HTML - Devious World [v99a/v43a] [Devious Skooma]

I rated this game 1 star because of its frustrating, repetitive nature. It's a text-based game, which could be engaging if done well, but sadly, this one fails miserably. The main issue is that all the choices you make lead to dead ends, and after reaching one, you're forced to spam your way back to another branch, only to face yet another dead end. This loop of disappointment makes it feel like there's no real progression or meaningful choices, which is essential for any game, especially a narrative-driven one.

10 years for a game that feels like a first draft, every single path i tried was a deadend aside from a single 1 click game over button where i got eaten by a monster. when i realized how incomplete it was i was shocked to find out this game wasnt new, in fact it was already 4 years old when this thread was made here 6 years ago. this is the very definition of a patreon milker

It actually pains me to rate this game so low, because I really think the writer is good at what he does and what's available is compelling and varied. Want to read about a twink teenager having sex with his male friend? You can do that. Want to read about the same teenager getting with his big titty goth friend? You can do that too. Want a story about a MILF? A college girl? A shy nerd? It's all there. There really is something for everyone, and if you like a lot of different things, then you're eating good.

Just don't expect any of those meals to be filling.

Or contain calories.

Or have any taste beyond the first few bites.

You'll notice when I praised the maker of this game I called him a writer, not a developer. And that's because that's what he is. He writes. The game is a choose your own adventure novel. Hell, it's about two dozen choose your own adventure novels.

And not a single one is finished.

But, you say, this game is in development! It's a work in progress! Of course there are paths that aren't complete. Why is that so bad?

Because this game has been in development for about 9 years at this point, and every path is still incomplete. Not only that, but every path has multiple fake choices that aren't yet available. This game constantly teases you, not with slow burn sex scenes, but with content you will never be able to see. And you never know when you'll run into one of these dead ends. You can be breezing along a great story with all your kinks, and suddenly you're railroaded into the one choice that exists, that also manages to change the story completely into something you have zero interest in. And the writer doesn't update this game with anything approaching a plan or even an acknowledgement that people other than him are reading what he writes. He'll just add tiny bits of different paths at random, and then never touch them for months, if not years. He keeps adding new paths that are also unfinished messes at whim. The process for making this game seems like the writing equivalent of dancing blindly through a field of flowers on a never ending summer day and occasionally picking a flower, smelling it, then tossing it to the side. This game exist solely because the writer wants to write something every once and a while. It's basically a collection of drabbles strung together. A writing exercise. Something done solely to amuse the creator. Which is all well and good if you're not releasing it for public consumption.

And that's really why I'm rating this game so low. Because the writer doesn't care about anyone reading it. Because this is someone's personal writing journal posing as a game made for people to enjoy. It will never be finished. It will never even have a complete path. Reading it is an exercise in frustration. The years of content in this game mean nothing because none of it leads anywhere.

A proper story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Every story in this game has parts of maybe one of these. This game has no art. It has no animation. It has no sound. It has no assets but the words written in it. And it's still less complete and less satisfying to "play" than any other unfinished, empty sandbox or RPG Maker swill on this site. It is purely and simple a failure of writing. Something that should have stayed in the writers private drafts folder and never been released into the wild to plague the aspiring fappers of the internet.

It's a choose your own adventure with pretty decent writing.

The main complaint I've seen is that there are a lot of dead links. The reason for that is because Devious World is more of a hobby. A playground for the author, if you will. Devious World has no set goals (aside from monthly release) and no true completion in mind. It's just a collection of branching stories that often contain ideas for how a branch might continue (for the author's own reference). Hence there's an abundance of red links for ideas which the author may never pursue, and is released for free every month. The author does not write because she's paid (pretty sure they've confirmed on a post they're female), people pay her because she writes.

Don't expect a "game". There is no project or deadlines. It's set up as a choose your own adventure because it's a convenient format for the ADHD author's purpose of writing a metric tonne of smut. You're being invited to read the twisted, meandering, and very horny imaginations of another depraved individual that is sometimes like your own. Sometimes also their regular fiction and fanfiction.

If there's one 'complaint' I have, it would be that any fetish you initially encounter on a branch does not mean that everything on that branch is the same. More than a few times, a choice will take a sharp left into something completely different. This made my first read many years ago a bit of a slog, skipping through every single choice on a path I found squick just to see if it might suddenly transform into gold. Now, I only need to check the changelog.

What is there is can make for dozens of hours of reading. A lot of which any one person won't be interested in. If you're willing to spend some time, you'll likely find something you enjoy. And given the tangential nature of a lot of the choices, a good amount of what you prefer may likely be hidden behind something you don't. If you're not willing to sit down and read, don't expect to find anything fast. Everyone has specific tastes, and unfortunately Devious World has no signposts.

PS: read the review by y33tthem34t. It's a pretty accurate summary of reader experience.

