RPGM - Court Magician [v0.18.5] [Sin and Salvation Games]

so originally i had rated this 2 stars. however, after sometime the developer reached out, asking me directly in relation to my original critiques, how he can implement changes to ensure noone feels this way in the future.

over the course of a week we spoke, i gave feedback, he listened and asked questions. and then directly implemented them into a future build *no i wont provide it*

in this future build i played, all my critiques for the most part were no longer an issue, and i was issued further reassurance that some of my requested features, and other concerns would be addressed and even potentially added.

i must say the gameplay is alot more fluid now, with me no longer aimlessly wondering, and knowing exactly where i need to go, and who i need to speak with.

its refreshing to see someone who loves their craft, and is so super passionate about their project, That they'd reach out and get to the bottom of my critiques and work on it so promptly.

this developer is a rare gem, that truly shows respect to all their players, and constructive feedback.

i played the latest build, and found that i was actually enjoying myself.

having insights of future plans *i wont share what they are* and knowing whats potentially on the table. we're in for a real treat.

passionate and respectful devs that truly make changes based on actual feedback are rare. this guy means business, and id truly endorse supporting his project

Excellent trainer game with all the blackmail and spanking and corruption and humiliation and humor which is not all over the place. Game seems to be getting stead stream of updates as well. There are various small technical glitches and bugs due to shitty RPGM, but its not critical.
Very few as excellent games as this this around.

For sure one of the best trainer games on the market.

Already quite some content in it, although its a slow burner.
Dev is really hard working, and there is a lot of traffic on Discord. He is communicative and listens to the community.

Graphics are great. Story is captivating.
If you like this kind of genre, then this game is a sure recommendation. Give it a try

The game is a great corruption-trainer concept with a lot of familiar and welcome fantasy tropes. I played it till the end of the Chapter 1, and I was quite satisfied with the gameplay. However, there are chinks in the armour that others have already pointed out: weird music changes during dialogues, inconsistent dialogues, etc. I hope they are straightened out in the future updates.

On the whole, the game was very pleasurable. The writer appreciates good wit. I read the manual before playing the game, and the manual partly sold me on the game. Good writing is rare to come by. Good to see it here.

Female characters look good and the core idea isn't bad, but everything else is poorly done.
Exploring the map is boring, there's a lot of grinding, and the actual content is also underwhelming (Spanking and body inspection, a real sex only happens once, so don't pay attention to the tags like anal). Maybe the content in the paid version is better, but based on what I've seen, I don't want to pay for it.
By the way, free updates come out 2–3 months after the paid ones. There are also quite a few bugs.

I wanted to like this game. Concept and character design were good but other execution was terrible. Map browsing experience was really bad. It has many bugs and incorrect collisions but actual deal breaker was its grinding. I don't understand why devs keep making their game grinding to compensate game's weaknesses because players are not stupid and can smell from the grinding even before experiencing its actual content. Although this game is about corrupt magician, 10 minutes of starting this game made me sigh because it gave me so many tasks without any immersive materials. MC is not supposed to be that much dilligent. Sadly, I don't recommend this game.

Honestly I like the core idea but there are way too many bugs to actually recommend it in any way.
Also lacks a lot of refining overall.
I do hope someday all those issues will be fixed.
EDIT: I tried to push further a bit and decided to lower my rating. Looking back on it, it's not the first time I try to play through this game and there is no way to go around the fact that critical parts of the game are still entirely bugged even 1+ year after they got released. This means there is little hope they will ever be fixed.
The fact I literally cannot go through the whole initiation thing without at least encountering one major bug, and ultimately entirely unable to get to chapter 2 bug free, is ridiculous.
No offense to the author/dev, but this is hard for me to believe this game will ever be even remotely 'stable'.
I still hope that, someday, in the far future, this game (or a similar game) will be finished and enjoyable, but in its current stage this is at best a fairly buggy and unstable proof of concept.

I'd rate this 3.5 if I could because its a passion project.

For every good thing about Court Magician there's a bad thing. I really like when smut games put effort into making a living world that includes characters that aren't just the protagonist and the love interests. The various systems at play are here interesting. It does a good job of setting up the "spurned man" revenge and corruption motivation. Everyone is incredibly mean to the MC so it plays into the fetish of him getting one-up on everyone. The graphics and UI have a 90s LucasArts adventure game feel.

