Unreal Engine - Completed - Damsel Dash [Final] [DID Digital]

C for effort. F for result. This is garbage.

First, TURN UP THE LIGHTING. I can't even see my feet, let alone where I am going.
Second, work on the lag. I'm running around all fine, then all of a sudden I am not. And then 30s later I realize "oh, this is because I have been bound", but for all that time there was no visual indication anything had happened.
This is all frankly terrible design. Not even a prototype.

The game has been constantly receiving updates. The latest version so far is 1.1.1.

The game has very little to offer and has been designed for very short sessions. Of the four modes included in the game, only the Jailor's Joy mode lends itself to long gameplay. (The other three modes are time attacks.) Even this mode is not designed to handle capturing 100+ characters. Clutter, the micromanagement burden and the pressure on the graphic card are all stumbling blocks.

The game has no music and no manual. It does come with a tutorial section, but it is far from enough.

In short - my main gripes with the game are the clunkiness, the grindiness, and the lack of things to do.

There's a few aspects to me calling the game "Clunky". The main walk speed is painfully slow. The sprint speed is significantly faster, yet still somehow feels sluggish. In fact, almost everything about the game feels sluggish - in some areas understandably, so, but not always. Collision boxes can be quite large and make it awkward to walk near objects/walls/people. It can also be awkward getting around to the right side of the damsel, as there's a different option for front and back ties. There's also the usual "faster than my walk speed, slower than my sprint speed" thing that NPC's do when leashed (when they do actually follow you, anyway - a few times when I first started playing, the leash would attach but they wouldn't follow). It's just not too smooth to play, nor is it the thematic clunk of, say, awkward controls in horror game.

(Oh, and also - you can't choose the map. Random selection as to whether you get the village or castle map. Would call it clunky too but not control-clunky?)

With regards to grinding... well, it's grindy. Upgrades vary from 5k to 15k, clothing types and accessories from about 1.5k-5k, individual colours a few hundred, but depending on the specific game mode and your performance, you only seek to earn about 1.5k every 20 minutes. And the upgrades aren't exactly extensive, either - some stealth buffs and drop increases but not much. And the clothing types aren't too extensive either - one dress, one set of pants, one long-sleeve top, options for a hood, satchel, longer boots, but no differing styles, and the "underwear" are the ugly Skyrim-style cloth wraps for boobs and plain panties. There's no preview before you buy either, so you have to rely on seeing the clothing out in the wild if you want that. I think the game just uses the one character model with different customisation options, anyway.

As for the lack of things to do - well, there just isn't much to do, frankly. People are complaining about the "no sexual content" tag and, while I do agree not every adult game needs sex, you don't really do anything once someone's captured. Or you're captured. There's a (very brief, static) "game over" scene in one mode where losing is an instant loss, but getting captured yourself in others is just a time impediment while your character quietly struggles for a bit. You can tie up girls in a progression (wrists, elbows, feet then hogtie) and... that's it. Tying from the front seems to only allow a front wrist tie. Occasionally they might moan and you can gag them. There's also a roof mounting point where I think you can do more extensive ties, but that kept bugging out for me. Characters don't actually tie others up, either - the character getting tied just moves a bit and the ropes appear on them, while the other stands there, not even doing a stock animation.

Overall, it's just... well I wouldn't say the game is outright bad, just lacking. I do give a bit of leeway to smaller studios doing these sorts of big-engine games, but the gameplay's just not fun and there's not actually that much content. If there was a bit more engagement with regards to catching people and getting caught, there could be a fun game here, but as it is, it's just a kink game that doesn't demonstrate the kink all that well.

I'm giving this game a generous three stars simply because the fetishes therein—namely, gratuitous bondage and the "damsel in distress" trope—appeal to me greatly. If it were just that, the game would be rated much lower.

As far as system specs go, you don't need a beastly computer to play this at a passable framerate. My 2014 laptop with an integrated graphics card plays this game perfectly fine without any struggling or throttling. There's no real music or sound to speak of besides gagged moans and fearful cries for help, so don't go out pestering the creator to make and sell a "Damsel Dash OST" or anything like that. And aside from distant objects being occluded by a thick fog, there's nothing inherently awful about the presentation either.

That just leaves gameplay and... it admittedly gets stale rather quickly. If I had to argue which of the game's four modes are the most fun, it would probably be a toss-up between "Jailer's Joy" and "Capture Fest"; the former because it's basically a sandbox mode, and the latter because it's the least stress-inducing of the timed game modes. There are admittedly a good number of poses in which you can tie your damsels, and their pathfinding is reasonably decent when it decides to work—prepare to have a handful of damsels getting stuck at the tops or stairs or extremely close to random walls after you've tied them. I would argue the worst aspect of the game, by far, are the exorbitant prices for the power-ups that the game offers you... "Sneak Shoes", by far the most useful of them, is also one of the most expensive at 15000 coins, and given you can only make about 1500-2000 coins at the best of times, that's a lot of grinding for just one power-up, but they're all similarly pricey.

At three stars... either you like it or you don't. Personally, I like bondage, so I had no problem justifying wasting a few hours in this game... but that's probably all it's good for: "a few hours". It's not something you should expect to come back to time and time again unless you're desperate for entertainment... in which case, there's ample bondage porn available for free across the Internet.