HTML - Course of Temptation [v0.6.0f] [Anthaum]

Version Reviewed: v0.5.5f

Overview: Slightly less work than going to an actual college

Story: You are a college freshman who has a number of duties to accomplish from going to classes to feeding yourself to making money to send back home every week. It's a good thing you are at easy access university and everybody is DTF. The game has story elements related to some of the named characters, things like discovering the evil plans of a party throwing frat, or the proclivities of a repressed librarian, but they're fairly thinly spaced and don't affect any kind of overall storyline.

Gameplay: There are a handful of games on this site that are more grindy, but only a handful. Your basic gameplay loop is to get up, take a leak, change clothes, take a shower, get breakfast, go to class, sit through class, sit through class, sit through class, sit through class, sit through class, get lunch, go to class, sit through class, sit through class, sit through class, sit through class, do some afternoon or evening activities like making money, doing a "special assignment" for a teacher, or grinding up some skill, go home, do homework, go to bed.

This may not sound all that exciting when written out like this, but don't worry, you'll be repeating it hundreds of times. The main character has a laundry list of stats, some of which are actually important, but all of which take many many repetitions of some activity to increase. It's not always clear which activities will raise stats and which won't, the game gives very little feedback on this and the bars move so slowly that it's hard to even eyeball a difference when you do something.

As for the world, it is fully populated by a few primary characters that have custom story beats and hundreds of generated people who you know originally by hilariously long descriptions like "a slightly dressed up blonde-haired college girl with a flat-tipped nose". Figuring out where and when you can unlock the chat options that allow you to ask for their name is one of the hidden gameplay tasks in the game, and also one of the grinds as figuring out everyone's name takes hundreds of interactions. The game has a boatload of locations to explore, all of which take a little (or sometimes a lot) of time to get to. The game thankfully has a fast travel system, but it honestly should be the default since the standard section by section navigation system is woefully inadequate for the size of the map.

The game offers close to zero help in discovering the little bits of storyline that exist. You are on your own to dig them out from a moutain of grind. It also doesn't warn you if an action is useless for whatever reason, so you can waste a lot of time trying to level something up when it's locked behind a different stat or you just have not found the right time and place for some trigger. The other storyline bits involve one of several clubs that you can join. Computer gaming, swimming, football, and a couple of others. There are regular tournaments and how much you grind your stats can determine how well you do. Interestingly enough all of the tournaments happen regardless of which you choose, so you will be regularly reminded of how your school did in all of the stuff you are ignoring.

Sex content varies. For the primary characters like your best friend and the teachers it will take a long time and possible an extra dating card grind to get anywhere with them. For the randomly generated students it's hilariously easy to trigger the sex mini-game. Sometimes it's easier to start sex than it is to learn their name. The game even recognizes this, giving you a bit of extra "shame" meter if you screw someone without knowing their name.

On a side note, I rolled a male character and the game supports this, but I have a feeling it was originally developed with a female main character in mind. The clothing seems a bit heavily weighted towards women and as you walk around pervy gusts of wind are always trying to blow up my non-existant skirt. A lot of the shame and embarassment mechanics seem a bit more woman centric as well. I think the male mode is a little bit of an afterthought.

As far as the sex scenes go, they can feel rather mechanical. Apply lips to nipple. Apply hand to clit. Click go to advance one time slot. Congratulations, arousal succesfully increased by 5%. It's more of a sex battle system than a sex simulator. Some of the actions are only unlocked if you level up certain skills, but since they make little to no difference anyway that's also a disappointment. There are even opposition checks when you attempt to perform certain actions (like changing positions) and you can fail if your opponent is stronger. Annoyingly no matter how good or poorly you perform it doesn't seem to change your partner's opinion of you. Nor does it let you grind up your sex stats very much since the maxium bonus is capped at a very small value, so spending an hour holding back orgasms while you try to maximize your oral stat doesn't work.

Graphics: There are none, this is a strictly text based game. You know that lovely hand drawn art in the header for this game? It doesn't appear in the game.

Conclusion: For as highly rated as this game is I was let down by the long tedious gameplay and while the text based sex scenes you do occasionally get are well written they're spread too thin and it's just too hard to track them down. I'm rating this three stars mostly for the strength of the writing on the scenes you do get and the relatively large number of supported activities, but with the caveat that you're going to need to dedicate many hours to grinding up stats if you want to see all of the content, especially with the team activities since you can only do one at a time and they're very grindy.

This is a very large and complete game. In the same vein as Degrees of Lewdity, but as a much more traditional girl life sim. Kind of caught me by surprise.

Kind of scratches that Girls life / New Life / Cursed itch.

Course of Click Chores.

It's like playing The Sims except your sim has no automatic functions. It's a bunch of click chores involving going to the bathroom, taking a shower, paying attention in class (I love clicking that I'm paying attention in class 5 times), working on XYZ stat, making money, etc.

