Ren'Py - Cross Worlds [v0.36] [Lustful Entertainment]

What a disappointment. It all starts out so well! A decent plot, interesting characters, RPG elements, quests, humor, and real choices that shape the narrative. The narrator alone is worth a star. It's genuinely fun to play. Even despite the overabundance of gender diversity, where it becomes difficult to understand who He, She, It, They, These, Those are, and why those pronouns are constantly changing, and the protagonist's "roommate" in the diary suddenly changes gender! But then corruption and a mind break appear, and you start to feel your interest waning. Everything slides straight into a deep sandbox rabbit hole, endless grinding for dubious gain and repeating the same scenes over and over for each character. You don't want to play anymore; the entire grind is done with the Ctrl button held down, and interest in the game wanes, until after several completely empty quests, the plot ends, leaving hours of grinding to come. And that's the end.
At first, I thought I'd recommend this game, but unfortunately, my opinion has changed completely. It's not worth your time.

V0.36
Pros:

• Beautiful artstyle, character designs vary in height, shape, colors, and attributes of different species.

Cons:

• Grinding stats can get very repetitive.
• Repeated CG, plenty of the events you perform while grinding reuses the same basic CG, some even have the characters in the exact same pose.
• Fragmented writing, the stats for Story/Romance/Corruption is tracked independently, so you will get scenes that have characters behaving weirdly that contradicts events you have already done.
• Updates frequently break saves, requiring you to regrind the entire game over.
• Constant addition choices without content, split gender routes, futa/breast/height modification, story choice differences all bring split content you can't view in the same save file, but some choices hasn't gotten any content in 10+ updates since the choice has been introduced.

While the artwork is very good (minus the MC. His stupidass doughy face is quite annoying to look at. He looks like he's constantly about to sneeze while someone's tickling his balls), the game is shallow in every other aspect. The amount of content is very low, while the grind to both corrupt and date girls is pretty high, all for nice quality, but rather dull hand drawn scenes. The game is also really buggy once you start doing the most recent content, and the game itself starts to slow down, almost like there's a memory leak of some kind.

Bland, uninspired, and horrible pacing.
UI is really ugly and intrusive, and the textbox has no opacity slider.
Art's decent, in some respects, but everything feels like a ridiculous shoujo manga, where even the men look like women.

Unique game that could be great but for the weirdness and lack of editing.

It seems to be on that 'agenda' of not letting you call males and females him/her.... There are parts where you are only allowed to use they/them for a guy or a girl.

It is a very repetitive game where you mainly just grind stats in order to achieve something (usually sex)

Ai art, I think.... Since they won't issue changelogs anymore, if you play it you'll just be going in blind to see if anything has changed. Sometimes it seems like a long period between content updates.

Many sentences don't make sense and it should be checked over....for spelling as well. It's almost exciting writing...or it seems like it but then after playing for awhile it's just meh....

Oh, also... You can change your first name but can't be trusted to come up with a last name so have to use Cooper. Just seemed silly.
too bad

The art is really good and easily the best part, the writing is competent if not anything special, and the basic concept is interesting - if admittedly generic (standard "lust spirit/demon/thing needs you to have sex with a bunch of people in order to siphon the lust to become more powerful"). Everything you need to have a decent fap game, right? Well no.

Problem is it's just way too grindy and repetitive. Way too many needless stats to manage in order to progress. For example to get new scenes and progress with a character you have to raise their corruption level, to do that you have to get their normalcy to 100, but in order to do that you have to get control to spend on spells to raise normalcy. Don't forget you also have to manage their mood and keep them happy. or else the stat gain is lessened. All of these things require separate actions/scenes in order to generate, and since there's a day/night cycle you might only see a character once or twice a day, it's pretty annoying to realize you don't have enough control to cast a spell, so you have to waste the next in-game day or two farming control, just to cast a few spells to get halfway up the normalcy requirement, only to then have to generate more control and so on. Then when you finally get their corruption high enough you have to do the same thing again but reskinned - now you need to raise their relationship level, but to do that you need to raise their bond, and then you also need to raise their arousal...and now I'm frustrated.

It doesn't take that long to do, to be fair, but it's just long enough to be annoying and would benefit from increased stat gains to speed the process up a little. Like straight up if every action generated twice as much normalcy/control/bond/whatever then I'd seriously consider bumping this up a star just from that.

It just gets repetitive fast, especially because each corruption and later relationship level only has a couple scenes associated with it, so you have to do the same scenes over and over again in order to farm enough of whatever stat points you're trying to raise. It kind of kills my interest in the characters and whatever story is happening because I'm basically incentivized to just skip through the same scenes over and over again, which kills any immersion and makes the LIs feel less like characters with personalities and more like generic stat blocks that occasionally have a sex scene.

