Others - Going Deeper [Beta 2.1] [NRFB Games]

I can't stop thinking about this game.

Going Deeper is part unique turn-based roguelite, part hypno dating sim, wrapped up in H content that's integrated well with the setting (as opposed to e.g. aliens being randomly horny).

Gameplay: 4/5. Still in beta so it's missing some content and doesn't have an ending as far as I can tell. You monitor the actions of 3 girls as they explore a procedurally generated dungeon, slaying monsters, disarming traps, and looting chests. There's no health bar - instead, you're trying to mitigate the buildup of negative stats and status effects both to clear the dungeon and reduce long term penalties. It's fresh, takes a while to get used to, and suffers from not giving the player good feedback and rewards for doing well.

Story: 5/5. Going into this I expected to just unlock whatever hypno skill I could get and start training the girls into dumb whores, ala Ero Dungeons. But each one has personality - sure, cliche, seen it before eager tomboy, uptight paladin, laid back and a little slutty - personality that I was hesitant to mess with. They talk about their pasts, you see it reflected in their present struggles, their relationship with faith, societal pressure, family pressure, and for me a lot of that resonated. Then the game gives you an option to toy with their brains, mold them into something that you think they want. The fruit of Eden, a promise to make them happy. Do you take it? And if you do, can you resist the other temptations that go along with it?

H content: 3/5, but higher if you like fetish stuff. Personally I give it 4/5 because I like bondage, oral, hypnosis, forced orgasms, and lesbians. But most of it has one or two images to go along with it, and that can be a turn off for a lot of people. It also takes a long time to start unlocking it, though I think with New Game+ you can carry over the content and spend more time trying to get the specific scenes rather than spamming the research button at camp.

I give it overall a 5/5 mostly thanks to the novelty and the personal feelings it's given me.

Side note: I preferred playing as a girl. All the other characters are women, so playing a guy (even with the femboy pfp [side note, there is an equivalent tomboy pfp]) feels kinda pervy and predatory in a way. That might be my own bias though. It really only affects a few pronouns and maybe one or two scenes. I felt more connected with the characters as a girl (since the dungeon seems to attract and corrupt women primarily), a fellow partaker in the journey of temptation and corruption, rather than a tool tempted to satisfy the dungeon's goals via satisfying my desires by corrupting the women.

I really hope the dev gets better and keeps producing this game. I can't help but get invested in the journey these girls are taking exploring their faith, indoctrination, and sexuality. It's a bit of a reflection on the real world in that sense.

Some of the best writing and game design choices I've come across in a long time, I can tell it strives to make the most out of all it's mechanics (well introduced and explained). Looking forward to coming back to it at a later point

Easily in my top 5% of H-games I've played. Mostly because there is an enjoyable GAME to go along with the H. I find the worldbuilding and character writing is as good as anything else on the site and the dungeon exploring has an addictive quality. The progression of gaining speels and the girls gaining abilities is very enjoyable. There's a polish and attention to details that I appreciate and its clear the dev cares about what they're making.
It's not perfect, some of the scenes have 'very' specific requirements and the stylized graphics won't be everyone's cup of tea. Would love a few more visuals for happenings in the dungeon and for when you hit a game over. Also really wish you could drag and release to move to a square rather than having to click again every time.

tl;dr Just play it. In a sea of click-through-the-porn "games" and terribly written VNs, this is a port full of quality goodness.

It's a unique roguelite with a well-written story grafted onto it.

This game is about exploring a procedurally generated maze of rooms with curios and monsters inside, that the three pre-defined characters explore semi-autonomously floor by floor, going deeper into the dungeon and corruption. There's also a compelling narrative perfectly explaining why exploration happens in the first place, and why and how you are only given partial control of the party. This is very cool. Honestly, I think the narrative is the strongest suit of this game—yes, that's a roguelite we're talking about. Going Deeper just has a very good story. It has a coherent plot, with solid mystery, characters, motivation, and worldbuilding. The prose is competent (see: the Witch character), and there's a good balance between the amount of story and action you're given.

There are unfortunately three problems that prevent Going Deeper from getting 5 stars from me. And no, art is not one of them, I just treat it as a text game. The art is a net positive, and that's good enough for me.

