flaccid and unarousing. Don't come into this game expecting much in the way of titillation, its mostly just a 'number go up' game where you unlock walls of text by stacking multipliers. I can't really recommend it, but there is some interesting number play to be had here.

(7/7) One of the best text based ero games I've seen, comparable to the eraTouhou collection. I strongly recommend downloading one of the image packs to enhance the experience.

It's a sort of turn based puzzle game where if you succeed you corrupt the heroines and turn them into your slaves which you use to corrupt more heroines.

The combat is very finely tuned and you have to read the README to really get what is going on. There are a lot of vignettes and variations on the characters, their mental state and even your attacks, this is where most of the erotic part of the game comes in and it is well written and pleasantly reactive to the situation.

I wish that there were more massively game altering items that changed the rules of the combat somewhat, the game can get a bit stale on the subsequent loops because of how finely tuned it is. Also there aren't enough vignettes with the girls you have already corrupted in my opinion. I wish there was some way to interact more with them.

It is overall one of the most original and well implemented "play as the tentacle monster" games and I really hope to see more from this developer.

Review is for Release 58

it was fun and chalanging rougelike game that involve corruption. you maybe won't understand how the game work for few run but the higher you go the better the challenge is. also for better experience, download the mod pack from multiple source. the original image still looks fine regardless.

This game feels like the creator always asked "How do I make this game hard?" but never asked "How do I make this game fun?" because it honestly isn't. It has garbage user interface, it takes ages to do anything interesting and often times when you do you fuck yourself from ever being able to do anything interesting ever again, and even cheating to hell and back by trying to "give" yourself op items literally doesn't help because as it turns out you only get one and you have to play through this bull fuck of a game more than once to get another. I'm struggling to beat even one run as it seems are most people so why the fuck would this dev think this is a good idea? It doesn't incentivize you to keep playing, just makes quitting early a fuckload easier.

I really want to like this game, it consumed me entirely for a day just trying to understand it and get into the guts of it. There's a deep appeal to the ideas behind the mechanics, and the complexity is deeply investing. A lot of thought and work was obviously put into it.

I just wish that the dev ever asked the question; "But is it fun?"

The balancing isn't fun. The complexity is clever, but it's not fun. There is a work of genius here, but it's absolutely suffocated by how it's misapplied.

It's one of those games that's worse than bad - those you quit out of sooner. But when you see so much potential behind it that you feel like it could be good if you just understand it - it's a sunk cost machine with always one more corner that might hide greatness, but never does.

This is by far one of my favorite game on the site by far. We have other reviews so I’ll make this a quick summary for people to understand what the game is about to see if it fits your taste.

Its a text-base magical girl corruption game where you, demon lord, min-max save scum and optimize to do the best you can against a group of 3 magical girls to corrupt them and gather energy before X # days are up before the final showdown and then you keep doing it in the next loop/city and refine and get better at your work with benefit of corrupted heroes from previous cities until you finally encounter your nemesis and lose or CSDEV released an update and you restart because you want play new update with new stuff . You get to see the 3 magical girls decent into corruption as you see them go from paragon to however you twist them based on what parts of their moral compass you break. If you think save scumming is cheating, well you aint trying then. This game plays best if you’re willing to reset the day to min-max everyday for the best possible outcome. Part of the reward in this game comes from your ability to change your strategy to fit the day to squeeze just some more energy from the magical girls as changing even couple turn in a day can make you go from doing millions to trillions corruption damage.
This game does have a harsh learning curve if you’re not willing to put the time to learn and to read the info txt files, but even then it can still be confusing. This game has an active community so just ask and someone will help or explain.

Customization is a thing as well so you can customize and create ur own magical girl to oppose and add picture if needed. Customize your campaign instead fighting the same magical girl given by the game. Its easy to do if you’re willing to put the time into it.
Another plus is the creator has been constantly updating this game, there is no access lock behind paywall early access, so feel free donate in future if you like the game as well.

This is a tough game to review. so sorry if this isn't very well written; it's one of the most unique H-games out there. The core gameplay loop is all about getting numbers to multiplicatively increase through what's essentially Combos of actions, and through that causing the NPCs to "break".
The learning curve is really tough, save scumming until it "clicks" is recommended.
I think the gameplay can be very satisfying when it clicks. The first time you get a stat up to 1G, you feel great. The way the Saviors get corrupted throughout a run is really well done.

The only reason why I wouldn't give it a 5 is that the games' "Loop" progression isn't to my tastes. I've only gotten to Loop 3, but at that point I want to stop. It's practically a prestige system, but you can get stronger through a Forsaken (that I honestly don't fully understand, so it might be a skill issue.)
The problem for me is that it takes too much time to finish a Loop, and there's not enough "newness" per loop. Maybe it's a problem with me, but I find that the first 20 weeks are roughly the same. Which means that I'm spending at least 30min doing repetition each loop.
Do note that if you only play a single Loop, I find it to be a very well paced 3-4 hour game.