The bad parts is everything feels clunky as shit. Weird choices abound. The one that stood out to me was this: the game uses the RPG Maker battle screen as an Aventure Game dialouge screen. Attacks are dialouge options. Enemies are characters that belong to enemy factions. Whenever a character from a faction talks, the music changes to their theme. This is fucking annoying because there will be times where 2-3 factions are having a conversation, the music tracks changing every time you advance the dialouge. A sound effect would be better. I had to to turn off all the music because that shit is dreadful.

Screen transitions are constantly clunky. You enter a new screen, it loads, then the screen effect (sunlight/darkness/etc) loads with a quick fade-to-black. Not optimized.

The art style is wildly disparate. Plenty of characters don't look like they're from the same game. The protagonist looks like a bad fan art of Gargamel from the Smurfs cartoon. Some NPCs look good. Some look traced from real life porn. It's all over the place.

Finally, right now, there's just not enough content to bother putting up with the bad stuff. I'd say wait for refinement.

Really great beginning. Just wish there was more content now.

I really love the kink of being the ugly magician tempting women around the castle. Great interactions with different characters. I love that you can change other characters' dialogue toward you by manipulating them.

The art is amazing, love the story and for some reason I just can't stop playing. There is something unique about this game and I think other's should try it. Keep up the good wrok, can't wait for new updates!

v. 0.16

Here's the thing about The Court Magician: the developer could strip out all of the adult content and I'd still play it. There's some real game mechanics here, like an old-school adventure game, and I never thought I'd see that. That alone makes it one of my favorites. It's not a deep puzzle game or anything, but there's some points where I had to think about how to progress a quest. I made choices about which things to do each day. The fundamental mechanics are solid.

As of this patch, there's still not a huge amount of content. I ran into some bugs and a few janky moments. That doesn't really bother me, since it's still a beta. This game is still at a point where I mostly care about seeing good fundamentals; if you're looking for loads of content, bookmark it and come back later.

Also, the spanking content is pretty satisfying. I haven't found many games that have it as a big thing, instead of a light flavoring, and I'm glad this one leaned into it. One of the better choices for dedicated spankos.

Overall: This feels like a game for people who want a game with their adult content. It's really good if you're kinky in the sense of enjoying power dynamics more than leather outfits. Praise Moloch and pass the paddles.

I like this game. The theme and the slow sense of build is phenomenal and it is all bolstered by high quality and original feeling art. Writing is pretty decent too. This is the kind of game that if completed to its full potential with its current level of quality will easily be a masterpiece.

It currently does suffer from some minor issues. Biggest being how early on it still is and how herculean of a project it seems. There isn't really THAT much here unfortunatly in terms of sex scenes and so I wouldn't blame you for waiting a bit longer for things to evolve. Also the game suffers from the jank of any modified RPGM game. Its a bit buggy, objectives are kind of unclear at times, physically moving across the world to complete objectives is a chore. If the game is fully completed and the world becomes a dense and rich place this will become emersive and cool, but right now its just slow and dull.

A 10/10 for potential and creativity, a 6/10 for current experience. I am optimistic this dev has it in them to realise this project however.

[v. 0.12.3]
A very interesting proof-of-concept for a corruption/trainer adventure/simulator game.

The best part of the game is undoubtedly the commitment to the bit of playing cartoon-villain evil mage. The socializing-system that represents gaining levels of control over people is a very cool concept, and the game very smartly puts a lot of emphasis on your ability to use it as part of the story.

The art and the thematic cohesion is unique, and the broad strokes of the central characters are well executed. A lot of stuff is smartly put together.

But as it is now, most of the game feels not only rough to play, but it feels that in a way that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the game.

It feels like the scope of what the game is trying to do is just a little bit beyond it. Like, it's fine that the sex/corruption scenes aren't all there yet, but the supporting systems for that corruption also seem to be only half-done. The balancing for the corruption/socializing and it's leveling needs to be properly balanced and progression-gated, the storylines for corrupting major characters need to be plotted out and those storylines should have some kind of meaningful gameplay behind them. A proper minigame/gameplay system for gathering alchemy-ingredients would be welcome etc etc.

There's so many things that still feel like they need work, without even mentioning all the art and story-content for major setpieces, that it feels like the game is just going to end up struggling to fill the space between it's better-written, more interesting and more interactive major story-moments, due to a lack of resources. And that just leads to defaulting to all the bland, boring RPGM-things, unless you have strong gameplay-systems holding the game together. Having to struggle to do so many things makes it harder to make the things you do want to deliver on more focused and higher quality.