First, currently (beta 1.5) adult content is fairly scarce. You have only a handful of scenes with each girl, a lot of them being pairings, player character not present. On top of that, unlocking events is a part of roguelite system, tuned for multiple dungeon runs. Sometimes you need some very specific circumstances being met, like a particular curse—out of dozens—on a particular girl, and a particular camp activity happening. Worst of all you need to cast a spell to watch the precious event, so you need to constantly keep track of what events might happen. This is just difficult, not in a good, but in a tedious way. Camp time is one of the most tightly managed resources in the game, and on top of that events form event chains... The game either needs a lot more events available, so more of them will just fall into your lap, or make a way to get more rolls on prerequisites, and on top of that the hint system needs... to be more helpful? Somehow? Maybe this isn't completely fair but I'm tired of trying to hit Lucette with Nature's Reclamation—and yes I know I need a Thorns build for that to even be a possibility. I give up, I just don't have the time for another full run—a full run with a build I do not like—for a chance of a scene.

Speaking of builds I don't like... This is the second problem. It is somewhat subjective, but there are very few choices that make a tangible impact. Yes, the skills do matter, they do make the characters stronger, but compared to other games, they just don't feel that way. Say, a skill gets you a 3% effective stat boost when your active skill had been off cooldown for several turns (which should never happen ideally, so what's even a theoretical uptime on that buff?) Compared to some other roguielites where a single perk or item will happily give you something like 10%+ crit chance, no strings attached, Going Deeper handles its build systems in a miserly way. And did I mention your characters can have only one big active skill, usually with a cooldown of 20 to 40 turns? I did not call it miserly for nothing. Yes, there is a limited choice of secondary so called support skills, but they are very minor, and must be activated from an awkward context menu, which is rather tedious.

This brings us to the main issue I have: the UX that becomes less and less pleasant the more you want to play optimally; and I don't know about you, but I like optimizing. Why else would you play a turn-based roguelite? The problem is that fundamentally this game wants you to find the best combination between safety and exploration speed. The solution is to follow these rules: a) do not split the party b) rest ASAP c) don't waste turns doing nothing. It is doable, but MY GOD it requires a shit ton of micromanagement because by default your units will always violate A and B. Meanwhile the UI is not making herding your pussies easier at all.

Still, 4 stars for unique roguelite mechanics and excellent storytelling, and maybe this game can overcome some of the problems I listed and earn a fifth. Try it out in any case.

Good game, worth playing for people who like generaly text-based gameplay. Feels like match in DND. Many interesting mechanics and features.
4\5

The ero-trap-dungeon format is usually a vehicle for spitting out tentacle-rape animations in an action setting, but here in Going Deeper, it's a slow burn primarily in a turn-based text format.

The writing is the star of the show here - your POV is that of a commander/voyeur, and the writing is good about sticking to that. You rarely get a full picture about what's happening, and that helps with the eroticism going on.

Is the art style weird? Yes, but the lack of visual detail weirdly works to redirect your attention to the text instead of just encouraging you to tab through looking for the next pretty picture.

Is the game good? That's... hard to answer. It's unique, in that you spend a lot of 'gameplay' on autopilot waiting for something potentially catastrophic to happen, and occasionally scrambling to rescue your knights from getting their brains fucked out. It functions a bit like a roguelike/deckbuilder style, in that your 'deck' is mostly fixed but you have some tools for slowly influencing it one way or another.

Despite all that, it weirdly works and easily eats hours.

Is very rouge like.

Is very challenging just to not get corruption break by lust when i try to keeping them pure. every floor does increase room and it become more harder to remove monster just to get P1 corruption for curse dispel instead of P10 for quick game over and room increase and corruption wave faster the deeper it is.

it does have helper but it have to do task and loan some mana to lessen the burden.

con: when removing the curse it have chance to remove ult skill of character.

Bug(idk): I'm very annoy when removing the Negative status that can only be remove by an ally you have to fight or disarm the trap the current room just to wake/remove the Negative status

bug: The continues turn did not work out even with shift + space and i have to click many times just to get them on stairs

this game have potential.
Eggcellent.
I did not see alot of H-scane because im very focus on resisting when it comes to corruption break thus i give up and waiting for more update.
is because i did not do what this game have offer to me.
i will be back few months just to suffer again.