Shoutouts to the Dev for publishing everything for free and being one of the most dedicated devs I've seen. In a sea of Patreon slop, CSDev is a breath of fresh air and deserves more recognition.

I really like the concept, and I think it is a very good game, even thought the guide can be very confusing, since there are a lot of terms and most are not explained and you will have to explore it all by yourself.

This is okay. The problem is that by the time you understand how the game works, there is no more content.

The game is a little repetitive. It is well written but around the third wave it is possible that you saw everything, (and you only meet the boss around the 10th one).

So you will keep seeing the same things. I would give five stars if there was more flavor, like "extra content" for mid and late game stages.

This review is for Release 51 (although I have been playing since R22c)

TLDR: Insane learning curve, but great community and a cheat mode that makes the game possible for casuals or people who just don't want to think too hard for a bit, but needs better pleasure center pressers (art, varied flavor scenes, etc.) to increase/maintain appeal.

The game itself is incredibly hardcore with a learning curve that is only beaten by 3.5e DnD in that you need to dedicate a lot of time to learning how the game works and even then, you need to also understand even more that you cannot learn from what comes from the game.

On the plus side, once you lose your first run (unless it has been changed to just always be available) you gain access to cheat mode which grants infinite evil energy, so even if you are a scrub like me who can't clear any run on their own, you wind up getting what you need to be able to play through the game on what should be called casual mode.

The biggest thing that helps this game is definitely the community.
I have never met a community of players on ANY forum that has been as helpful, patient, and insightful as this community.
If you ever need help learning how the game works, you can always post a comment in the discussion section and someone WILL help you to the point that the next time you will need their help is when you reach the loops that have elite enemies because those ones are very difficult to deal with.

Aside from the difficulty of the game, the mechanics are fairly sound, I have only rarely encountered situations where bugs arise, to the point that the only bugs I can note at this time are:

1. Surround levels dropping for seemingly no reason as soon as a chosen gets un-captured (sometimes going from 7 levels to 4 even though nothing has changed aside from them no longer being surrounded)
2. Damage from basic attacks in the late game of loops doing almost no damage even though there are no negative modifiers in play and nothing has been done to reduce damage yet.
   ie: when an attack that should be doing damage in the realm of 50.4p points only does 23 points of damage for literally no reason.

And that's literally the only bugs I have ever encountered.

The character creation is nice, which is good because a text based game that is 90% math really should be spectacular in the writing department, especially since anything that isn't tied to the mechanics of the game is considered flavor text that you don't have to read unless you can decipher the chosen's strengths and weaknesses from their personality entry (which you can do, but you can also get psychic reading at the beginning of the loops, so not a needed skill).

The fact that the chosen can now have wildly varied body types and those can actually impact the game is awesome, but they need to have more of an impact in the flavor scenes since those have remained basically the same ever since I started playing, so I almost never even read flavor scenes anymore, I just scroll to the end to see if I gained any EE or breaks from the scene, then move on.

A problem that I do have with the game though that has nothing to do with the gameplay itself, is the use of AI art assets.
They used to be an optional pack that you could install yourself, but now they are built in to the base game.
With a game this immense in mechanics, getting professionally made art to use for the game should be a priority rather than using AI assets, especially since an artist could not only make better art, but they could take each of the flavor text scenes and turn those into whole ass dynamic images that turns the game from an exercise in programming into true fap material.
Seriously, playing this game always makes me want to go watch magical girls getting gang banged in public, to the point that I literally stop playing the game to jack off to something else, and when it comes to porn games, that is NOT something you want.
If there were professionally made images and art assets made for the game by a real artist, even if they just started out as colorless sketch images, it would massively improve the appeal of this game for many people, and for the hardcore gamers only interested in winning, you could just have a toggle button to turn off the flavor text images to cut down on scrolling.

All-in-all, it's a good game at its core, but it is so complex that it turns many people away, and the lack of decent art assets and no difficulty options aside from standard, custom made loop, and cheat mode turns even more people away.
Personally, I keep playing because it scratches all the right kink/fetish itches, and winning without cheating gives such a dopamine rush that it makes it all feel worth it.

So if you are hesitant about checking this game out, or are even considering leaving a bad review, I really recommend interacting with the community for this game, because they can turn a frustrating headache into something that is actually really enjoyable.

This game always is the most broken unbalanced game ever strategy-wise, but it is also extremely satisfying once you know what you are doing. Racking up those multipliers and combos feel amazing, no arguments.