This game has great potential, but it self-destructs due to the author's lack of understanding of how to move the project forward and his specific tastes.

Let's start with the author's misunderstanding: the author is a pretty good writer, the text is not perfect and reading all these mountains of empty text is pretty boring (except for some good stories) but the whole problem is that the author tries to curb the impossible by creating dozens of different stories with the possibility of choosing which... often leads to nothing and you end up in a dead end, so why give such a choice at all? Wouldn't it have been easier to just leave the stories finished so as not to disappoint people. Nothing has changed recently, so I guess it will continue to be the same.

Then there are the author's specific tastes: as a writer of erotic stories, I can understand him to some extent, because no matter how hard you try, but when writing a story you will put your thoughts and desires into it, but damn... take away the gays, the femboys, the cuckolds and you're left with a small pile of unfinished stories. I'm in no way saying that these fetishes are evil, it's just that their concentration here absolutely dominates everything else, and even in the more vanilla stories, they're just trying to take you in the wrong direction.

This game is just a collection of small short stories. Almost every single route is unfinished. The dev is a solid writer, but frankly as many have pointed out, this game is a waste of time for both the dev and players. It's simply not feasible to finish making. I'd much prefer if this work were abandoned and the dev wrote for some other artist to create full scenes. So many games out here with solid renders but trash story, meanwhile this dev doesn't understand scope but knows how to write. If we could just combine them together... But that's just my opinion.

I found this game around 2015 in TFGames.

It's been nearly 9 damn years and this MF is still closer to the start than the first quarter of the whole project. Is it really THAT difficult to focus?

It's a shame, because the writing is pretty good. But how am I supposed to enjoy the game when I'm always two or three clicks away from an end of content?

Skooma could've just picked two or three single stories per gender that could've branched out and the game would've been over by now, but instead they've decided to attempt at writing 10k+ different stories that only last for a couple of passages.

im sorry but this is shit. Potentially not shit but as it is rn its 100% shit. Maybe the male pc is better, but every female path you take ends in a red passage missing. Also ive found one picture? I didnt click through every option so maybe there are more but ive clicked through most of them and only found one. Writing is decent, not great but not bad, stories kinda make me think of those tv shows like tales from the crypt. No pictures despite there being a pictures folder makes me question some stuff. No music so cant deduct points for that.
Overall its absolutely not worth it, dont waste time.

This is a very poorly thought out concept for a game. There are 24 characters and each of their routes has a large number of choices which never seem to merge. Because of this, very conservatively assuming only 2 choices per page, there will be 768 routes being written when you get 5 pages into each route, 24,576 routes when you get 10 pages into each route, and 786,432 routes when you get 15 pages into each route. This game or collection of short stories or whatever-you-want-to-call-it will never be completed to a satisfactory level.

This game suffers from a lack of discipline with content. Instead of vying for a few finished stories it is a couple dozen incredibly incomplete stories. The writing for some of them is good and I would like to see more of it but that is unlikely considering the large amount of other content that also needs completion.

Version a87:

This game is the epitome of a mixed bag. I really like it, but it has glaring issues.

The writing is good, sometimes offering inspiring and fantastic situations that suck me in and I can't get out of my head. Other times it falls flat, due to lengthy descriptions or boring subject matter. In a text game, the writing is paramount, so having no editor can be challenging.

The concept and design is too ambitious. Not only does the game start out with over 20 branches in character creation, but it keeps branching with each new passage. This is a mathematical issue because each new branch is an exponential, factorial increase, not multiplication. In other words if each passage had only two choices and each branch had only three passages, the resulting number of passages would be 220 (2^3 * 20 + 2^2 * 20 + 20). Make each branch four passages long (a very modest increase in each branch), and and you're suddenly looking at 540 passages. Each additional passage, averaged across all the branches, more than doubles the amount of work required. And that's assuming only two options. Many passages in this game branch in more than two directions. Assuming a modest 250 words (average length of a manuscript page) in each passage, the hypothetical game with branches that are four passages long requires that author to write a total of 135,000, in other words, a full novel (~50,000-100,000 words). This example is theoretical, so let's look at the real numbers.

In reality, the author has written 3.5 million words at this point and the game is maybe 25% complete at most. (I'm being generous.) So, that makes this at least a 15 million word project. The author wrote the currently existing prose over 10 years; continuing this pace will result in the game completing in 30 more years at the earliest. So, probably not before the author turns 60 years old. And let's be realistic: pace decreases over time, so it will take longer than that.

With the (conservative) math aside, my point is this: the design is not feasible. The author needs to fix it somehow or it will never be finished. Options: fewer branches, branches that combine back together, choices that don't generate new branches, shorten the length of each branch, change character creation so it doesn't generate branches, etc. There are many ways to fix this problem, but it needs to be fixed somehow.

