Cult of Lily was actually an enjoyable experience, feeling like a gem among the sea of games existing.
Taking the Dating Sim logic into a game isn't done anymore unfortunately, and having it fully does feel pretty good.
The characters are cute, the music goes well with the everyday life vibes. Lily being a futa gives an actual all-girl context while still having a stick position and some girls are already fan of her, bringing good expectations on what will happen.
Unfortunately, the more you play it, the more it becomes repulsive.
Cult of Lily isn't a game about unfulfilled promises, it is a game about false promises.
The first thing that'll come in sight is the clunky system.
I am not against using something out of the basic but it needs to actually be able to fulfill the needs. Cult of Lily feels like it is spitting on 30 years of QoL history.
One save only doable by speaking to a special "character". One fast travel only, limited at that. Need to trigger the sprint at each map change. No way to know your stats besides increasing them. Likewise with the relationship. Their level of progress is nowhere to be seen. Even the stats level system seems useless with a change in name only after 5 of them.
Seeing the version, it is either the dev doesn't think of those a priority or it is just impossible to code them with his skill.
Having cheated to some extent, I am more leaning toward a code problem.
Obviously, those flaws aren't enough to make a game shitty in itself. And Cult of Lily seems good enough to keep on going on.
So did I.
What seems to be a good everyday life with events to get close to lovely characters rapidly changed to nothing more than a scripted game meddling with typical porn personalities.
The everyday life goes shallow.
The game asks you to spend time with the characters the afternoon, but having only a limited number of actions at night, the balance becomes a problem pushing you to use the afternoon to grind rather than bounding.
It was lovely learning about the slum and the prostitute at the beginning, but there is nothing more to be known afterward making the first week repeating again and again without new possibilities.
The characters that seemed good changed completely to go with a porn logic.
One gets excited just by talking with guys making her go masturbate every time, another is a buttslut, one is just horny, one is a sadist, another a drunkard mostly, one have a dark past that seems to correlate with sex for some reason.
The more is known about them, the less lovely they are.
The scenario bounces around making you wonder what is the point of the title.
The first month is actually about Lily and seems like a new beginning explaining the Cult of Lily.
The second month goes still about Lily but doesn't actually give anything and is rather adding some events for another character.
The third is even more nonsense still on-hold even now, and the fourth is just test month.
While you do get events between them, half are just displeasing. Putting some fishy moves to the character of Melody and having everyone ignoring them to bring it back later when the dev will finally decide to make her part.
At this point, what seemed like a box of jewels changed to a trash can.
I have to say that this is all pretty dumb moves.
The game could have been done under RPG Maker. There are some that have quite customized the system to actually do this kind of game and we would have an actual sprint in it. Or even a status screen which would have been amazing.
The events put the second month or even the five one could have been into the everyday parts. Adding change into it. And putting them as characters with a slightly different reaction depending on the number of encounters would have made it lively.
The porn characters are an utter nonsense. This logic is used to put scenes quickly but this is still slow making it completely useless. Kinks come from a personality, adding a kink blindly just warps the character. You can't have someone complaining that people get frightened by her going into a dominatrix kink, that's stupid.
Some character were really eager for the MC, it would have been easier to put the scenes to them while keeping it true to who they are rather than killing all the cast.
I need to stop here at Melody. She is one of the worst character I have seen in a game. Not by her personality but by how she was used in game.
She comes as the big sister the first day and their bonding basically ends here. She isn't even a character that you can progress anything with and reading between the lines, it seems that the dev wants to do something special with her.
The problem comes with the way characters are written. The special thingy will obviously be disgusting and ruining all the affection that was put to her on that first day.
It is already beginning, the character is really fishy in some events, and it doesn't seem interesting at all.
She should have been the closest character to Lily, being on the other side of the room, and it is a potential wasted.
Lily's presence is also severely lacking. You don't need an event for everyone each month, just one conquest would have been enough. The first two months were actually following this logic but rather than keeping the character, it got thrown out as a one-night stand making the whole event worthless.
Putting them as true characters would have emphasized it and they seems important enough to put some weigh to the Cult part.
One does come back later, but it is still way too late and completely optional.
The scenes are just 3 sentences by animation with 3 of them by scenes making it hard to feel anything in them.
There is also an ass obsession making most of them anal rather than actual sex.
I am not one that can't enjoy the kind but there is absolutely nothing justifying the tendency in their world, making it weird to just put it in their ass without second thought.
Many are some other kind of foreplay, and even with Lily as an eye candy, it is still boring to have some hours of grind in stats and another hour in relation just to be sucked 5 seconds.
Again, making Lily actively take part in them would have been way more in line with the title.
At the end I stopped playing at the fourth month.
The game just can't be salvaged at this point.
There'll still be dumb porn logic after hours of grind just ruining all the character and nothing else is here to make it a worthwhile trip.