I am looking foward to seeing the full release for this game.

It is a game before it is porn, which is a rarity among most of the stuff on this site.

The mechanics are interesting to learn and play with. You learn more with each run rougelike style.

There is a lot of fetish content. You take the girls into your tent alone and take control of their mind so that they can be more proficient at the fighting style you have chosen from them. Very nice.

The story is interesting to observe.

The scenes are somewhat scarce for the moment. But it is still in beta.

Please add 36 more Lucette sex scenes as she is the best girl. Thank you.

This is a fantastic slowburn corruption game.
There are 2 main parts to the game: a camp section where you prepare spells, research phenomena you've come across and talk to/seduce 3 cute paladins who have come to purify the evil inside a mysterious dungeon.
The second part involves exploring the aforementioned dungeon, which is filled with traps, monsters and treasure. If you don't like this part, it can mostly be automated.

Fetishes are mostly centered around corruption and mind control. In theory, these are optional but the game clearly expects you to feel tempted to use them and if you try to go for a "pure" route, you'll miss out on most of the content.
There are about 40-50 h-scenes, total playtime is ~10 hours if you want to see 70% of them and another ~10 if you want to see everything. If you REALLY like the gameplay, there's even a new game+ with tons of options for increasing or decreasing the difficulty.

The writing is of very, very high quality and the characters and artstyle are full of charm. I have nothing negative to say, this game is simply a masterpiece.

[Alpha 16 review]
4 stars for effort. This is resembling an actual game, even if it's lacking on the lewd department.

A good amount of work has been put into it, and it's quite good for an alpha.
Worth checking again further down the line to see what it evolves into.

Before we get into the review I want to clarify that this is for the Alpha 14.1 and I will base my scoring on the potential that I see for this, not just the current content.

This is one of those games where you can easily see, that the dev cares about all aspects of it. If this had no NSFW content, I would still play it. The systems are pretty deep but not overly complex to get into, the UX looks great (with some minor kinks to work out which I will get to) and the writing is honestly the best I have read in an indie game in years.
I don't want to spoil too much but at some point you meet a character that only speaks in riddles and poetry and it's amazingly well written dialogue. I have no idea who the person behind this game is but I want to read more from you, dude.
Thankfully in this game, there is a lot to read. This is combined with pretty few actually NSFW graphics but (in my opinion) very hot descriptions of what's going on. The event system in general is pretty cool with prior effects on the characters being taken into account in the description of what happens. Clearing a floor genuinely reads like a story despite being randomly generated.
The actual story of the game also seems very interesting and morally grey - it's not long enough yet to give a real rating and I don't want to spoil but I can certainly say that I want to know how it continues.
The graphics where they exist are pretty simple, keeping with the style of the games pixelated visuals. The music is another very nice aspect - I just realized that I never got annoyed by it in my multiple hours of playtime and that's pretty rare for me.

Of course with an alpha there are still some things that aren't polished or finished yet - for this game this is mainly content. The story stops after a few floors and after some time even the floors run out. This is of course intended to change with more versions.

Then I have some problems with the UI:
- Why do I get back to camp menu after researching something? I now have to open up my research tab and find my next research which is quite annoying when wanting to research multiple things in a row. Would prefer if the research tab just stayed open.
- More options for when to pause would be appreciated for the auto-mode (e.g. on finding a specific kind of room, on failing to dodge trap, on scry being off cooldown etc. etc.)
- When a text is bigger than the text box and it becomes scrollable, progressing with leftclick doesn't work anymore for some reason

And one final feature request:
A collection page that can be viewed outside of runs. These things seem to be tracked globally anyway, so having them easily accessible would be great.