Also there are some half baked RPG mechanics, you earn money which you have nothing significant to spend on- technically there are items but they almost never matter. You have levels and skills but they basically never matter. You have a party system but it basically never matters outside of a few times where you are forced to bring some party members to certain scenes.

Maybe this will all get better in time, but the game's already been out for 2 years and it shows no signs of significant progress from when it first released other than a handful of scenes here and there. in some ways it's almost gone backwards since there have been reworks of existing mechanics that frankly were fine already instead of putting time into actually progressing the game.

Just as a preface, I havent finish the game but because Im 99% certain the main mechanic wouldnt change anyway, I'm just gonna review it. So for my 3 hours worth, take it for what it is.

The game is extremely tedious.

That should more or less suffice as a review, but allow me to explain further. There are two main points of the H gameplay, and that's building relationships versus corrupting the characters. To do this you'll need to raise your bond/normalcy respectively. To raise those mutually exclusive things you'll need to hangout/corrupt them. And you'll need to do this ALOT. I spent 2 hours pressing the same buttons in an attempt to raise those figures, and pretty soon I find myself lost; I wasnt having any fun, I was just skipping past everything to raise those numbers, in a pathetic attempt to grasp at a reward that even after obtaining it didnt give me so much as half a chub.


To summarize: the game is tedious, unengaging, and the writing is pretentious (i.e. trying too hard to be funny) at best. It may have an interesting story but because its layered in this bog of grind I simply cannot give a fuck for it. But the biggest disappointment is that the game started well enough as a simple innocent VN experience that threatened to actually be daring enough to push into sandbox territory. But instead it warped into this weird shitty math homework that's nearly a full 180 from what it started as.

I stopped playing after realising that this is the same mechanic for every fucking chracter in this game. In a world where theres plenty of games, porn, and porn games available, this game carves no niches and its hard to recommend this to anyone except one with the patience of christ and plenty of time to spare.

Respect the effort and artwork, which is why its getting 3 stars from me. But that's only because its at least functionally a game.

I played Cross Worlds once, before the relationship rework.
It was a rather classic straightforward Ren'Py game with bits of sandbox. The story unfolded itself and was enjoyable. I would've put between 4 and 5*.

Now, it's among the most boring grindfest where you spend your time hitting Ctrl and skip time until you've raised happiness/control, then you play some random scenes to be done with it.

If I had completed what was available on my 1st playthrough in 155 days without skipping time too much, I now am at day 340 and barely started with Sybil after around 6 laborious IRL hours.
And I say that after I just 100%'d "Man of the House"!

Not to mention inconsistensies. From relation 2 to 3 with Sybil, she goes from a caring "landlady" to, when you pick "Tease":
- Hey landlady, you have time? We could go to your bed...
- Ho! Yes we could, but I don't have time, sorry D:
[Insert Jackie Chan confused meme]
The MC and her never ever talked about anything sexual whatsoever at that point.
I've spotted the same shenanigans with Laia.

Inorganic and confusing as hell.
And again, the damned happiness/control, what a chore.
I still give a 2nd * for the art.

This game is genuinely one of the worst examples of mind control/corruption I've ever seen it has so many flaws and does virtually nothing right.

Step 1: Corrupting the characters themselves changes almost/literally nothing about their character they will be mind controlled to have numerous sex scenes unlocked and still behave the same as before. If you want to add character corruption and have it feel like a real thing change how they act, change how they look to indicate that they ae changing and make it feel like more than just a stat increase.


Step 2: Make sex scenes feel even remotely earned and actually alter behaviour afterwards, the sex scenes tied to corruption are all essentially gain X amount of a stat -> watch a short scene -> lose the stats and go back to beforehand with literally no behavioural change. They earn no progress they don't feel like a goal because nothing changes afterwards, they also do not feel earned because the characters behaviour beforehand is not altered at all it's as if they are a robot and you hit the sex button. It's like going up to a total stranger having sex instantly and then going back to being total strangers (then repeat), which sure sounds fine in concept but having this kind of loop for the main characters is extremely shallow and the scenes are not remotely good enough to justify existing for themselves.


Step 3: It's not gradual at ALL you go from kiss level to full on sex within a single corruption level this makes it feel even less earned and that there's nothing to go towards. The game has a city wide corruption story going where people go from normal to actively having sex on the street within days (ingame) of this plotline starting so where will this plotline go from here?? They take what could be a game wide overarching story plot and then immediately send it to it's logical conclusion within minutes of it starting with almost no action from the player.( also why would I have to corrupt individuals at all if people are just suddenly banging strangers on the street.) It seems like even the dev realised that it made no sense and they tuned it down but now what's the goal to get back to something that already happened?

