Java - Lilith's Throne [v0.4.10] [Innoxia]

Best text based game I have played lots of possibilities and kinks for anyone. Looking forward to the updates. Options for different romance partners, can play as male or female, have multiple races and character customization, good story and the combat doesn't feel like a chore. It's not impossible to get to the good stuff and I never felt like I was missing anything.

A lot of reviews on this game are focused on the fact that it's stagnant, abandoned, etc, etc. But, I want to shine a light on where the game is actually at, as of August 24, 2024, as someone who really enjoys text-based games.

TL;DR: The gameplay is shallow and unenjoyable, the sex stuff is a little better but becomes repetitive quickly. What you see on day 1 is what you get. So, very, much, TEXT.

The Good
As an avid player of RPGs and simulation games, I expected there would be a lot for me in Lilith's Throne. And for a short while, I was right. The RPG combat is serviceable for a short time, the concepts behind the sex system are quite appealing, and there are some emergent gameplay scenarios/stories that come up from the systems that I don't think other games can replicate in the same way Lilith's Throne does.

For instance, I was playing as a character who was kind of a sadistic brawny meathead who liked to be violent and torment other people. I was pleased with how this character concept worked, as the "pace" system for sex allowed my partner's feelings to shift from eager to actively resisting and asking to stop once I had beat and choked them. This sort of character would not be possible in any other game I can think of!

The Bad
However, it falls short in many ways that prevent me from wanting to come back. The writing and structure of the game leaves a lot to be desired, the RPG mechanics feel tacked-on to an already bare-bones game, and the lack of content makes the game become quickly repetitive.

One of my biggest gripes with the game is how its curated quest content is presented to the player. I don't mean to seem like a neanderthal who can't read, but there is SO MUCH TEXT at once. Seriously, in the beginning of the game you are hit with like 4 walls of mediocre dialogue and prose explaining everything that's going on. And unlike in other text-based games, there's no taking it one paragraph at a time -- your ass is SCROLLING through their Great Wall of Text. Imagine if you played an RPG and instead of the characters talking one-by-one they just spat all of the dialogue at you and you had to sit there and read it like a mediocre fanfiction. That's Lilith's Throne.

Another thing that pisses me off is how little real content there is. Once the novelty of the dynamic sex system wears off, this game is like 1-2 hours long. The map is full of empty streets and alleyways dotted with shops that sell items that give you a 1% boost to cum magic or whatever. The main quest suffers from aforementioned text overload syndrome so you will never know what's going on unless you have the patience of an eighth-grade English teacher reading a student's narrative essay. And even if you do really enjoy the main quest, the only content featured is basically "go to this place, let this guy talk at you, fight this guy". And at a very early in the main quest, you hit a wall where you need to kill this powerful level 10 enemy, so you'd better get your ass grinding for that too.

Speaking of grind, the RPG elements in this game seemed promising at first. I really like how critical hits are fulfilled by certain conditions, it almost makes combat seem like a puzzle to be solved. However, the game completely squanders this by allowing you no real way to customize your gameplan in fights. Status effects, buffs, debuffs, healing, and other staples of the RPG genre are either nonexistent or made obsolete by damaging spells, making combat feel like banging two action figures together until one of them breaks. And the perk tree is a fucking insult. Oh boy I leveled up, time to get... 1% increased spell efficiency (yes, really, this is what all of the "perks" are like)...

Conclusion

In conclusion, Lilith's Throne promises a lot and delivers on none of it. If this game was a little earlier in its development I wouldn't call it out for being so barebones, but it might as well be abandoned at this point. The RPG mechanics are promising, but end up being shallow and tacked-on. The sex mechanics are promising, but end up being repetitive with little variation between scenes. The result of all this promise is about 1 hour of fun and imagination before you realize that what you saw the moment you spawned in on day 1 is all Lilith's Throne has to offer.

One of the only games which gives players this amount of freedom. Even the most sandboxy adult games tend to have some form of rail roading but you can kinda go crazy in this game. The main story is fun but unfinished BUT I don't think it's the main appeal. Instead it's how this game has randomly generated content and like almost infinite freedom for doing whatever else

tl;dr: Play if it's your first time, but don't bother if you've been waiting for more real content. Give it another 5 years.

Adding my review on to this preemptive pyre. The game's not dead, but it may as well be. Content comes out woefully slow, the repetition of the game's earliest iterations remains rampant, and you've seen basically everything within an hour of playing.