And that's it! From my pretty minor critiques you can once again tell that I was happy (and honestly quite impressed) with my experience. I will try to keep up with this game and update my review when more content becomes available. Deserved 5/5

[Alpha 12]

This is a perfect example of a game with lots of potential, with all the good and bad that comes with this title.
To summarize my thoughts, it is very much worth checking out, it will be addictive if enough events and interactions with your allies are added, it is still very much an alpha title, and the ai art is used very well to the point that if the game wasn't tagged as such, I'm not sure I could tell if I didn't go looking for it.
Right now, the biggest thing holding it back is the lack of content, which is expected for an alpha. The amount of time between "playing blind and getting events by happenstance" and "changing your play to try and trigger as many events as possible" is a couple hours at most. When there's enough content to stretch that time past 5-10 hours or even more, that's what'll make this game dangerous.
Additionally, and maybe I just haven't found it yet, but there doesn't seem to be an in-universe reason for the game to be a roguelike. It's got the "randomized, ever-changing dungeon" aspect, but not the "excuse to restart with nothing" part. Not a deal-breaker, and I could be talking out my ass anyway, but it would be nice to see.
Will keep a close eye and NOT support because every project I find on this site that I support dies. Check it out.

While it's definitely in Alpha, at least as of this posting, it's still pretty solid. It's a little devoid of particularly lewd content at the moment, mostly teasings and light stuff, but that's fine. It's also a porn game, with emphasis on the latter, which has its warts if you're looking for, well, porn, I suppose.

Tested Alpha 10.1:

- Gameplay loop is nice. You play for more than the lewd.
- Vast amount of different options and strategies, a bit unbalanced atm but it's an alpha.
- Developer interact with users and take their feedback into account.
- Roguelite: it's ok to lose, you still gain new unlocks (there might be some runs when you run deep but still earn nothing: maybe this will change in the future)

I put 5/5 to encourage the developper. This looks great, and looks like it will be even greater!

[Written for Alpha 9.1]
[Summary]
In short, you lead a team of cute lady knights in a roguelike through different dungeon floors. On those floors, you have a choice of letting your knights take on corruption or curses. Corruption lowers their stats, while curses have all sorts of effects. After each floor you return to camp where the fun begins. You can manipulate the mind of the knights to change their behaviour, accept or reject the curses (changing their mind in the process), and you can scry (spy) on them while they go about their day.

And you can also research and prepare for the next dungeon, and there's an extensive skill system, but that's not why you're here I think.

[Characterization & Atmosphere]
The characterization of the knights is top-notch. They are well written, and any action they do in camp has a lot of flavor associated with it. It really makes it all feel lifelike, and makes you enjoy the mind manipulation so much more.
This section is rather short, since it's easier to complain about the bad than praise the good. But this is really why you should play the game. Inviting the knights to your tent and warping their desires is tons of fun. Of course, if you don't thing that sounds like tons of fun, this isn't the game for you because of the next sections.

[UI]
The UI looks nice, but fails at its job of providing the necessary info to the player. The dev really needs to take a second look at this. Panels that slide open and hide the main view aren't the way to go. The things that are relevant (exhaustion, corruption, status effects, events, etc...) should always be on screen, while irrelevant things (irrelevant stats, old events, etc...) should be hidden away. More zoom levels are also welcome.
The camp UI is a lot better, but still requires too many clicks to do stuff. For example, after researching stuff you are always thrown back to the main camp screen, so you need to go back to the research panel, type of research, set your filter, then click research again (most things need to be researched multiple times).
But again, the UI looks great, its functionality just isn't there yet.

[Dungeon Mechanics]
Dungeons are hard if you think too much about it, but easy if you don't. The knights can auto explore, fight and disarm stuff, and after three fights they lose a well-rested buff indicating that you should call them back to rest. You could try to push your knights further, or concoct elaborate strategies to evade difficult threats, but you're only shooting yourself in the foot that way.

Combat and traps are complicated. From a high-level view, the knight comes in, takes some damage and kills the trap/enemy. On a low level view, I have no idea how it works, and I don't care. The problem isn't necessarily that the combat is complicated, but that the combat is both complicated and player intervention rarely matters. You can play the entire game (as I did) without ever interacting closely with the combat or trap disarming. Add to that the clunky UI, and a sort of ennui sets in.

To make sure that you keep a brisk pace, the floor will send corruption waves (cwaves) your way. These depend on the time spent moving (so not resting, fighting, disarming) your knights do. When a wave hits, the curses on the knights first absorb it (2-3 charges per curse), and then the knights gain temporary corruption. In theory, this sounds terrifying, and I first thought it was a very unfair mechanic. But in reality it doesn't matter.

