Ren'Py - Forbidden Dungeon [v0.1.4] [Dark Forge Studios]

Deserves more than a 3 star average, one of the better AI Games, and quite enjoyable as a mobile game.

I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected however it feels a bit easy and the AI hentai scenes could use some work, some don't seem to work at all or don't make sense with the previous images or first part of the video. It was surprisingly hard to put down until it got a bit farmy with not a lot of change as I couldn't even finish Area 1 100%. I would recommend a try.

One of my recommendations is to make it more obvious who is attacking who. There are a lot of copied enemies in the same encounter and it moves so fast and depending on who is attacking it's hard to keep up with who just attacked either make it slower or add better attack animations in the game.

I do think his patreon tiers are a bit lackluster and expensive for a full AI art game. Starting at like $6.50 a month for an AI game is pretty steep in my book.

Anyway, I wish the best of luck to the dev but I won't contribute at that rate for essentially free/no skill art.

I'm 99% sure most of the 5 star reviews here are fake, because this game is below average at best, people comparing this to DD and saying it's a good porn copy are either crazy or have never played DD, because other than visuals, a little bit of the UI and a very ROUGH copy of combat and dungeon exploration, nothing is the same

Lemme tell you why: -The gameplay is boringly repetitive and grindy
-The art is bad compared to the good AI art games, especially the animations
-The porn is just underwhelming, looks good at first glance, then you realize it's a small amount and it's all repetitive
-Almost 0 quality of life, everything feels clunky and under developed, things such as showing you which of the enemy is gonna attack first, if there's 3 enemy that looks the same(which is gonna happen in more than half the fights) and they just show a que, so you won't know which one's gonna attack
-Quite a few bugs, nothing game breaking but still annoying
-The combat is just trash, it's too easy and potions make it risk free and as I said before, it's just rough in so many ways, no party movement, every character or enemy attacks whoever he/you wants, making characters like crusader almost useless, what's the point of a tank if he almost never gets attacked, like I once had the mage attacked 8-9 times in a row by the enemies and no other party member got touched, the healer worked overtime and crusader was reduced to a shitty 3-4 heal ability just to keep that character alive, why is this posibile?
-The dungeons are random and annoyingly simple, it's either a room with random currency or basically the 2-3 ''different'' enemy character fight on repeat
-And a few other problems like the unbalance of characters, but I quite frankly feel too bored to continue writing

The story is decent but it goes by fast and it's not really fleshed out, but that's not a problem in this type of game, the problem lies in the quality of the gameplay and the porn side, things that can be fixed with time and lots of work.
I was planning on giving this 2 stars since that's what it deserves now, but it has potential and it's something different that the common slop porn game you see everywhere, so maybe with lots of QOL, better AI and some balancing, it will be really good in around 1-2 years from now, so quite likely that I will come back to change this review if that happens.

what Lustiest Lair ( the darkest dungeon mod) should have been.
10/10.
LL is just flavour text, with mildly risque outfits here and there, this one is the real deal. if you've been disappointed in LL , look no further . That's the one we've been waiting for for years. Thank you dev.

I Really enjoyed the dungeon play. The game as a whole is still in the early stages of development but from what I've seen, it looks really promising. I wish more people would come up with games like this one.

This game was... addicting.

I don't know what it is but the combat started to become more addictive as I played. Trying to get the best gear for my team was also one of the things I ended up being hooked on. Please put more gear into the game. It would be cool also if the gear changed the characters appearance, like some dildo armor and stuff like that ahah

The adult content is good but can be improved. But despite that I'm still having a blast playing it for several hours. Do recommend if you like RPGs or roguelike games.

This game is Darkest Dungeon if everyone was horny 24/7 and they were stuck in a power fantasy manwha.

Same dark vibes s and death stuff… but now your party members bang each other to recover hp and mana. Combat’s there, sure, but half the fun is seeing what kind of messed up/lewd stuff happens when shit hits the fan.

Art’s hot and very stylized. The game runs smoothly on my tablet.
Saw a few bugs with the UI but nothing that even hindered the experience, just had to click on a cross to close a skill sometimes. Not sure what all the UI problems everyone keeps referring too.

Also, took me a while to notice this was a Renpy game. The dev really went the extra mile to transform this in something that doesn't feel like it's renpy. With this, I mean it in the best way possible. Being a developer myself I know this is technically very hard to do, so big props for it.

Reading some of the comments and reviews it seems people have no idea what is a rogue like/lite game and keep complaining from their arses. Play DD 1 and 2 and then we'll talk

I'm loving this game so far. The fights and soundtrack are super addicting. If there were more animated scenes this would be even better!

I've seen people complaining about performance, I've had 0 issues and I'm running this on a very outdated laptop. Maybe some are using potatos to run it?

All in all, looking forward for the next updates

Unplayable garbage. Constant UI bugs and various issues with a UI. On top of it all, Dev has disabled Ren'py save feature, thus a death will reset your progress to beginning. When managing save files on the desk, the game state becomes even more corrupted.

Its okay. A good way to improve would be to make this more unique as even as a parody its very much so like a mod for Darkest Dungeon that already exists. Something id like as well is if it has a female protagonist tag to have a female player option.

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.

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.