However it's replayability suffer heavily from gameplay pace: the better you are at the game, the less engaging the story becomes. Once you finish your first / second cycles the next ones become more and more boring, and you see no points in continue playing.

This game deserves a Poor rating because of the UI and UX alone. It's not terrible, but it's distinctly below average. It's hard to understand what you're even meant to be doing, the game does not help you at all. The writing is of fairly high quality, but it's extremely difficult to feel like you're playing a game. I can read very high quality smut that I don't need to play a game to access, let alone a game that's this difficult to work out what it is you're meant to be doing. If the author ever reads this: you need a few hard UI and UX passes to make this game more approachable.

In a nutshell, you can't figure it out without a gallon of beer. Seriously, this game is so unfriendly and unnecessarily overpowered that I fell in love with it at first sight. I love games like this, the kind where the gameplay is a huge system that you can spend hours exploring, but the problem is that here it's done in the most obnoxious way possible.

It's h game, right? Right, but the game itself forgot about it, that's why you can't "have fun" here, because there is very little content, and the game itself takes you away from it.

Incredibly sharp rise in the threshold of entry. High threshold for such games is normal, as it is difficult to create a normal atmosphere in the game in which the incredibly complex game system, but in other games "mountain" high, but the angle of ascent is successfully calibrated that would not thaw, but here ... here the mountain is dotted with spikes on which dragons are sitting, and at the same time a tornado is passing by. Lots of obscure "at first glance" terms, lots of obscure "in the very long run" terms that no one will explain to you, why would they? Do you need them? And what is there to do? Am I doing everything right or have I already lost?

From the previous point follows this one, the need to read tons of guides in order to just play the game. And this is the shit I just hate, if the game has shit that you can understand only from the guide (well, or spend 50 hours on it) then the game design is shit, okay? In games with good gameplay design, there are few or no such situations, somewhere the player will be specifically told why what is needed, leaving out unnecessary details for the moment, somewhere will hint gameplay.

Showing everything at once. In a game with a huge number of features, you need to understand when to provide the player with these features, if they overload gameplay, it is worth some way to weaken its impact on gameplay for the first time, or at all blocked, hide that the player would first understand and master the basic mechanics, and then, delve into the details.

Here comes 4535 hours of play, so - everything seems to go well, great, the next move and... you lost because on the 3rd hour of the game did not choose the 2nd skill of 44, sucker. When the game party can last up to several hours, it is worth doing so that the player would initially realize that he sucks ass and that it is necessary to start again, which is often used in the form of challenge once every n days, which allows the player to understand whether he is doing everything right and compare their strength relative to something.

Disgusting UI. There is nothing much to say, the others have already described it, but just to point out that put the interaction with the chosen in the tab info, quite a strange idea. (I found it by random poking).

The system seems to be advanced, but in any case, the variability here is zero. At least a little move from the most effective path, for example, the dial of fun, why not? That's it, you suck your ass, restart casual-boy.

Honestly, the amount of work put into this game is insane.

Instead of listing all the pros and cons (as its been done by many people already), I'm going to ask you to give it a try if you haven't yet.

Its a bit hard, but the semi-built in tutorial does a decent job at getting you started. Once you begin to understand it becomes incredibly fun, to the point where I was playing it without the intention of rubbing one out.

Honestly: My congratulations and thanks to the developer for this amazing game.

I finally got all 3 distortions on day 13 after endless resetting and need to review this game.

Pros:

• A high skill porn game, I have now seen everything.
• Best automatic personality generation I've seen in just about any game much less an indie Sailor Moon ripoff.
• Even though the writing is scripted and often repeats itself the writing is surprisingly good and a lot of thought is put into character details.
• The chosen do bad things too, if you think about it who are the real villains? Still us.
• The dopamine release when I get the perfect battle is superior to any orgasm.

Cons:

• Text only and need to download packs.
• My brain is working too hard to fap.
• Girls start to feel less distinct since the text for each character trait is repeated.
• Very hard to learn, too hard for normies.
• Some information is pretty obscure, you don't learn fallen/distortion/superior mechanics until after your first run. They interact too. You play through a whole game just to find out it was the tutorial and you now have to learn how the actual game is played.