I like the concept but....

I will say the biggest problem first, the artstyle is way too inconsistent, and it doesn´t really fit, the map looks weird with the characters, some characters have different artstyles it just isn´t appealing to look at. I appreciate that this game doesn look generic but it needs more than that.

The dialogue is pretty boring and sometimes difficult to read.

The characters are boring, and flat.

The UI is very bad and confusing.

Music is generic.


I wouldn´t recommend it.

It's a game that I desperately want to succeed, but one where I suspect won't.
Pros:
-The characters. The females are hot and have their own condescending personality. Greely himself isn't the sterreotypical "ugly bastard": the dude is actually just dealt an unfortunate hand in life. Your minion, Weasel, is the kindest soul that you will feel utterly horrible in disciplining. So on, so forth.
-It's all set up to where the game could be an untouched masterpiece. Stats, free roam, multiple quests, etc.
-Everyone is an ass to Greely, so it feels good to "get them back".

Cons:
-I can't believe I'm saying this, but...the scope is concerningly massive. The dev has set up too many things that will either 1. Get ignored for years, 2. Be completed in years, or 3. Serve to demotivate him and cause him to scrap the project all together. I would LOVE for his vision to be met, but I just can't see it happening.
-Constant bugs. Now, they aren't really game breaking and the game's menu has an antibug tool, but it's still annoying.
-You are constantly low on supplies or stats. Sure, this game is a "no time punishment" style of game, but you can't even forage for mushrooms without losing Willpower (the stat you'll be using the most).
-QoL things: The game slowing down every time Greely leaves the castle, the damn waterbarrel next to the water well (you know the one), etc.
-Because the game is so big while being in such an early state, you'll encounter TONS of npcs that you'll be excited for...only to realize that there is nothing. It kinda sucks, but I get it.
-Differing/inconsistent art styles and quality. The portrait looks nothing like the CG, random FPS drops, and so forth.
-Not much CGs in the game atm.

All in all: I want this game to succeed. I adore trainer games, and this one could take the cake if it's polished. However, it'll take YEARS of work to finetune this game, and every time a project has something like that...it get's dropped. I do hope this one isn't, and I'll be keeping an eye on it!

I give this 4 stars. As many other reviews say, it's a very promising sandbox looking forward to many possible ways to do corruption.

Right now there is very little content, basically no H-Scenes and primarily the base structure of a promising game. It has multiple interesting characters and I have high hopes for the game. A complex sandbox which promises slow corruption of multiple interesting characters and an evil MC. It could resort to grind, but from the looks of it all should be fairly non-grindy.

considering the dev started only a bit more than half a year ago, I will revisit in 6-12 months. People who expect a intersting game: Only download if you want to see the groundworks of a game, there is not really a reason to play it now except for 30minutes of story

good luck dev - and a tip: don't get to hung up on mechanics. Games live from their content and the raunchy scenes, not if I can theoretically do thousands of things that, in the end, make no difference in the scenes.

Review as of [v0.11.3]
This is actually way better than I expected. I downloaded it on a whim, swayed by the good score and I was pleasantly surprised. The game has many mechanics that were unexpected but not unwelcome and though it might still be in its beginning stages it feels like it has the potential to be a game with a lot of depth and breadth.

Doesn't hurt that many of the girls are very appealing.

Something I wish to see, besides polishing of mechanics is being able to get the slave girls from the goblins. I don't enjoy leaving them there.

Anyway, don't let the ugly MC stop you from playing, this is a very fun and promising game.

The writing and story are quite nice, however what kills my experience are the multiple debilitating bugs the game has. Sometimes dialogue will fade to black and you can't see anything on your screen. Some quests like the face cream one has bugged dialogue where it puts you in an infinite loop if you advance dialogue too fast. Some art is also missing. A lot of this is probably due to RPGM, but the game does deserve some polish.

now this is something else, amazing graphics and animations, waiting for future updates, the gameplay is very confusing in the beginnig but with some time anyone can get it, i dunno if i miss something but maybe the side menu should have access using the keyboard too

I don't usually bother with games in development, but the creator clearly has a real passion, and for that, I have to commend them. I was impressed by the amount of work in an early game. The base of the game seems pretty fleshed out already. The story has a logical path from now on, and again, I respect that the developer seems to truly be passionate about this project. interested to see how it progresses.