Ren'Py - Forbidden Dungeon [v0.1.2] [Dark Forge Studios]

You could play this, or you could just play Darkest Dungeon which is the same thing just 500% better. The sex stuff is basically tacked on and adds little to the gameplay. I love Darkest Dungeon and can see the temptation of adding alluring graphics, but DD is too intricate to try and copy into a Renpy game and have it really work.

Good clone of Darkest Dungeon. Not that difficult, but challenging. IDK what the locked areas of the town will do, but for now it's enjoyable. IDK also if the preggo is optional/avoidable. I hope so (I don't like it). The game get locked after beating the 2nd boss, so it's mostly a demo. The game has a lot potential!

As a darkest dungeon fan I love to see a H parody of the game, but this game simply does not serve enough to be one.

It is impressive how the author made this game from the renpy engine but many contents of this game is still missing. The game itslef just feels like DD with AI horny characters on and sometimes with AI H scenes. I don't have a problem with the AI aspect but the problem is that the game doesn't have anything else other than the horny characters.

This is also not to mention that the game runs terribly because of the engine this game runs on, which causes lags and graphic glitches half the time which really impairs the game.

Quite fun in itself, but I feel like the balancing needs some work.
With all heroes at level 5 and the bunny equipped for agility and HP, you enter a veteran dungeon (from level 3 onwards), and yet you get killed immediately because all four enemies are before you, and all four attack the bunny. And that wasn't even the boss fight. Two fights against four skeletons were no problem, then against two knights and two wolves were also no problem, but in the fourth fight, I was up against two knights and two banshees. As I said, I didn't even get a turn.
Since you now have to recruit a level 1 bunny again, you have to grind several level 1 dungeons to even have a chance at all, even though you're so weakened. This becomes a time-suck and drains motivation.

It would be helpful to have a time window after a defeat in which you have to end the fight so that you can save a character.
Or expensive potions. I'd also be happy with the option that revivals are only possible once per dungeon run.

Furthermore, some links to images are missing when visiting the brothel. You can ignore the error message and continue playing, but the fun is still missing.

Currently, it's more likely to be four stars than three, since you'll act differently and grind more when you restart. But as I said, it's an unnecessary time-waster.

will lose 99.99% of the time no matter what. Difficulty does not matter at all. Equipment does not make it any better. Potions are practically useless due to sacrificing a turn to use them so it negates the entire thing entirely.

Very good bones! Not a huge fan of MP limits, one of the super fun things about darkest dungeon was figuring out how to syngergize character abilities. But that's really my only gripe with gameplay. Looking forward to future updates.

To save everyone here time its shit

It plays like shit, It runs likes shit, The art is shit. The game isn't that porny and its sure as fuck not implemented into the game well.

The AI art looks terrible and is inconsistent in the ways Ai art usually is but its just so obvious that there is no effort put into the designs of this game, They are all generic ideas of either sexy heroines or basic dungeon enemies. I will also never understand the need for games like these to have their rosters include a self insert playable main character or monster enemies when its so obvious that they just want their game to be full of hot chicks. Like why even have generic skeletons and dogs in this game they don't even fuck your characters and even if they could it would only be if you lose. Why not use your shitty ai program and have it generate the only thing it was trained on and make shallow sexy girls.

The cut in sex mid combat looks fucking terrible and is treated like an after thought of an inclusion. The way attacks connect with both player characters and enemies feels fucking terrible. Player side attacks also look awful, Some of them don't play their animations correctly like the healers basic attack, some of the attacks take a while to come out like the mages big fireball, where she stands still as asset store seals pop above her head and light up and then the screen flashbangs you.

The UI for dungeon selecting is a mess, When placing your characters into the party they don't all face the same way so its hard to tell if they are in the right order or not and you can't even slide them around you have to reselect them again in the right order. Its very difficult to tell where you can click in the hamlet because there aren't obivious buildings that are clickable or popups telling you which building you can click. In combat UI also lacks functionality, Its hard to tell how long buffs are going to last, Or how long DOTs last, or you chances to hit an enemy, or enemy hp. Also in fights with multiples of the same enemy its hard to see which enemy is going in what turn order. Its hard to tell what enemies are doing or what they are capable of because nothing in the game tells you what action they are taking. In darkest dungeon when an enemy attacks you, You see the attacks name and thus you can link the effects and range to the attack can't do that here.
Its hard to engage with combat decision making when your given so little information to work with.

