Upon stumbling across a rather esoteric, if not archaic looking gem off the wayside of corruption games out there, I decided to take a chance on seeing what it has to offer despite having flashbacks to my barbaric inability to understand how to get into Dwarf Fortress.
I'm glad I decided to, however, I still retain that barbaric inability to truly comprehend how to play the game...good. Bias-wise, I cheat in this game. I cheat to the high hells as it gives the ultimate ability to truly experience this game's fantastic lewd-up at your own pace without fear of becoming utterly lost to it's UI and gameplay loop. There's a reason for that, though, and that'll be addressed later on in the review.
Anywho, onto the game.
What can I say? From that screenshot you get on the page, that's the most you're going to get out of the graphics. You may look at that and say, well Fenoxo gets away with text as the driving smut, does this game too? Yes and no, it's a lot more fluid in how it details it's gameplay, as the game plays like a game rather than an interactive open-ended story with combat (ala Fen). You play as the Demon lord. You're a hentai villian so utterly killing someone is beyond your enjoyability, instead, you like to get under your enemy's skin and use their own faltering wills against them. What does that then translate to?
You have four basic moves, each of those moves poke and prod against the heroines which then slowly but surely erode their wills until they themselves start to gain corruption tiers in relation to what aspect of their character you're degrading.
For example, if one of the heroines is susceptible to pleasure attacks, spamming that, and the adjacent upgraded form of that when you eventually get them pinned mid battle, would start to break tiers as the war draws on. As in this game, you'll be ambushing and fighting your opposing heroines over an entire campaign's length game (lasts about 5~ hours give or take, maybe a whole afternoon if you're going for it). And when tiers break/progress, the heroines personality starts to shift and reveal how corrupted they may be, and on top of that, it may positively and/or negatively impact their relationships between each other (mainly depending on everyone's corrupted status and inner friendships). This hence translates to a lot of lewd, both with your minions being sicked on the sloots in denial, alongside them slooting each other on their own (depending on how they go about things).
The above essentially is the game. You grind out your Demon lord's abilities, successful battles give you more energy to buy more abilities, and the more you win, the more corrupted they are. Once they're destroyed enough, you'll essentially win the final battle against them, and potentially recruit them as forsaken, the evil version of what they were (who then serve alongside you as sloots that acknowledge themselves). Far more easier said than done.
I'll say this before I go further in critiquing the major hindrance this game has. This is actually a corruption game. Not a game that tries to train heroines from prude to lewd (not that that's a bad thing, and there's still a boat load of that in the game), but you are playing as an evil bastard. You are corrupting these heroines to hate themselves, humanity, their goal, alongside just even destroying their wills so much so that they wish for death, only abandoning themselves to wanton sex to forget their shame.
So be warned, as mentioned, this game gets dark, and I do recommend disabling violence in the option-menu if your not much into abuse (which I'm not), since that replaces the break their legs option with tickle. And there's a lot of rape, rape from your thralls, your demons, your heroines when they "vent" their frustrations out on each other, it's heavy in the AO department, if you're not into that I'd advise to pass this one up. Though it also leans heavily on prude to lewd to help soften things up at least heroine-wise with a lot of the actions you take. And, it's not like that all the time, but by the time you get to the end tiers, you could have turned three of humanity's greatest beings into nefarious bitches that want to do nothing but kill and fuck, and kill even more, no matter the amount of innocent lives they've soaked their souls in.
Corruption tangent over, why the four stars? Well, it takes a minute, if not a hot one to really grasp at what you're doing. And when you do finally figure that out, actually learning how to play this game good is a long process (hence the many guides throughout the thread). That in turn results in many failed runs, maybe only seeing a glimpse of the quarter/mid tier corruption events before being defeated, alongside just feeling like a loser of a Demon Lord since you're usually broke on how evil you are. It's got a rather large learning curve in deciphering what's going on, and it's also got an interface that if you can't get used to, will probably turn you off since there's not much to changing it. I still really don't know what's going on in this game when I see the amount of numbers, multipliers, and how everything really interacts with each other in terms of popping off. Not completely ignorant to the system(s), but it is confusing, and isn't explained in too much detail ingame.
There's cheats though, that allow you to basically be the Demon Lord in having infinite power, unlocking all abilities at the start and just being a general OP villain (press C at the options tab, or alternatively, go through one run of the game irregardless on whether you win or lose). With cheats, you can go from 0-100 as fast or as slow as you want, and I actually recommend this as a newbie option so that you get a feel for what the game is so that when you want a real run, you'll understand halfassedly on what's going on. And that if you want to skip the grind/learning-curve, you can still enjoy the events and mechanics the game has to offer.
And, if you can look past that and/or accept it, and that you're dedicated to learning this game, you'll have something you'll probably never uninstall. The game's gaining momentum, plenty of it in truly refining a lot of it's features. It reminds me of those old brothel simulators that many people built up back in the day with their custom character packs, dialogues and events. This game is slowly becoming that to where it can actually be a corruption simulator, with your own characters, and maybe even potential dialogues and further refinements through mods in the future (btw custom characters & portraits are now featured in the game). It feels pretty open and I wouldn't be surprised if this gains more traction due to what it's end goal is looking like.
Overall this is a great game you should give a go. I mainly give it four stars as it does take a lot of getting used to, and it is jarring at first, but like many, it can be mitigated in some ways, and if you do like the gameplay loop you can git gud. Great game, can't wait for more.