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

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.

I don't really know how to feel. It's good on paper... but it feel like was made with AI
Not only for the arts that off course are generated, but also for the gameplay.
The game is a Darkest dungeon light, you have 5 heroes, you the protagonist, a paladin, a rogue, a mage and a priest. You can always bring a townguard, a free hero that have only the attack option or spent 500 to buy each. Unlike DD you don't have sanity mechanic, and you can hit every enemy on every slot (the enemy can do the same to you). At the start of every dungeon you can equip your party with equipment you can find in the dungeon.
And that's it.
It's a 0.1v so there could be more in the future, but it really feel like somebody had write "create a darkest dungeon like game".
There are some sex, very vanilla, very AI generated.
I hope to see some content and maybe a soul in this project.