The combat is poorly thought out, Unlike darkest dungeon you don't think about any of your actions during combat, Positioning and targeting capabilities are why your party is in a line and are the backbone of strategy in that game. In this game nothing a barebones ideas of a secondary effect system and a mana system that is supposed to make you think about attack selection but every character has a built in mana restore basic attack that deals solid damage and can hit all enemies, and there aren't any anti stall mechanics other than running out of enemy hp ironically crits are undesirable because it means less farming, Not taking advantage of stalling to trivialize combat is a choice for the player. In the offhand chances that your unit is sent to deaths door or "near death", It seems they can only eat one more attack and then they die, and if they are healed off of it they keep the full near death debuff for the rest of that fight? Corpses are entirely visual they serve no mechanical purpose in a game without rank limitations to attack ranges, Just another thing cheaply copied from darkest dungeon by someone who has no idea why it was in that game in the first place. Ero dungeons and ero hunters both have a better grasp of that idea that this game ever could and I don't even think those games play well.

Dungeoneering is soulless, You click around rooms and then click the chests in those rooms or get a fight. No skulking though hallways no buying items or food for dungeon prep. Like why even have the appearance of darkest dungeons, dungeons if you aren't going to use any of the mechanics. Seemingly no scouting either so you just click around rooms and get jumpscared by fights or random bullshit events. Camping not being player engaged but instead a random event with shitty ai generated rapey looking sex scenes being your main way of restoring resources out of combat and your only source of eroticism if you aren't dogshit enough to be losing to enemies is pretty par for the course of shitty turn based porn games I suppose. Also even if your heroine dies there might not even be a shitty sex animation to play out with an enemy.

I cannot fathom playing this game over actual darkest dungeon with horny mods installed, You have talented artist making horny mod content for that game with consistent art styles, passion and an actual understanding of sexuality. Not cheap low effort blowup dolls that you can watch a skeleton dry hump in the middle of combat while your self insert oc watches.

Its shit and the fact that any one is giving this game money on patreon is unfathomable to me when there are so many better, hornier darkest dungeon porn games or mods out there made by people with actual talent they could be supporting. If you want to play a better game just get darkest dungeon and install xelsword mods. They look way hotter as that artist actualy knows how to inject sexuality into a character design and you'd be playing one of the best turn based games of all time.

I also completly forgot to mention the armor system but thats fitting considering how much of an after thought it is in game too.

Play Ero Dungeons or Lustiest Lair(Darkest Dungeon Mod) instead.
The UI is obnoxious and terrible. The coding and design is inconsistent so features will sometimes work and other times fail so I doubt this game gets to version 0.5.

MTL Translations are bad.
Asset Flips are worse.
AI is somehow even worse.

MTL you at least have competent game design and art.
Asset Flips at least had someone think about the gameplay for an hour.
AI is just terrible gameplay, terrible art(just disgusting 90% of the time), and it is designed to waste your time.

Lustiest Lair is inconsistent but there 1 of the 3 art styles or sets is going to be good. Ero Dungeons is well designed even if low budget.

Another low effort ren'py Darkest dungeon copy with an nsfw setting. No actual porn inside of this game besides what you see in the previews. Female protagonist tag is not realistically possible due to the story attempting to copy SL MC and the dev's lack of effort. The AI art in this game is okay, but it laughable seeing the 'modifications' the dev does to make it fit to the game (dead units are just cropped and rotated, sometimes just deleted, blood or poison under pcs are just red and green ovals from ms paint.)
Not worth your time or money.

It definitely has potential. I like the aesthetic and artstyle quite a lot, AI or not - what matters is the result. And the result is definitely one of the better games on this platform visually.

My biggest issue actually is the gameplay. While it is reasonably entertaining, there are a few balancing issues that kind of break the deal. The biggest problem in my opinion is that it's impossible to keep your weaker party members alive. Since there is nothing stopping the enemies from attacking the back of your formation, you have to keep fighting enemies that are way weaker than you, otherwise your healer/mage will keep getting killed and their level reset. This definitely needs a fix.

Leveling itself also feels quite unrewarding since there are no skills to learn and no stat points to distribute. The ability to learn new skills is certainly something still missing here.

But all in all, considering how new the game is, I will definitely keep an eye on it, because with a bit of work, this could become really good.

So many 2 stars reviews praising the game and yet they gave it that score. As a developer myself (and I have felt that on my own game), it's quite bizarre and frustrating seeing something like that.

This game is... really good. It has already so many things packed inside even though it's a 0.1 release.
From a technical perspective, this game is quite impressive, managing to do this on renpy nonetheless, I can't even imagine how hard it was.

I love the vibe, my game is also about someone who finds himself on a new world and this ticked all the right boxes for me. I played before and after the balance patch, I can say it improved a lot with that last patch. Maybe go the extra lenght of giving the player a difficulty choice in the beginning of the game.

