Version Reviewed: "Final."
Gameplay: Rogue-lite, turn-based
Sexual Content: Rape; blood (hymen-breaking); spanking; anal; oral (blowjob); urination (one scene, easily avoided); bestiality (zombie dog); goblins; orcs; ratmen; boarmen; demon; drugs (aphrodisiacs); submission/sexual training (just the aftermath); foodplay.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the genre of the game (I think a rogue-lite is a fantastic idea for a game like this and I'd love to see more!), the execution of the idea itself leaves
much to be desired, unfortunately. Performance-wise, there were no troubles with running the game at all, it ran perfectly smoothly, but that's about the end of my recommendations.
The art is gorgeous, both for the in-game chibi representations (my only criticism is that there's no animation, so everything looks and feels very slidey) and for the more detailed art when you finish the game (win or lose). The animation in those, however, is... iffy from scene to scene. One that sticks out is one where your character has nipple piercings that just kind of vaguely float around the nipples but never actually connect. The music didn't ever get on my nerves, despite looping, but the voice of your character did get a bit repetitive at times.
The story is basically non-existent, simply presenting as an incredibly basic vessel to deliver the rogue-lite experience. You are Shaltih, the greatest mage your country has ever known, who has wiped out armies with a single spell. Now, you have (somehow) lost a war against demons because the king died and now the queen can't rewind time with her orgasms (I guess masturbation isn't cutting it?). You're thrown into a cell where you can't use magic and now you have to escape. Win or lose, the queen finally manages to cum and resets the clock. Unfortunately for Shalith, it's back into the cell for her. The story proceeds to immediately become irrelevant when you walk two feet outside of your cell and promptly pick up a spell that happens to be lying on the ground and incinerate a nearby rat person with it.
The end-game cutscenes are little better for the most part. For a fun drinking game, take a swig every time you see the following lines: "Your mouth objects, but your body says otherwise!", "Shalith was thrown back in her cell with no chance to escape!" or, my personal favourite, "Awoo~ Bark! Bark!" A lot of the scenes, while fun, require imagination to fill in the blanks as they often amount to this:
Capturing Monster: "Funny quip!"
Shalith: "How dare you?"
Monster: "Here's a cock."
Shalith: "Nooooooo~"
Monster: "Yeah, this feels great. I'm cumming."
Shalith: "How could this happen."
The English is mostly passable, with a few typos here and there, but they don't do more than make the already existing problems feel worse. At least once, however, an entire sentence got cut off in the middle.
In terms of gameplay, it's a horribly clashing mix of ideas. You only get sex scenes when you lose the game and only if you lose to specific enemies (sometimes multiple times). There's no way to guarantee you will find a specific enemy, nor is there a way to guarantee you'll lose to them when you find them due to the way the combat works. When you move, the enemy moves immediately after, but they get to attack first. Shalith then immediately counterattacks with no way to stop it, meaning you can't find an enemy you want to lose to and simply "surrender." Meanwhile, the game has an experience system that lasts through the time loop, meaning that you are only getting more and more powerful the longer you play, making it that much harder to get a specific scene. Finally, the game doesn't unlock all scenes after completing the game (one of them is apparently broken and can't legitimately unlock at all). Supposedly, that will be updated as well as a "true ending" with the Queen herself, but that has yet to materialise. If you're missing memories until that update,
this post contains a full save file (insert into C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Roaming\Goldberg SteamEmu Saves\1259740\remote).
As it stands, after just a couple of runs, you quickly become too powerful for anything but poor gameplay decisions to take you down. By the end of my fourth run, I could literally cast no abilities, simply rely on the auto-attack and the final boss would have been killed with over half of my health remaining. As it was, I had enough abilities to quite literally one-hit-kill him before he ever got a chance to touch me.
As for abilities, they're a bit of a mess. Spells of the same type and level don't stack, often forcing you to discard a spell for an identical one with one fewer use or retreat through the whole level after clearing it to restock. There are some abilities I know exist that simply never saw in all my time playing yet I got the lowest tier health potions (heals 3-6 HP) regularly on the last of 28 levels (where enemies regularly deal ~10 damage per hit). Others are simply hilariously broken from a balancing perspective, often because they're also broken in coding. My final run gave me an item that healed me for 2 HP every time I "took damage." This already very useful item (and there's upgraded versions according to the files) got better when an enemy missing (about the only direct combat advantage you have over them since you never do) counts as dealing damage that happens to be zero, which triggered the healing item. Finally, there's only a single negative ability in the game, which permanently takes up an inventory slot, something cruelly punishing at early levels and but utterly pointless at later levels. You can only have one of these no matter what and it has a 10% chance every so often to cause you to skip two turns. Punishing... if it worked. In my experience, it never stopped you from moving if you were in the middle of it, it never gave the enemy free attacks or movements, it was simply a timewaster for the player. And in a game that incentivises crawling over every square of a dungeon for scraps of experience, that wasted time added up quickly.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the concept behind the game, but the payoff in both gameplay and sexiness was extremely unfulfilling. I'd say this is worth playing once, if only for future developers to possibly get ideas to improve upon, but only the once.