HTML - Course of Temptation [v0.7.3] [Anthaum]

Writing this as of 0.7.2

TL;DR version: it's an unfocused game with functional mechanics, but that aren't enjoyable to interact with.

Longer version

The main obvious thing - that for the life of me I cannot understand how the hell it's supposed to work - is the sex. Either there's something obvious that I am missing, or the sex mechanics are a mess and need to be reinvented.

- Don't bother being dominant. The AI does whatever the fuck it wants. Feel free to turn on the cheats and increase the Assertiveness to the max, the AI couldn't give two shits about what you want or your cheats. You're the bitch, get used to it bitch.

- Except for the submissive characters. But with those, they are basically dead, they don't do anything, and if they do, then I didn't even notice. No seriously, it's necrophilia simulator.

- Time to put the pecker in. Hmm, what's that? She wiggled out and your pecker is out? Ok no worries, try again. Hmm, what's that? She wiggled out again? Ok no worries, try again. Hmm, what's that? She wiggled out again? Ok no worries, try again. Hmm, what's that? She wiggled out again? Rinse and repeat

This being a sandbox game, it's more or less a given that there will be repetition. It's also more or less a given that all NPC's will be similar. But in this game, they're not similar. They're exact copies. Not counting the forward and submissive traits, I haven't found out how other traits affect the NPC's. Sure, they have description, but I haven't noticed anything ingame that happens because of those traits.

Speaking of sandbox, what's the appeal with micromanaging? Why isn't taking a shower just a button? Why do I need to take a shower and also click to get dressed? Why do I need to click to get dressed when waking up?

Why are classes so many buttons? Why not just click once if we want to pay attention or goof?

Why do I need to use the phone to booty with someone, when they are in the same place as me? Why booties only work after 6 PM? You're telling me that a hormone filled young people person full of sex drive in a porn game cannot bang any time of the day?

Special NPC's require more work than they deserve. No, I'm not going grind and do things in very specific ways just to bang that special NPC, thank you very much.

Maybe I'm being harsh and maybe I'm coming off as an ass in my attempts at humor, but I really want to like this game. I love sandbox games, so I wish the best to this game development. I'll come back one day to check again how it's going but for now, it's a pass for me

Very nice sandbox game, it gives the player tons of customization options, not only in pc and worldbuilding, but on what to do on a day by day basis! Perfect game to play for a while.

I'd recommend this game if you're a fan of more lengthy games, as the progress can be quite slow at times, but def worth it!

Also, the devs seem to pour a lot of attention here, and when games are flopping and scamming patreons left and right, that counts for something.

Review as of v0.7.0n

This game promises to be so much fun, but ends up being one of the dullest experience I've ever had with an eroge. Where do I even start...

Let's begin with the most important thing in an eroge - sex. The mechanic, on surface, is similar to other text based game with a lot of actions and combinations thereof... except half the time it doesn't work. You can press the same button a million times and the game will refuse to do that action without any explanation as to why. You also can't see your partner's stats, so god knows if they even care about what you're doing. Not to mention the NPC have way too much freedom in their action choices, which annoys me to no end, no matter how dominant your character is, they will still be doing whatever the hell they want.

The story basically doesn't exist, it's the sandbox at its finest with dozens of cloned npcs that in theory have traits, but in practice do nothing to differentiate from each other in any meaningful way. And the unique ones? Oh god... they are restricted, unfinished and frankly only make you not want to engage with them, because you know they are nothing but dead ends waiting to happen.

The mods certainly help this game, but that's just helping an atrocious game become somewhat playable. I genuinely regret giving it a second chance after I already hated it after trying once, some time ago, and hating the experience. I just can't find a single aspect of this that I would enjoy. Everything that looks even remotely promising ends up being a disappointment.

I think I genuinely hate this game.

Amazing game! So much depth and lots of replayability. Surprised its not higher. Looking forward to more in-depth systems and a broader set of customizations (which in its current state is the main thing lacking). The sex can get a bit repetitive

Yeah this is kinda epic style baby.

A sandbox that actually feels like you get to actually do different things in it. Lots of events with tons of customizability throughout. Lots of options during sex scenes and choices for character interactions. It's real good. And give it time, more options and scripted events in the fold of the daily grind could quite possibly make a top tier game.

this game was amazing, open world and everything, so many unique interactions, only thing lacking is visual repersentation for characters, but that can be fixed with mods and considering im a CS student i might just take that upon myself

Fabulous game. Thoughtful systems, few bugs, fun storylines. This has monopolized my NSFW gaming time for the past several months.