I fully embrace AI, I just care if the game looks good or not and the game for me looks amazing.
Sound and music was really good also, I was really vibing with the epic soundtrack on the boss fights.
I recommend the game to anyone who enjoys a good challenge. Anyone complaining about the difficulty of the game never played Dark Souls for sure (and that game has quite the fanbase).

In short, really good game.

v0.1.1 release review

Let me start off with the good. It's damn impressive what the author has managed to do with the renpy engine. There are times you forget that 99.9999% of the stuff put out in Renpy is just visual novel schlock while playing this. It's damn impressive how far this game goes in pushing those boundaries.

Next, the fact that the art is AI doesn't bother me, and kudos need to be given for how much the author keeps all of it to not only a singular theme, but one that apes the source material.

Final positive point is that there's a lot here to sink your teeth into for a first outing. Already a lot of lore and mechanics set up for you to explore, this doesn't feel like a first or second release as it's quite well developed so far.

Now unfortunately we get to the bad, and why this can't be higher than 2 stars at the moment.

First of all the difficulty is insane. Even the game this is mocking is no where near this difficult. As someone with hundreds of hours into the source game, I found myself playing this porn parody and getting full party wiped 2 or 3 rooms into a dungeon. That might not be too bad, but there went all my resources, and the only lewd I got was watching the monsters fuck my female hirlings.

This brings up the second point, this is a porn parody, so where's the porn? Other than a very brief few sprites at the camp scene and the above mentioned 'loss' which again is no more than a few sprites with a head swap for various characters, there's nothing porn about this game. Where are the sexy attack animations? Where are the lewd movesets? There is a popular mod for the source game that makes the original material 100 times sexier and lewder than this parody.

I think the author of this game has a lot of potential. But they need to remember their audience and their goal here. The difficulty needs to be adjusted, MASSIVELY. The lewdity needs to be more of the focus of the game.

Don't just try to recreate (poorly) one of the best selling indie games of all time in an engine that wasn't designed for it. Parody it, lean into the lewdness, give players incentive to keep playing and want to see more. Not punish them because it's supposed to be difficult. No one will want to play a difficult parody.

At this time I'd suggest people stay away and not waste their time until there's some drastic revisions. I'll check this out after it gets some updates if it seems like the author moves in the right direction, because this game DOES have potential. But otherwise this one is a swing and a just barely miss.

This game somehow manages to be even more punishing than the game it's a parody of! Darkest Dungeon was already a seriously hard grindfest of a game, but this game takes the same formula and makes it even more brutal by removing the "Death's Door" concept. This increases lethality of combat to an unfair degree, makes healing far weaker, and leaves all your progress likely to vanish at any moment.

Making matters worse, there's no ability customization, all moves are incredibly generic, and all enemies can hit any rank so there's no point in arranging your party in any particular order. Some dumbing down might be forgiven in a porn parody, of course... but this just feels soulless and rushed.

Most unforgivably, though; this was advertised as a porn game. I came here to see girls getting captured and fucked, not getting chopped into bits. The in-game lore even suggests that this ought to be the case, but the gameplay itself seemed to end in poorly-depicted gore (like, random parts of the default character sprite dropped in a red oval on the floor) instead of sexy defeat images.

Ultimately, it's not fun, doesn't seem to have had much thought put into it, and the early focus on monetization seems unpromising. This one isn't worth your time.

(0.1.1)

It has some of the groundwork to become something good, but it’s definitely not there yet. The choice of Ren’Py to make a game like this is strange, and it shows in the screen transition glitches, the enemy/action targeting bugs that occur when a character is stunned, the inconvenient and buggy inventory UI, etc.

The inability to see enemy stats or tactical information such as how much damage status effects deal or how much attack and defense increase or decrease with buffs, or even know the turn order, makes it impossible to make informed decisions and optimal plays.

The sex scenes are bland and purposeless. No dialogue, no relationship building between characters. Just a few still images every time you rest at camp or a short battle loss animation when your companions are killed.

The dungeon delving is similarly boring. You choose rooms to explore completely at random and just click-click-click to pick up loot and move on, or get a fight. No events, no traps, no clues about what lies ahead. Every time a character dies, you lose their equipment AND their levels on top of having to pay their hiring price again, so you’re basically sent back to noob characters every so often, which I can’t imagine being anything less than aggravating past the first few dungeons.

This being so early in development, it has a lot of room for growth and I hope it gets better, but at the moment it’s neither fun to play nor good fap material.

It's a neat idea, but I lost any and all desire to play this game again after I lost against the goblin boss, reverted back to level 1, and lost all of the gear I had spent the last hour or two working to get. Neat idea, but I'll pass on doing that again.