This is absolutely worth a try if you've never played it. If you have already played it, though, and are wondering "Is it worth another try?" No. It's not. Whatever made you stop playing back then remains a problem now. I went wild for this when I first played it years ago, but basically nothing has changed. The dynamic sex is still the same, the map is still the same, the UI is still the same. It's all the same. Yeah, a few tweaks here and there, but my god, not nearly what there should be. It's a shame that this game fell to the wayside, because once upon a time, it was really shaping up to be something.

I would love to give this a higher rating, but there REALLY needs to be a way to adjust the UI scaling. This game is nearly unplayable on high resolution monitors.

If this gets fixed, I'd say that this is a five-star game. I love the premise, and the in depth customization. But I may go blind trying to read the UI elements.

This game used to make me nut like crazy.
Not often you run into a sandbox like game where it gives you so much freedom.

Now it's just another number among the corpses of abandoned games.

Eventually you'll run out of content to do and be faced with repetition.


Good game to play though the first time. Don't expect much content. ToT will be complete before this game probably.

Preface:

• Likely the most robust interactive sex scene system out there, with many action and positioning choices.
• Has an excessively detailed body part system which helps maintain good variety in randomly generated NPCs as combinations color, size, length, style, etc will rarely clash.
• NPCs will have their fetishes and turn-off which impacts what actions they choose and their reaction dialogue to your choices during interactive sex scenes.

Where it goes wrong:

• The cost of having such wide freedom of actions during the sex scene is that every action is described in the same 1-3 ways (literally, most of the time is just switching the adjective or appending/prefixing their current mood).
• Whether you're fucking a Story NPC or a randomly generated NPC, it is exactly the same. There is no unique behaviour, dialogue, action, or positioning that is rewarded for entering into an interactive sex scene with a Story NPC.
• The interactive sex scene will not have an ounce of influence from the scripted story events/dialogue in the 5 minutes leading up to the scene or the fighting if it was a result of a battle.

What is respectable:

• The game really lets you adjust what content you get. You can specify what sex / gender / species (fox , slimes, succubi) / degrees of furry (kemonomimi vs full anthro) you want to encounter. You can opt out of transformation content or allow it one-way. Only thing that is set it the sex / gender of Story NPCs, which you can avoid by not losing or offering your body to them.
• Honestly, if you just treat it as something you can play every few months for 30 minutes to get off, the game is great as a interactive sex scene sandbox type deal. Probably even a 5/5 in that use case. Any more than that, it quickly gets boring and dissapointing.

It's a fun game for a text RPG, but the updates are slow. The game is ambitious in many ways, but the lone dev with a handful of community contributors has overstretched her ability to deliver. It would have been wise to hire somebody to help with the coding at least part time some years ago, though I'm not sure the dev has the resources for that.

Sex scenes are pretty great because they're dynamic, but it can get...lore dumpy at points, and the setting is pretty fun, if grimdark in a few aspects.

If there's one word that summarizes this game, it's "stagnant".

Lilith's Throne is one of the older projects here that are still in "active" (term being used loosely) development. Released in 2018 amidst Corruption of Champion's unceremonious end, the game promised to develop even further on the essentials laid out in that influential game. The main appeal of this game is its wide range of character customization options, all of which apply to randomly generated NPCs: races, fetishes, gender, equipment, and more can be tuned to your liking, and the in-game content options allow even further tuning of the game to have these generated characters and world consist of whatever you want it to have. Want all humans? You can have that! Want everyone to be a catgirl? You can have that too! Want a mix of femboy gryphons and futa hyenas? Fair game! Want nobody to have body hair? You got it! The only real restrictions are on major NPCs, which have their own preconfigured appearances and fetishes that generally only change during events in their story (barring the ~2 that you can enslave); fetishes, which there are a few you can block entirely (e.g. lactation, incest, NTR, cum inflation) while others you can have NPCs not have interest in but doesn't actually block them from using sex moves associated with them per se; and to a lesser extent ages and personalities, the former requiring some shenanigans to toy with and the latter requiring a specific item that only affects personalities that tangibly affect dialogue.

In terms of being a dollhouse that allows you to roll a bunch of OCs and then slam them into each other, barring a couple of ostensibly random restrictions (multiple penises not being possible for engine reasons, some races being a lot more difficult to gain access to outside of cheeses/cheating due to race balance issues) and the occasional awkwardness (trying to get positions set up, especially for group encounters), the game is very effective in that regard. For that reason alone, I give it a 3/5, since it's carved out for itself a niche that none have dared match in scope and execution.

The chief caveat with this game is that it is basically pure text, with only the occasional bit of artwork for story-relevant NPCs existing as to give a better grasp of what they look like. Your imagination will be doing a lot of the heavily lifting, taking the altogether relatively barebones description of whatever sex act is going on and transforming it into a graphical image in your mind's eye. Those with aphantasia will have a very difficult time enjoying this game.