In short, the strategy is just to make sure your knights rest whenever they lose their rested buff (since at that point they lose stamina every tile, and you can only recover 30 by resting), and make sure they don't stray too far from one another. Even playing extremely passive like this, I would only get three or four cwaves per floor. This in contrast to my first playthrough, where I rushed through floors which allowed me to get it done in two cwaves, but gave me oodles of tcorruption from exhaustion. So the game is really trivial if you know what you are doing, but the default way of playing will punish players heavily. Especially since leaving monsters alive (as you might do in a rush) makes subsequent floors harder.

[Curses]
While the curses are fun from a H-perspective, mechanically the curses are very weak. In fact, as mentioned above, the optimal strategy is to embrace as many curses as you can to give you as many time as you like to clear floors. Some curses don't matter at all, such as rope-bunny (minor lust gain when getting the tied up status effect), or exhibitionist (minor lust gain when in a room that is currently being scryed). Others seem like they should have an effect, but don't really matter, such as scatterbrained (lower stats while disarming traps) or weakness of the mind (temporary corruption when getting the dazed status effect). Then I also had a bunch of hidden curses, which meant they were so situational that they didn't manifest even once during my entire playthrough (I had a lot of those, since I actively wanted as many curses as possible to see what they do).

[H-Content]
There are a few H-scenes, but they are few and far between and some require a lot of work to unlock. The bulk of the content comes from the curses above and the effect on the mental status of the knights. Unfortunately, mental changes aren't shown that clearly (no special scenes). They do affect the in-camp behaviour, but you're unlikely to notice. they also fluctuate very heavily. In a couple "therapy sessions", you can make the proud idealistic knight forget all about those ideals, but nothing will change. Their desires also don't matter. Sure they need desires to learn skills manually, but you will be primarily imprinting from scrolls anyway.

It's really a shame that embracing curses doesn't affect the knights more in camp, and that drives and desires are both easy to manipulate and have little effect. The curses are also hit and miss, getting a knight to embrace exhibitionism is fun, but I don't think anyone has a saboteur fetish.

Also, in theory there are a bunch of text events during combat or traps. Those are just text however, and you can safely ignore them (see the combat mechanics section above). But it's still content I guess.

[Bugs]
As always, games have bugs. There are some minor ones, (TAB-button not working, or incorrect ordering of UI nodes) and some larger ones (sometimes curses gained persist when restarting a floor, you can keep researching during the day to skip dungeon time and stay at camp). I didn't encounter any that are game breaking, though.

[Summary]
Good basis for a game, with very good dialogues and scene setting but mediocre dungeon mechanics. The UI and tutorialization especially needs some work. However, I do look forward to new content, and think it's a solid base for a very good game (if you're into mind control).
Note that the rating is conditional on the fact that it's only an alpha, and is heavily carried by the promising future the game seems to have.

Now this is an excellent game, good story, developing and interesting, and very well written, nice art, music, solid functioning interface. Not a game for a quick fix, some may say, but the game is appropriate here, for the corruption development. Definitely interesting.

A promising early version of a game that's right up my alley.

The tags are great, love to see some MC-content, the gameplay-loop is competent, the art is lovely and the theming is pretty strong.

Really hope this has a bright future.

I've played an early version and while it ran out of content pretty soon and the H content was bare bones then the concept for the game seems very promising.
So i will probably wait a while and come back after a few updates to see how its has been progressing on updates.

Excellent start. Fun dungeon crawling, strong writing/worldbuilding, and interesting, if somewhat cliche, characters. Art/aesthetic are nice. Strongly recommend to any corruption/mind control fans, and looking forward to future updates.

Its pretty fuckin rad tbh. Kinda confusing at first, also confusing later but once you understand what the fuck is going on youre good to go. Gameplay is pretty fun, theres a lot of stuff that can happen to your girls. It is kinda heavy on getting your shit kicked in tho, but thats the idea i think. Id love the main character to get in on the corruption as well but i dont think thats what mr dev intends to so it might be just wishful thinking. All in all it is a very solid 4 star game. And when it gets developed more im sure i wont be wrong to change my rating to five star.

Just play it ya dingbat its good