4: This issue isn't directly related to the flaws of the games corruption system but it's made 10x worse by the issues of it, gaining stats on the characters is extremely tedious and boring and takes forever. They updated one character to improve the corruption system to make it somewhat gradual but that just makes the boring stat grinding take at least 5x longer and its not even slightly improved

I don't know how to even fix the issues within this game as a corruption/mindcontrol game, literally everything has been done wrong leading to it being super ungratifying and simply boring. There is little actual content as is so scrapping it would feel bad, but the older corruption system is genuinely 1/10 garbage, the newer one is a step in the right direction but still feels kinda bad as it's held back by how bad the old one was and that it still somewhat relies on it.


Why not a 1/5 and why did I even play through the whole game if I thought it was this bad? Because the art is good and the game during the more linear/RPGlike segments was decently good the game would probably be better if it focused more on that, but instead most gameplay time is spent on the corruption sandbox aspect (which is bad)

oh and proofread your game with the sister on there's so many mistakes its insane


tl;dr characters do not feel corrupted they act the exact same before and after, scenes feel unearned and are not great, and the "relationships" are not gradual at all somehow simultaneously feeling like they barely started and already met their near conclusion

There is a lot of good characters in this game, good art too, but what it gets me most is the theme, mind control and corruption, funny writing
I know the dev is reworking some stuff, hopefully it gets better with some grind, have potential

Waiting for more! It rarely happens for me. Chars are diverse, funny and easy to distinguish. Lots of diffrent stuff to enjoy if you are into some real shit...
I hope updates will come in regular way then i will update my review with further criticque

2 Stars....
Recommended? Probably not
(sorry so long)

The grammar and pronoun use is the worst. Your buddy is always referred to as they, them, and so on. If your friend is a female then it can call her a Him. Your sister is referred to as a lad. These mistakes really distracting and ruins the game.
"what about Robin? Are they ready?" (rather than is he ready?)
Just wait for them a few minutes, you know how they are." (about a singular friend)
"Robin doesn't talk much but that's fine they're loyal" (should be he's loyal or she's)
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Spelling/grammar
"Does that means?"
"I don't the kit"
etc....
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Map shortcuts take you to the main location you are headed except for when going to the Guild. It takes you outside and you then click to go in. Small thing I know but you have to do this over and over so gets old.

When you choose party members they will disappear sometimes.
Your journal never updates with details about characters.
The Moms look the same age as the kids.
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Great artwork and characters, though it's severely lacking sometimes.
i.e A quest to catch a creature has many different things happening, traps, magical 'bomb', etc...but the scene never changes. It's just you looking at your friend in a single pose pretty much while the action happens off screen.
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You spend LOTS of time building various stats for the mind control part of the game only to find it doesn't matter and you can't use that part yet. Once or twice on a few characters but only the most basic levels. You can't advance to the good stuff. The thing is, you don't know which characters you can change until you grind like crazy then try to change 'levels'...
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Beautiful game that could be among the best with corrections and more content. If the kinetic style quests are changed it would go a long way as well. Even if they just fixed all the pronoun errors it would help as it just sounds dumb the way things are. It was released almost a year and a half ago and maybe they will fix it. Maybe they will figure out a direction for the characters as they don’t seem to know if they are male/female/it or whatever. The game certainly would be 5 star then.
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Latest update short and boring.
Still can't tell the difference between singular, plural, feminine, and masculine.

Even though version says 0.9 it feels like 0.2 at best (partly because of lack of focus). Even though the art is great this game just doesn't have enough to pull you in.
I played to the end of 0.9 and it feels like i just scratched what this game is supposed to be (in like 1-2 years from now at best)
RPG gameplay is barely present. I'm not saying game should have some elaborate dungeon system or social rolls but at least some use for stats beyond few preplanned interactions in quests would be nice.
Quests themselves are (if i understand correctly) nothing more than short kinetic stories. There is no real gameplay attached to them.
Corruption is ok conceptually, but considering how much of it is locked behind "work in progress" it feels very shallow and repetitive.
TL;DR while art is good game itself is not yet deep/big enough to be played

Cross Worlds is a fantasy corruption game with VN and RPG aspects. You play as a guy who gets isekai'd, develops mind control powers and starts corrupting everyone around them.

The game's biggest weakness is definitely its lack of focus. The story advances through quests which have few choices and force you into either stat checks of the weak RPG system, or item checks which you'll immediately scroll back to fulfill. After a while, you'll be introduced to the corruption gameplay and everything else immediately takes a backseat.

Only... not enough of a backseat? The story portions of the game keep coming back even though it runs almost completely parallel to the corruption game, the two rarely acknowledging one another. It feels bizarre to be corrupting the town at one moment before being sent off to take out an unrelated cult in the next. It's very jarring.

On the bright side, the art is good. Technically it's a monster girl game, but the girls are only monstery in the loosest sense. So far there's a mushroom girl, a couple elves, an amazon, a goblin, a harpy (sorta), and an androgynous slime. There's futa and probably gay content if that's your thing, but it seems like the devs are pushing towards making it optional. Regardless, if you like what you see in the screenshots, there's more to be found in game.