For what it is, it's not bad. What it is is an AI game. And I don't mean AI art not give back to artist, so bad. If you've played an AI game, you probably know what I mean. The creator of this is not capable of working to the level that the quality of the images implies.

The game isn't bad. I've seen far worse. But it is amateurish. Anything not generated by AI is rough. Take the town for example. It looks good. The art is generated by AI. But the actual UI for going around town is basically horrendous. In order to use one of the towns facilities you have to already know it's there and click on an unlabeled part of the image to go into the building. A sane competent developer would never do that. Making the button to enter a building stand out AT ALL from the environment takes next to no effort and is obviously something you would want to do.

But because this is an AI developer they don't actually control the image and don't really the skill or knowledge to make it better. It wouldn't be hard. Even with their circumstances. But they didn't. Because they are an amateur. And that's fine. Good on em for making a game. Keep going and getting better.

Still, that mindset permeates the game. Some parts of it are cool. Some parts are bizarre and bad. Something even a very junior developer wouldn't do. It's a weird mishmash of quality levels and that makes it very hard to stay engaged with the game. Still, as I said, it's not the worst thing I've played.

I think, If the developer uses the AI to help supplement the areas they're incapable of and actually works on polishing their abilities in the parts they're controlling they could conceivably eventually make something good. If they just lean harder into the AI and keep spewing stuff at this level then well... we'll just have this but bigger. And that would be a shame. Good luck.

Renpy game that is not 100% VN desirves high rating. Game istelf is very close to standard rpg with long boring dialogs. "You are special hero blah blah blah..." Or something like that... good potential, but in rpg genre not that special.

I love Darkest Dungeon, and I'm working on my own isekai game, so seeing both combined was hype as hell. From the moment I started, I felt right at home. The dark, twisted setting mixed with the summoned hero theme just works so well.

Combat is brutal but fair, once you get past the first hurdles, it's all about smart skill use and adapting. I don't get the complaints about difficulty, it's a roguelike, wiping and losing progress is part of the fun. If you don't like that, play something else.

For anyone who's ever wanted to play as Sung Jin-Woo in a roguelike, this game is your wet dream come true. The progression system makes you feel like a weakling at first, but once you start unlocking the right upgrades, you become an unstoppable force. And when I finally unlocked the Summoner class? That was it for me. Absolute perfection. Managing summons while dominating enemies was everything I wanted and more.

Just spent a good chunk of time trying this game on, I kinda lost track of time, and you can really see the effort put into it. The dark, oppressive vibe is on point, and the soundtrack is amazing. It pulls you right into the world. The graphics? Gritty, detailed. People keep complaining about AI, but seriously, how can you play this and call it bad? It's gorgeous.

Gameplay wise, it's challenging but fair. Some people complain, but they just don’t get that you need to grind gear. Once you do, the game rewards you. Combat is solid, tactical, and every decision matters.

Overall, I loved it. If you like Darkest Dungeon and want an adult twist, this is 100% worth playing.

Right off the bat, at least 95% - it might be literally 100% - of this game's art is obviously AI generated. If that bothers you, don't play this. I don't think the art is particularly bad as far as AI art goes, but it is very stale and done in an extremely overused style. The porn is mostly limited to scenes that happen between fights and some rare in-battle animations that replace death animations. There isn't all that much to see at the moment.

As for the gameplay, it's a clone of Darkest Dungeon but missing the entire positioning system and the sanity/darkness mechanic. Also, the balance is way off. Fights are extremely punishing with basically no recourse. Good luck trying to get through a single level 1 dungeon without most of your party dying. And the rewards for doing so are very minimal and frankly kinda pointless since you'll probably lose everything when you wipe in the next dungeon. You'll quickly get stuck in a spiral of only being able to use the borderline useless guard units because the good heroes don't stick around long enough to make the hiring cost back. I have thousands of hours in other strategy games, RPGs, and dungeon crawlers. I'm not one to complain about difficulty. This game isn't even hard, just bullshit. Also, the town is separated into several separate interactive streets where you have to actually click on unlabeled doors to see the different facilities. This is extremely tedious compared to Darkest Dungeon's hamlet.

It's just as perplexing as it is low-key impressive that this game was made in Ren'Py for some reason. I have no idea what would possibly be the advantage of choosing Ren'Py for this kind of game. It would have probably been much easier, faster, and efficient to use Unity, Godot, or some other engine. Nevertheless, if this game was perfect I would not hold the engine against it, but it's clear the engine is holding the game back in some ways. This game is very new, and there isn't a lot of content, and what is there currently is mediocre at best, but there is potential here for this game to be good if its underlying systems are refined and the dev is persistent with content updates.