Suggestions:

• IMPROVE THE UI add the ability to check information (like chosen weaknesses, how traumas contribute to openings etc.) in battle. I pretty much needed 2-3 text documents of info on how game mechanics worked open at all times when I was starting.
• GIVE ME THE OPTION TO HIDE SOME TEXT, I don't need to see every EE upgrade on the menu every time I change the page I'm on, and a lot of text is redundant. Toggles based on dialogue type would be great for this.
• MORE DIALOGUE VARIETY! This is a game that benefits from having more stuff in it, it's not like you'll run out of disk space or processing power. Multiple dialogue options per personality type and more variety per corruption level (a tier break should have much more variety than just c/min/sig). More events like the day 14 broadcast would be great.
• CUSTOM CHOSEN, allow custom dialogue/descriptions for custom chosen. Helps with the above suggestion and unchanged lines can default to the standard. Would make mods god tier.
• EE becomes uninteresting after you get Tomorrow's News, I feel there should be some generic spender for EE or more interesting upgrade paths. I'd like to have access to more weak items that I choose circumstantially as opposed to a couple OP ones that I'm stuck with.

Other players have already said it many times before, so I won't repeat it here.
In short, this game is:

1. Unforgiving
2. Demands dedication
3. Lacks feedback towards the player
4. Long-winded and slow

Personally, I don't like this kind of game, where it pretty much expects you to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of documentation just so you can play it "right". Even then it's still hard to tell when you're doing poorly. And yes, you will be doing poorly and will only realize long after the fact, or if you even notice at all.

I'll just get this out here, to me this game gave off the impression of elitism, by which I mean when someone raised a complaint such as mine they'll just get hit by the playerbase with a "git gud" while not providing anything helpful at all. I know there are people out there who enjoy challenging and difficult games, and I'm not saying the developer should dumb it down or make it simpler, since it's perfectly okay if they enjoy making hard games.

Sorry for the rant. I suggest you avoid this game if you're looking for the standard RPG and/or sandbox game experience because you will not find any here.

This is the most poorly explained, obtuse, frustrating game I've come across in over 20 years of gaming.
The developer uses hundreds of terms without bothering to explain what any of them mean, how they work or even what the objective of the game is.
After more than 15 hours of trying to play and reading guides, I still legitimately have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing here. Am I trying to kill the "Chosen"? Am I trying to enslave them? I seem to be attacking them in utterly pointless duels that achieve nothing and result in a loss for me every time.
I'm giving this 2 stars because it's clear a MONUMENTAL amount of effort went into it. But holy shit, I have no idea what audience it's intended for.

Difficult to learn, satisfying to master. You will struggle, you will rage, you will beat your head against the opaque rules and mind-boggling math behind the game.

Then you will swallow your pride, you will find the guides in the game folder, and you will read the forums. You will start putting the lessons into practice.

Then you will win Loop 1, and the *real* game will begin. Stick with it, don't give up, this game is very rewarding in a cerebral sense.

Oh yeah and it's hot.

The good:
Currently really good as a 'game'. There's quite a large skill curve though before you get to the point of being good enough to get anything done. Some Minor QoL I'd like added (a button to show all inputs given in the current day would be fantastic for example, when trying to optimize)

The bad:
Some excess repetition in the sex/erotic content. Regularly updated though so I'm very prepared to go up to a perfect rating as the game gets improved.

(Review is as of Release 46b)

I'm giving it a 4 based on the fact that it does what it sets out to do, even though in its current form it's kind of not for me.

For starters, and this can't be stressed enough: while the game presents itself as more of a management sim, it is absolutely a puzzle game. Not only does the game hide this fact from you, but it also never tells you if you're putting the pieces together correctly.

It's daunting early on and the included text document only sort of clears things up. I say "only sort of" because of my previous comment about how the game never tells you if you're putting the pieces together correctly. Played correctly, this game is a "select the right options and make the numbers go brrrrrr" kind of experience. Hey, I like the Disgaea series, you may think. I'm fine with numbers going brrrrrr. But here's the problem: the game takes place over a number of days, and while you understand what your goal ultimately is, what you don't know is how close you are to achieving that goal. Did you actually do a good enough job of making the numbers go brrrrrr last turn? The good news is that if you think you didn't, as long as you don't complete the day, you can reset and start over. Owing to the fact that it's a puzzle game, there is no randomness: if you play it the same way, you will get the same result. But the bad news is, you don't really have an idea of just how well (or poorly) you're doing. And if you start poorly, you might as well give up, because you will pay for it in the end: the game is not exactly forgiving, and only gets more and more unforgiving as you progress. This is ultimately the biggest flaw in the game: even reading the text documents and some of the guides other users have posted (which is also a tacit admission that the included documentation does not do a good enough job of explaining how the game works and, more importantly, how to not suck at it) does not actually tell you if you're doing well enough in your game to progress. The game also occasionally freezes, particularly if you do too good of a job of making the numbers go brrrrrr.

I'm still giving it a 4 for a few reasons: first, the dev clearly has a vision in mind and it's one that some people absolutely do enjoy; and second, said dev is very active and seems very dedicated to improving the game.