Karryn's Prison is the Half-Life of lewd JPRGs.
Combat in lewd JRPGs has always felt half-assed, there only because RPGM gives you these mechanics for free and you have to pad the play time between your H-scenes with something. Smarter devs have been slowly getting rid of it altogether, avoiding Final-Fantasy like random encounters, adding stealth mechanics, environmental puzzles, etc. to replace it. Some lewd JRPG have become extremely similar to sandbox VNs, differing only in the control scheme.
And now Remtairy has come and given us something completely different. Something that I simultaneously want more of and don't want to see mindlessly cloned.
The story
The story itself is not exactly original. A cocky busty virgin is given a new job: instead of serving as the emperor's personal assistant/bodyguard she has to pacify a prison full of rowdy and horny inmates. You know exactly where this is going, right?
The art
It has grown on me. I am not a big fan of enormous breasts, but it's not like there are many games like KP to choose from. There's also the "blowjob mouth", which you can thankfully disable, and some scenes use some severe perspective distortion, but the amount of art is enormous. Most scenes are dynamically paperdolled to reflect everything that's happening.
The gameplay
A lesser game would have you fight basic battles against inmates and show you H-scenes upon defeat, but KP is not like that at all. First of all, its combat system is complex. Mind-bogglingly complex. You've got two health bars, one skill point bar, three damage types, status effects, unarmed combat, stances, a giant upgrade tree to choose from, enemy types that actually matter because of their stat profiles and skillsets. In any other lewd game you would see this as a hurdle, a mountain of complexity separating you from your H-scenes. But that's just half of the combat system, because the other half is all about sex. Yes, there are no prerendered H-scenes, everything happens right there on the combat screen.
You see, these prisoners aren't just going to beat Karryn up. But they aren't rapists either. They are perfectly willing to tear her clothes off, ogle her and talk dirty to her while masturbating, but they won't do anything to Karryn herself until one of her pleasure meters reaches one of the consent thresholds. And it will reach them, because the game expects you to roll with the punches (or dickslaps?). To ensure that it even autosaves your game.
The result is great. I've nutted to the game many times even before Karryn lost her virginity: the combat where Karryn is desperately trying not to lose, to keep her desires in check and her orifices inviolate while being mercilessy petted was already stimulating enough. But sooner or later Karryn will fall far enough, and the combat system is upended. Now you're a lust surfer, trying to keep Karryn sexier than she is sluttier, so she can milk the enemies dry before they fuck her brains out.
The ugly
The game is not perfect, of course. It plays like ass on weaker PCs. New content really peters out in the second half of the game. Combat masturbation is mostly a gimmick. Job minigames are another clever use of the combat system, but they take too long and are especially laggy. Finally, the game wants you not to power grind through tricky situations, but to fail and restart the game from the beginning (your stats are capped, but your enemies' aren't). You can keep some of the bonuses you've earned, but this is still frustrating if you fall off that wave you've been surfing on deep into your playthrough.
The verdict
Even with these issues, Karryn's Prison is a monumental achievement. It's the new yardstick for quality and depth of lewd JRPGs, a redefinition of the genre.