5/5 would seduce my professor and fuck him in the bathroom of the local bar again

This is the best adult sim ever! It's a text-based game, but I like it so much that I'm even making mods for it.

So far, I really like the direction dev has taken. It's not like any other game, it's unique. You can tell dev has spent a lot of time thinking, crafting, and doing research. A new update comes out every month, which is awesome.

Now, it's time for me to dive back in and relive my uni days!

This game is one of those games that pull you into playing them despite the weaknesses they have or your personal aversions. For example, I never play life sim html games because of the tediousness of the game loop - but with this game, I'm compelled to try. It's very... competent and polished at what it does, with great and (mostly) easy to navigate UI.

Still, I rated it as 3, and not as 4 or 5. Why? Well, partially because while I'm compelled to play it despite it's nature - there is still it's nature. Despite all the navigable UIs and convenient cheats, there is still a lot of tedious clicking between the situations. I guess part of it is the nature of the medium, you can't avoid it, but... still, would've been great to see a little bit more shortcuts, for example to get through morning routine faster. I get there is a point to it, and events in for example shower can be important - but I've never seen important events while using restroom, putting on makeup and other things like that. I don't know, but what I know is - there is tedium, and it's tedious (duh). So one star down for that.

Another star is down for similar but different reasons. It feels like there is a bit too much RNG and too much space between events. In whatever career or narrative arc or relationship you are following, what's there is great, but... you have like 30 percent chance for the next stage, and you need to farm some meters to even get there, and you can do so like once a day (with most careers or relationships) or even once a week (like with parties and "milkshakes"). So you wait for a whole week or day to trigger the event, it's not triggering, you wait again, it's not triggering... you get the picture. In theory that shouldn't be a problem because you can always have another stuff happening in the meantime - but first of all the game's not complete yet and sometimes there isn't much more stuff, and second following several different narratives at once is mentally taxing, at least for me. It creates exponentially more tedious clicking, so it's easier to concentrate on heavily pursuing something singular for the time being... and RNG with other progression roadblock turn this into waiting simulator every time. I don't know what to do here, again it's kind of the nature of the chosen medium, but... maybe a bit more ways to influence RNG? We have sliders for faster relationship growth and River Rat progression, we have "Lucky" and "Unlucky" inclinations, something more like that would've been at least something.

Two more smaller complaints, nothing influencing my rating, just before I forgot:
- Sex scene system is fun, but it should be shackled. Too often NPCs will start doing random kinky stuff just because there is an option. Like, every guy uses his foot on my MCs privates while she's orally servicing him - what is this foot fetish paradise? I've never ever even seen this move in real life, but in this game it's like default or something!
It reminds me about this one furry sandbox game from... Innoxia? Where every single NPC will randomly start fucking your nipples with their tail just because. Something like the sex system in Newlife would've been better.
- There should be a way to quickly learn character's names, at least your classmates. It's tedious and immersion-breaking, to manually chat them up one by one for hours.

Still, it's a great, very professionally made, game. And after following it's development for some time, I'm almost positive it will only become better and better. I'm waiting patiently for some stuff in dev's roadmap, like more party girl content and pregnancy system! Maybe it will become 5 out of 5 for me with time! But for now - 5 stars for immense potential and polish, minus 2 stars for some problems holding it back.

Edit:
Review number 123, nice!

One of the most legitimately exciting and unique life sims out there. With vast customization, a huge amount of content and replayability, I am thrilled to follow its development. Varied fetishes, layered and evolving scenarios, complex relationships, multi-faceted personalities and the chance to be who ever you want to be in this still-growing world is a real treat in a world of otherwise shallow and derivative competition. I am putting my money where my mouth is on this one and funding development. Some games are just that good.

A good but undercooked take on this genre of gameplay.

First 1.5 hours is entertaining but after that gameplay becomes repetitive. In some aspects I would say this game plays a little too safe so there's no challenge. You won't run out of money, your stats are easily manageable though the bladder meter is too annoying in my opinion. You'll have to go pee every 5 minutes of gameplay.

Overall a good game but in my opinion needs polish in midgame and general gameplay

This is tough. I really want to like this Course of Temptation, and there are clearly a lot of people who enjoy it in its current state. But it's shaping up to be a life simulator that's both wide enough to be cumbersome and shallow enough to be unsatisfying.
What I mean is that this game is basically 3 games all fighting each other at once:

1. A Text-Based Sandbox RPG where you are a student in a university that can enroll in classes, join sports teams, go on dates, work part-time jobs, and just live as a college student trying to improve themselves and meet people. Most characters are randomly generated (which you can adjust with world generation settings) but there are also some essential NPCs with unique roles and storylines.
2. A Tedious Life Simulator where you must regularly go to the bathroom, study, and even do your f-ing laundry, most of which doesn't have much narrative impact on the game's story.
3. A Shallow Dating Simulator that allows you to date the various randomly generated character that populate the town, with sex scenes that end up being obtuse and narratively incoherent. Some aforementioned "pre-built" characters have more content and restrictions compared to the randomly generated ones, but most lack any meaningful storylines as of now.