The choices aren't always clear about communicating consequences, they expose the player to extreme content without warning that may be unpleasant, and there isn't much player agency overall.

This game has a great concept, but botched the execution. It's designed as a collection of unfinished short stories rather than a game. Despite its issues, I still like, but I wish it was better.

I'm going to be honest with this, it's a mediocre project that only serves to excite and then drop you, you can't take a simple route without the option you want later being blocked, my main problem with this game is that it shows you so much but so little at the same time, the developer should focus on finishing character routes rather than starting a new game which surely nobody asked for, the only good thing about this in the female route is the bestiality, and even so it fails to be avoidable (more than taking a totally different route most of the time) or without noticing first at least, everything else is surpassed by Girl' life in terms of gameplay, the only good thing about the game in general and what it deserves 2 stars for is the writing that really excites you but that quickly lowers you from the cloud due to blocked routes

A chore to read.
Jump through choices until you find the start of a path, then pray that the path is more than two "choices" deep. There are no choices most of the time, you will be presented with 5 choices but only 1 will lead anywhere.

Apart from the saltiness that comes from finding a route I absolutely love but finding that there is no way it is added upon nor continued in any meaningful way, my only remaining gripe is how hard is finding the content.
There should be a guide pinned or a quick-jump menu at the start or something, if you could just straight up ignore all the useless branches (both marked and unmarked) the user experience would gain so much more.

Can't enjoy a game that leads nowhere no matter what choice you make. I think it could be good, but the fact that I couldn't get anywhere in any story was annoying. The writing is fine. Sometimes there's anime pictures that should just be removed - it's inconsistent with the rest of the game. And since this game was posted here in January of 2018, a couple months away from being 5 years old, I'm going to be very critical of this. How has it taken nearly 5 years to write a handful of unfinished stories? Dev couldn't focus on one story to the end - not even a single branch? At least label which ones are dead ends from the start instead of this

This is a really good game. Lots of options and paths, great variety of kinks and excellent writing. It would easily be 5 stars if it wasn't so damn frustrating. As mentioned, insane amount of scenarios and paths, which is great, and understandably they're not all finished, that's fine. But the way that is handled is incredibly frustrating. I'd prefer there be a few finished paths and the unfinished ones simply tell you "this path will be out in the future" or something. Rather this game lets you progress a certain way along a path and then suddenly you a hit the unfinished point. Often this will be just before the action gets started. Just before MC can fuck his daughter, just before MC can teach his son's bratty GF a lesson etc. It happened to me again and again and again across all the various paths, and it really got on my nerves. So again, great game, but the way the unfinished paths are handled makes it feel like a major tease.

Can't wait for more content, but this is an amazing one so far!

The short version is that there's a great variety of fetishes, and seem to have had a lot of thought on each one, rather than simply checking boxes, it seems the writer made sure that the various kinks get the love they deserve.

The down side to all the different branching paths, and various characters is that there's a good chance right as you're getting into it you've hit the end of the line, but assuming development continues it'll be well worth the wait.

Really enjoyed the details and interesting stories that have been crafted. I don't think that the lack of pictures really affects how the story plays out. Especially considering that vast amounts of possibilities you have mapped out.

Few completed stories, but plenty of completed scenes! Plus, the developer keeps chugging along, so check it out, see if you like the writing / themes, and you will have a good amount of content every month.

What is there to say about this "game?" It's a mix of your typical CYOA book and an open-ended text adventure. Unfortunately, it has the weaknesses of both and the strengths of neither. There is no scope to the stories contained within and branches are entirely arbitrary. Even if it is ever finished, it will still be a crappy, forgettable experience.

Truly the Star Citizen of explicit html text games. Extremely far from any kind of finished state, would not at all be surprising if it was never finished, progress is seemingly steady yet relatively insignificant, playing seems entirely fruitless as nothing is done to the point where you can actually get anywhere, but despite all of that what is there is so very very spicy.

It's so painful, because nearly every branch is interesting, almost every explicit situation one of the hottest I've ever read, but literally none of them have an actual ending, so you will be blue balled not only sexually, but also conceptually. God, I want to know what happens after you've been appointed the leader of the loli demon lord's corrupting anti-magical girl squad, I want to know what you do with your fully crewed hover carrier, I want to know what happens after you ask your rich aunt to make you her weird kinky sex slave pet, I want to know what happens when you agree to bring your hot attachable penis futa mom your friends pussies, but will I ever know bros? Will I ever know? Fucking doubtful honestly. God it's sad.

So here I sit, cum tissues at my side, head in my hands, contemplating the greatest, most fulfilling nuts that may never come to pass.

V72 Alpha, Devious Skooma, for the love of god, at least finish a couple routes, holy shit, you spastic. Maybe that sounds entitled, but you are fucking torturing me with this shit.