It comes to the point where you're just doing a routine. The game hardly even becomes about the adult content. The sex/masturbation rigmarole ends up being very mechanical; just a way to recover your release bar. You work for hours to cover your ever-increasing weekly debt. It's very grindy yet the game warns you not to increase the skill gain multiplier or remove the daily cap. There also isn't enough events in between to make it not a boring slog.

The game also needs to be more streamlined. If I'm not interested in watersports, do I really need the bladder bar? I already know what I'm going to do in class outside events, do I really need to sit through it every time after a while? Can I just quickly exit the dorm to the outside? Can I just quickly go in and out of town without having to navigate to the bus stop? Can I just optionally skip the sex/masturbation scenes after a while if it's not bringing anything new/interesting after the 20th time? There's many little time wasters like this that plague this game.

Excellent game, it's rare to find games with this much freedom and I really like the exhibitionism content I have seen so far. Granted I do feel from time to time there is some thing missing but that's just me being greedy lol

A very in-depth simulator, I enjoy this to get ideas how life could go before going out and actually doing this stuff haha. I think it gives me courage actually. Only lacking pregnancy content or I would select 5 stars.

Great text based game, you can tell a lot of heart and soul went into this game. Some recommendations, feel free to ignore, but more in depth conversations with individuals would be neat to see, especially some after care dialog would be cool instead of just saying "bye" afterwards, as well as pregnancies being a thing and the implications of that. 5/5 stars though, can wait to see what comes next.

The game lacks any sense of consequence or pressure that isnt entirely player driven. Everything has an escape hatch to completely negate any sense of choice you might have made if you feel bad or get the squick despite already having a back button. Its toothless, banal, overly cautious, and flavourless. They've made terrible choices for making their lifesim compelling.

[ver. 0.5.3]

I haven't seen so many customization options since TiTS. And this one comes without slurs!

The writing is solid, the interface has room for improvement but I'm confident that will be addressed during the stage of giving the UI the finishing touches.

The game has a strong foundation in its current state, which is a good sign for things to come.

To-do list:
- Finishing the scripted storylines, of course. Looking forward to it.

- Doing something, anything, with the current non-scripted sex events (boring and grindy as hell, a real shame.)

- Streamlining/skipping repeatable events that don't add that much to the story (like classes, studying, working or eating). The random events during these chains can appear in one single screen instead of having to manually click several times (4 for a single hour of class, way, way too much.)

fun game, can be a little annoying getting events to trigger. wish there were more prewritten sex scenes/scenarios because the sex minigame thing is a little underwhelming. There is a lot of content in the current build

A bit grindy and the lack of visuals but otherwise great game.

The generated characters' attributes and looks are fairly realistically distributed, though some more extremes could be displayed as well IMO as despite the setting being grounded in reality, it is still a dating/sex game.

Some places could use a drop-down menu instead of listing all the options in-line with the text (I'm thinking of hair colour in character creation mostly).

Great game with heaps of customisation and playability. The ability to generate a world how you wish, the varied and diverse characters, and the sheer amount of playability puts this game ahead of many others

I almost never play text only games anymore but id figure id give this one a try on a whim and boy am i glad i did, this game is so much better than i was expecting. Almost every other game out there could learn a thing or two from how this game is coded. Pretty much every system in this game from character interactions to clothing to menuing is done better than 99% of games on this site.

This game is an example of how to code a great text-based game. It gives you so much freedom and allows you to play your own style. I really hope they keep up their great work and add some more story content, because at the moment there is a lot to discover but little story.

And I am really looking forward to the day when a game like this can be played with an AI based picture generator that gives us some art to the actions described in the game. That would be perfect.

Great game with many options, funny dialogue, lots to do. Very hot descriptions, with many different options of clothing and kinks. Very nice exhibitionist options. Titillating without being obtuse. Very promising, will be keeping track of how it progresses.

Good stuff but it’s in desperate need of more content.

It’s a text based sandbox rpg which attempts to simulate college life (but also porn) in the magical land of the US and does a pretty good job at that… mostly. The tl:dr is it has a good skeleton but really needs more flesh, which looks to be coming in future updates. But to go into more detail:


-ART / MUSIC-

There isn’t any. Well there’s a couple of maps but no visuals or audio to speak of. This is a purely text based game, which is… cool, but also a big ask for most people to even consider trying it out. Adding some form of art to the game is probably its most requested feature and I’m inclined to agree it would be a huge boost. Grabbing an artist (paid in exposure) certainly couldn’t hurt. Even adding AI art might not be the worst idea here as characters are all randomly generated. Point is, some visuals to accompany the text would really improve the experience here but I get that it is fundamentally a text based game (and again that’s cool).


-GAMEPLAY / WRITING-

I would like to compare this to other lewd games of varying… degrees. But that’s sort of, maybe, against the rules here so I’ll refrain. On its own merits the sandbox elements are solid. It’s cool how you can create your own stories with npc’s and there’s different relationships you can trigger with each of them, like becoming friends, rivals, fuckbuddies, boyfriend/girlfriend etc. But the best relationship is unquestionably hatefuck, which can be a little hard to trigger but really fun when it does. Imagine like the nemesis system where a rival appears to slap you in the cock and get nasty.