Taking the Dating Sim logic into a game isn't done anymore unfortunately, and having it fully does feel pretty good.
The characters are cute, the music goes well with the everyday life vibes. Lily being a futa gives an actual all-girl context while still having a stick position and some girls are already fan of her, bringing good expectations on what will happen.
Unfortunately, the more you play it, the more it becomes repulsive.
Cult of Lily isn't a game about unfulfilled promises, it is a game about false promises.
The first thing that'll come in sight is the clunky system.
I am not against using something out of the basic but it needs to actually be able to fulfill the needs. Cult of Lily feels like it is spitting on 30 years of QoL history.
One save only doable by speaking to a special "character". One fast travel only, limited at that. Need to trigger the sprint at each map change. No way to know your stats besides increasing them. Likewise with the relationship. Their level of progress is nowhere to be seen. Even the stats level system seems useless with a change in name only after 5 of them.
Seeing the version, it is either the dev doesn't think of those a priority or it is just impossible to code them with his skill.
Having cheated to some extent, I am more leaning toward a code problem.
Obviously, those flaws aren't enough to make a game shitty in itself. And Cult of Lily seems good enough to keep on going on.
So did I.
What seems to be a good everyday life with events to get close to lovely characters rapidly changed to nothing more than a scripted game meddling with typical porn personalities.
The everyday life goes shallow.
The game asks you to spend time with the characters the afternoon, but having only a limited number of actions at night, the balance becomes a problem pushing you to use the afternoon to grind rather than bounding.
It was lovely learning about the slum and the prostitute at the beginning, but there is nothing more to be known afterward making the first week repeating again and again without new possibilities.
The characters that seemed good changed completely to go with a porn logic.
One gets excited just by talking with guys making her go masturbate every time, another is a buttslut, one is just horny, one is a sadist, another a drunkard mostly, one have a dark past that seems to correlate with sex for some reason.
The more is known about them, the less lovely they are.
The scenario bounces around making you wonder what is the point of the title.
The first month is actually about Lily and seems like a new beginning explaining the Cult of Lily.
The second month goes still about Lily but doesn't actually give anything and is rather adding some events for another character.
The third is even more nonsense still on-hold even now, and the fourth is just test month.
While you do get events between them, half are just displeasing. Putting some fishy moves to the character of Melody and having everyone ignoring them to bring it back later when the dev will finally decide to make her part.
At this point, what seemed like a box of jewels changed to a trash can.
I have to say that this is all pretty dumb moves.
The game could have been done under RPG Maker. There are some that have quite customized the system to actually do this kind of game and we would have an actual sprint in it. Or even a status screen which would have been amazing.
The events put the second month or even the five one could have been into the everyday parts. Adding change into it. And putting them as characters with a slightly different reaction depending on the number of encounters would have made it lively.
The porn characters are an utter nonsense. This logic is used to put scenes quickly but this is still slow making it completely useless. Kinks come from a personality, adding a kink blindly just warps the character. You can't have someone complaining that people get frightened by her going into a dominatrix kink, that's stupid.
Some character were really eager for the MC, it would have been easier to put the scenes to them while keeping it true to who they are rather than killing all the cast.
I need to stop here at Melody. She is one of the worst character I have seen in a game. Not by her personality but by how she was used in game.
She comes as the big sister the first day and their bonding basically ends here. She isn't even a character that you can progress anything with and reading between the lines, it seems that the dev wants to do something special with her.
The problem comes with the way characters are written. The special thingy will obviously be disgusting and ruining all the affection that was put to her on that first day.
It is already beginning, the character is really fishy in some events, and it doesn't seem interesting at all.
She should have been the closest character to Lily, being on the other side of the room, and it is a potential wasted.
Lily's presence is also severely lacking. You don't need an event for everyone each month, just one conquest would have been enough. The first two months were actually following this logic but rather than keeping the character, it got thrown out as a one-night stand making the whole event worthless.
Putting them as true characters would have emphasized it and they seems important enough to put some weigh to the Cult part.
One does come back later, but it is still way too late and completely optional.
The scenes are just 3 sentences by animation with 3 of them by scenes making it hard to feel anything in them.
There is also an ass obsession making most of them anal rather than actual sex.
I am not one that can't enjoy the kind but there is absolutely nothing justifying the tendency in their world, making it weird to just put it in their ass without second thought.
Many are some other kind of foreplay, and even with Lily as an eye candy, it is still boring to have some hours of grind in stats and another hour in relation just to be sucked 5 seconds.
Again, making Lily actively take part in them would have been way more in line with the title.
At the end I stopped playing at the fourth month.
The game just can't be salvaged at this point.
There'll still be dumb porn logic after hours of grind just ruining all the character and nothing else is here to make it a worthwhile trip.