All 3 systems ultimately have the same flaw which is that they don't contribute to any narratives enough. Let me explain:

Customization:

• There are a lot of customization options including those for hairstyles, body types, clothing, RPG-style skill points, and quirks. They can be really minute and refined, which might fool you into thinking that they matter. But the majority of these options are just flavor text, with very little implications on the story or available choices.
• The one bright spot is the Inclinations system, which involves specific character quirks that do affect the story options and storyline, such has having a character be dominant, submissive, into exhibitionism, smelling weird, etc. This is great, because they're much more intuitive to understand than the RPG stat system and customization the rest of this game has where you don't know what actually matters to the plot. The one downside is that some of these Inclinations are redundant and honestly should be condensed. For example the list of Inclinations includes "Helpless Exhibitionist", "Proud Exhibitionist", "Lewd Exhibitionist", and "Cautious Exhibitionist" like are we being serious here?

Sex Scenes:

• And now for the sex scenes. This game makes most of its money on Patreon. As such, it's bound by certain rules concerning sexual violence and other loosely defined objectionable content. So I completely understand why the devs don't want to make rape a thing like Degrees of Lewdity, and quite frankly I think it's a good thing because DoL is fixated on being raped in a magical world while CoT is supposed to be more grounded.
• But the problem is there is rape in this game, and as of right now it's pretty divorced from whatever relationship dynamic and narrative your character has with the NPC. Depending on your stats and inclinations, sex often turns into a WWE-style wrestling match where either you and the NPC fight for dominance to then essentially rape the other until both of you cum, after which you two pretend like nothing happened because that stuff doesn't have an impact on the game. You can quite literally go on a series of wholesome dates with a virgin, pin them down and rape them in their ass during a sex scene, pee on them, and go back to dating like normal. And it's not even something like the other character is sticking with an abuser (which would be pretty dark for this game) but simply because the sex doesn't matter to the story itself.

Depth of Content:

• CoT is really trying to do it all, and that's admirable. But I can't help but feel that the plans for this game were too ambitious when you look at the massive amounts of work needed. Right now the NPCs are either:
  • Special NPCs with their own storylines. These unfortunately have several limits on what you can do with them, because they're meant to be given specific scenes and storylines at some later point.
  • Standard Randomly Generated NPCs which give you a lot more freedom to interact with. There's a dating progression system that is supposed to give a sense of compelling, spaced out escalation in intimacy. But unfortunately there's just not enough scenes right now.
• So the scene progression being shallow and incomplete is understandable since it's a work in progress, but when you see how much new systems are being added to the game it makes you wonder why the devs don't focus their efforts on just building up the existing scenes and storylines before doing anything else. Because without those scenes this game is clickhell drudgery, despite its many thoughtful optimizations. Yes there are cheats, but even with them you're doing all this work keeping your various life simulator stat bars up including hunger, bladder, composure, hygiene, attention, rest, relaxation (redundant), and release, for not very much in return.

The devs are including a system for memories and reputation, which are features that I've been dying to see in a life-sim for a long while. But at this point I'd rather they focus on building up what they currently have instead of falling victim to constant feature creep. CoT feels like it is quickly turning into a bloated game that's mostly work and little reward. It doesn't feel immersive when you have to make your character eat, sleep, pee, and do laundry in game while going through very repetitive daily grinds as a student, just to get extremely half-baked dating sim content and sex scenes that are sandboxed away from the rest of the story.
This game could be good, and I really hope I'm wrong about the devs struggling to add meaningful progression and interactivity in the scenes. But to me it seems like that is unlikely unless the devs take a good hard look at what they want this CoT to really be, and also trim a lot of the excess fat that has nothing to do with the game or story because otherwise it's going to be very hard to make this game rewarding to play. Immersion is not about descriptions or stats, it's about reactivity to what the player does. And as of the current build your character is a walking ball of stats that interact with hundreds of things in the game world in a very shallow way.

IDK how people rated this game so high, this game is the so boring, and why Real life simulators fall flat.