Unfortunately these relationships are also lacking a ton of depth atm. Most events can only really be triggered by having them happen to you and the game can be really stingy with that. It can also be really annoying to raise some npc's friendship & lust to get these relationships to even happen. And then there’s some really bizarre situations you can end up in because the game doesn’t really account for prior events and sexual encounters. You can have had sex multiple times with someone but try to flirt with them even once and they will say they just aren’t interested in you. Do this at the River Rat bar and then wait around afterwards until they proposition you anyway for maximum hilarity. I’d like to petition the developer of the game to add dementia and tsundere as traits to the game so this can be an intended feature. There’s some other stuff like having relationships with professors, helping someone cheat on their partner (the no.1 cause for most relationship jank in this game) or cheating around in general which just feel painfully underdeveloped at the moment. Relationships in this game have a solid foundation but they ultimately feel very flat, which is a shame because it’s such a core part of the game.

The game is also very grindy, it can be really slow trying to raise some skills especially assertiveness and compliance (aka dominance & submission). There’s also a bit of a disconnect there as certain things have no impact on these skills, where I would argue they should. Side bets at the arcade for example don’t raise your dominance or submission. You can literally go down on nine people in a row as a punishment for losing and it has zero impact on your submission skill. Similarly as mentioned before relationships are also really grindy, raising an npc’s bars can be an absolute slog of repetitive events. Don’t even get me started on trying to raise an npc’s dominance or compliance. Having sex with an npc seemingly doesn’t seem to change friendship or lust. Being submissive or dominant during sex doesn’t seem to affect dominance or compliance (or it’s barely noticeable) and it’s all kinda disconnected.
The grind will probably become less of a big deal as more content is added along with more ways to increase these skills and relationships. But for now. If you dislike the grind. I honestly recommend going into the options and changing the skill and relationship multiplier to 2x or even 3x. I’m gonna be real with you, I don’t think there’s enough content in the game currently to justify playing out a full college year, in which this level of grind might be more tolerable.


-CONCLUSION-

If all that sounds harsh and that I must hate the game, I don’t. Truthfully I played this game solid for a couple of days and found it pretty addictive. The events in the game are good, the relationship system is a great foundation, the customisation options are cool. The special npc’s are really cool (love the D&D storyline in particular) though suffer from the same grind and rng issues the rest of the game has. I do think the direction the game is going in looks promising and I genuinely want it to keep going. Honestly my biggest problem with the game is; I want more of it. And that’s a good problem to have.

It's good shit so far but needs more time to cook.

Quite the perfect blend of everything. The game has nailed a lot of the slice of life elements and allows you to explore it's quite large world if you wish, or remain mostly within University.

The developer has a pretty extensive road map for what they're wanting to do.

I do have a few criticisms though, which I believe are easily fixed, these only drop it to a 4.5/5, and since they're nothing too embedded in the game I still gave it 5 stars since there is no actual 4.5 option. On to the problems I have:

• The urination system. Wish there was an opt-out decision for this one, it makes a lot of stuff quite tedious. I get it's going for the Sims vibe, but this one just adds unnecessary clicks (making it option allows that fetish to stay for those who want it though).

• Sex. It's quite short? Your partner gets off and then it just ends. Of course you can cum multiple times but I believe making it last longer, have multiple orgasms will make the lustful side all the funner.

• Building Exhibitionism sucks. That skill is a chore and a half to build. I wish there were easier moments to simply gain that opportunity.

Outside those 3 major gripes, a lot of it is just teething pains and adding more content as the game is of course only halfway there. However for what is currently there, oh boy is it an incredible game. My rating of course is on the game as it stands at v5.2 not the potential.

Great future ahead.
This is a sandbox game, like Degrees of Lewdity, with tons of customization and a brilliant future ahead. I'm surprised by the amount of content it already have and this is the type of game that you can play in different ways.

Great sandbox rpg with decent character creation, things to do, and a solid turn based sex sim. One thing I wish was implemented was an image system where I could add a jpg for the pc and npcs. Great framework so far, loving making different characters so far

For context, I'm a few in-game weeks in my first playthrough as a nerdy streamer dude in v0.5.2c.

• Really good replayability, custom protagonist, world generation, interactive sex and freedom of choice for most things, including what type of content you will see.
• Writing's alright, nothing extraordinary so far, but it works and the porn's good.
• The game loop can be a bit grindy, but I expect the feeling will be lessened as more content is added to the game and/or more settings are made available (There's already a slider to reduce grind on skills, needs and relationships, maybe they should add one to increase random event frequency?).

This will be a game I watch closely, already a cult classic, five stars.

The concept is decent and things get interesting when events actually trigger, but the general daily game loop is just incredibly boring. You get up, you eat, you go to classes, you talk to some generic NPCs, and if no events trigger that's it. Repeat until something worthwhile happens. It's still an early version so I can't be too harsh, and unlike most Patreon games cheats are available in-game without any bullshit.