I feel like the game has potential, but it needs to choose a lane. Cross Worlds could be a VN/RPG where you run quests, meet characters, and explore a fantasy world, or it could be a corruption game where you turn the girls of the town into debauched, slutty exhibitionists for fun. Running both simultaneously doesn't seem to be working and weakens both. Given that it's a sex game, I would definitely focus in on the corruption theme. The RPG and story aspects are extremely forgettable, but there's a good framework for a corruption game here.

Overall, Cross Worlds could be an excellent game if the devs figure out how to combine their story and their corruption. It has excellent art and some good scenes already, but it's heavily diluted by the random fantasy quests horning in on a perfectly good corruption game.

Pros of the game,
The art is distinctive and very good
Soundtrack is also surprisingly nice.
Navigation is functional, quick sleep is a nice time saver but does get repetitive when your generally just looping back to the adventures guild.

Cons,
My biggest con would be the writing while its not poorly done grammatically there is just something about it that rubs me the wrong way.
-The pre isekai segment honestly just made me actively dislike the main character, I'm not sure if its supposed to induce empathy or apathy
-Main character isn't just dense but actually unintelligent to the point its distracting, story suggests he tried hard at number of things and just never quite clicked but the way he is portrayed honestly just makes it seem like he is generally incompetent
-Narrator weirdly swaps between attempting to be humorous and actually being a narrator but feels like it just comes across as disruptive to the general flow of the game.

Neutral but worth consideration, the game feels like it is heavily missing tags, but as this isn't dev uploaded I guess a dev note with expected tags is out of the question, also the whole pre-isekai segment feels like its gonna be so long before its relevant that the character introductions will have been wasted and would have been better off starting without it.

Version 0.3

Good:
>Nice art
>rough sketches of what could potentially become a very fun game, interesting concepts
>quests are fun and promising for future releases

Neutral (personally leaning negative since I'm not a fan):
>MC looks very effeminate
>Futa/NB best friend (they/them)
>seems like gay content is planned
>hooks for "sharing" left and right, will probably have optional NTR in the future

Negative:
>MC suffers from idiot syndrome at times
>while not soul-crushing, the game has a bit of grinding (be at X at time Y day Z to gain relationship points)
>low amount of content currently. Maximum is BJ from "landlady" and handjobs from a few others.

Should you download this:
Strong maybe, consider the current version a demo. It's not bad, just very unfinished.
It's not a waste of time, but currently you also aren't missing out by waiting for a few updates.

As straight man who isn't into sharing, I think this should be in the upper middle of your watch list. Higher if you are into futa/gay/sharing.

v0.11
+Fantastic art
+I love mind control games
-Mediocre Engrish
-Lots of WIP signs
-Lack of focus. lots of under developed girls and gameplay features.
-Grindy
-Somewhat Buggy
-MC is a bit stupid
+Over time became more mainstream in fetishes.
++Amazon was strongly teasing at futa. But ultimate became just a woman
++Shapeshifting slimeboy is now your choice of boy, girl, or futa.
++Initially you had a brother. could gay seduce him and optionally feminize him into a twink. Now you make an OOC decision on whether you "always had a sister and never a brother".
++Personally I appreciate that they are adding those straight options

It is getting better but could use some more work.

Very promising start

Pros:
Story feels good, actually moderately interesting and made me not want to skip through everything
Pretty good writing (see above)
Characters are differentiated (so doesn't feel like same characters just reskinned)

Cons:
Not too much content (although keep in mind just on version 0.3)
The control grinding felt underwhelming
Just the beginning so could easily get worse and update schedule remains to be seen

I love how one of the reviews on this game is complaining about Gen-Z, TikTok, and anime. That's goddamn hilarious. Go back to facebook and grumble about how kids these days are too soft or something...

Anyways, on to the review.

This game is great for an early release. The art looks good, the sex scenes are hot, and the quest system is pretty cool.

My only real complaint is lack of content, which will hopefully be fixed with more releases. I'm glad they made the unavailable scenes grayed out because that really frustrated me.

I do hope they add more choices/deviation per path though, because it seems like sometimes all the choices lead to the same outcome.

Specifically in a glory hole scene, theres a challenge to get rid of some thug whos being over aggressive. No matter which way you choose to get rid of him, nothing changes. Why even have 3 options if theyre all the same? Theres no replay value there.

In any case, I hope thats changed but beyond that its great so far.

Can't wait to see how this is developed further. Good luck and God speed dev!

A lot of promise here. The art is high quality and the writing, which needs a little grammar proofing, is decent. I think it'll take a little more to truly see how the quest and mind-altering systems are going to work completely but the foundation is seeming solid.