"You'd be sitting in a design review, and somebody says, “that's not realistic.” And you're like, okay [...] explain to me why that's interesting. Because in the real world I have to write up lists of stuff I have to go to the grocery store to buy, and I have never thought to myself that realism is fun. I go play games to have fun." - Gabe Newell.

This game is super realistic to the point of being boring and not at all sexy. The intro does a great job at subverting expectations, because on the bus going to the college there is a girl that openly lets you and your best friend grope her tits, it even says later on how lewd this college is, saying on how most people came to this school to have lewd things happen. And when you are free to run wild, it's boring. You go to your classes you have to worry about grades, making your best friend fall in love with you is a chore and so time-consuming, the sex scenes are mid as fuck, being only 3–4 sentences while just meeting a NPC gives you a paragraph. And a serious missed opportunity, to make the NPCs go a little wild! You are walking by and some random girl flashes you, someone asks to blow you while you are in the library, this and so much more could have been added, but the dev wanted "Realism" if I wanted realism I would just go to a community college and have the same experience! This game is doomed from the start by being interesting in the intro but threw it away for "Realism" this game is boring. And I say that with a hundred percent, and a thousand percent.

Really wanted to like this game, but I can't.

- Initial character descriptions (before you know their names) are ridiculously long.
"You chat with adjective noun adjective noun adjective noun adjective noun adjective noun adjective noun, while adjective noun adjective noun adjective noun adjective noun adjective noun adjective noun sits there in silence."
How about, idk, calling these characters "the guy" or "the blonde girl" or "the hispanic guy"?

- Things that would be interesting are skimmed over a lot. "You sext with him/her." Cool. How about actually including some dialouge?

- Half-baked sex scenes. Often turns into casual body horror. Uninteresting and very repetitive dialogue during them. Often doesn't make any sense to me why characters "force you to relent". Like, you try to straddle someone cowgirl. Hard no. Okay, I roll back one and try to straddle reverse cowgirl. Perfectly okay. Why?

- Many interactions are incredibly childish.

- Lack of visuals. I understand that this is a very big ask, and would involve the author paying an artist and take time to integrate. Regardless, the lack of any kind of visuals apart from the map doesn't help.

I love this game but it definitely needs improvement. Looking forward to more updates and reworking.
Mainly I hope for sexual encounters to be reworked. Some actions just don't make sense unless both the MC and the partner are made of elastic.

While pregnancy is not my cup of tea, I enjoy pumping and dumping every girl I encounter. Maybe the clinic will double as a daycare in the future?

I don't rate often... mostly cause the games change and they can eitehr get better (needed rating higher) or worse (need lower rating)... but, this one? I play it often. I like it. It's not my usual type of game, don't really like the need to do repetative tasks, but this? It's worth it. It's no in depth and the added mods seem to just better too. Keep it up! 4 starts, easy.

I'm disappointed in this game, because I thought it was going to be a DoL-type game but more realistic, and with adults. And it definitely WANTS to be that, it wants it so bad. And for the first hour or two, it really does feel like that's what you're going to get. But as you keep playing, you quickly discover how hollow and soulless it is, how many corners it cut.

Ultimately, nothing you do matters, and nothing has consequences. It seems that the game originally intended for things to have consequences, but the dev ended up wimping out and taking the lazy/uncontroversial path every time there was an option to do something interesting. For example, you can get offered too much to drink by sleazy frat boys at a party. You can even pass out drunk. At which point... you wake up in a bathroom with a penis drawn on your face in sharpie (that is the worst possible outcome).

Basically nothing really bad can ever happen, and nothing really good can ever happen either. You can get laid. Sex scenes are very boring and after the first two you'll quickly just start clicking through them, because it's just generic modular text that doesn't matter and isn't hot.

Ultimately a giant waste of time that keeps you clicking in the hope of something interesting maybe happening eventually. Nothing really does.

Finally a DoL type game that is actually pretty dang good. The game focuses on college life where you're student doing student things. Going to class, finding a part time job, and managing your social life. The game right now (v0.6.3) already feels very fleshed out and will give you a lot to work with. I'm looking forward to more updates and events that eventually get added.

Okay! this is like the FIRST game I have been like ADDICTED TOO! Something about having such an open world that I can explore is more amazing than any other game I can play. I keep neglecting other games to come back to this one. It is like it has me hypnotized

Needs pregnancy.

That’s about the only useful thing I can input here. I love games like this, but I feel like there are some immersive elements missing, “consequences” in general.

Doesn't really matter who you hang out with or fuck, every character is almost self contained, leaving no room for narrative consequence or mechanical consequence, like pregnancy.

Good game though, I just felt this criticism was the best information I could provide.