With all that out of the way, as soon as you test the limits of the established sandbox, or you try to interface with the game as something other than a sandbox, you very quickly reach the game's ugly side.

With how many RPG mechanics it has, it's not a very good RPG. In fact, I would even go as far as to say that it sucks.
Combat is very rudimentary despite how many apparent options there are, and the balancing is complete and utter whack: even when playing with enchantment capacity (itself a bandaid to stop the player from scaling out absurdly with expensive gear), melee weapon builds are dramatically stronger than everything else, and simply pressing "attack" 3 times with the highest base damage melee weapon you can find is a safe bet to winning just about every fight in the game. Ranged weapons require you to burn arcane essence, the secondary currency in the game, for no apparent reason. Spells require markedly more setup for less results than smashing with a melee weapon. Lust damage requires substantially more setup for less results than smashing with a melee weapon, especially as non-magic lust is extremely undertuned, and magic-wielding characters (so most of the boss fights) can't be insta-defeated by maxing their lust. To make matters worse, this bad balancing goes both ways -- players and enemies use the exact same pool of equipment and skills. While this in theory makes for a fair playing field, given that offense is so ridiculous and defensive options both few and largely ineffective, you run into scenarios where enemies attack for 100 damage at the start of the game on the easiest difficulty because the AI spawned with the right weapon and decided to select "attack" three times. It inevitably forces you to glass-cannon builds that nuke enemies right away, exploiting the fact that all draws are considered a win for the player, and only adding HP/defense when enchantment capacity allows; or alternatively turning enchant capacity off and then buffing your stats through the roof to roflstomp every encounter.

Furthermore, the main story, for how straightforward it is, is still somehow woefully thin for its apparent driving role. On the surface, it should be pretty cut-and-dry: after you get your bearings in the starting city, you're tasked to go around and beat up a bunch of lieutenant demons and take their power in order to get strong enough to take out the big tyrant Lilith and stop her from taking over the world. However, the layers that are added on top of this chassis (themselves necessary to give a bit of variety, even if it's not super-important to do so depending on how you want to look at this game) have almost no development to them beyond the broadest of strokes: each of the towns you have to go to to fight the next lieutenant has its own array of problems; there's a couple other factions out and about that have an interest in fighting Lilith; the supporting NPCs are not interesting in the slightest and only exist to 1) feed exposition and 2) have sex with; and underlying all of this is some very, very poor worldbuilding that quickly struck me as being made up mostly on the fly without any particular concern for logic. The prose, too, is only ever serviceable. Especially during the later content, I could almost taste the developer's ennui coming off of the story writing, as if the game were simply going through the motions to fulfill its obligation of telling a story rather than trying to do something fun or interesting with itself.

I had mentioned earlier that the game was best described as "stagnant". The reason for this is pretty simple: the pace of development is glacial. After the main Dominion content was finished in ~2020, it took two years for the next city, Elis, to even be added, and then most of another year for the main quest there to be expanded to something vaguely resembling "complete", and has stalled out there since. Furthermore, the barebones systems and mechanics have remained stuck in their current iterations for almost as long as the game has existed, despite the fact that several of these, chiefly the combat and skill tree, being labeled outright as "placeholder". Additionally, if you try to push the game's engine in a way that it doesn't like, you quickly run into trouble. Having too many NPCs active on the game world will slow the game to a crawl as the engine checks for status updates with each movement tick; moddability is very poor outside of developer-designated avenues of creating new races and items, and demand you fork the game's code and do a lot of Java hax to add anything substantial, not to mention making sharing said non-basic content mods an extremely difficult process; and with the long period between builds, any bugs or issues will likely be staying present practically indefinitely. For a particularly egregious example of the game's lackluster construction, the ability to have companions was disabled many years ago despite their popularity, primarily because the game happened to not be able to cope with the player having a party member at certain points in the game (you can still turn the option on, mind you, but it's both out of the way and will inevitably lead to said problems). For a more quirky example, the game is completely unplayable on leap days, as for some reason, the game tries to initialize the game on the current day of the year but in specifically 2019 when launched, but since 2019 isn't a leap year and thus has no February 29th, it simply crashes on startup.

Furthermore, what few additions that this game does get tend to be the apparent result of momentary fascinations rather than anything resembling a vision or plan. New side locations and minor content will be thrown into the starting city of Dominion out of nowhere; major patches will be random hodge-podges of thrown-together placeholders; minor patches will randomly have an attempt at a system rework thrown in; new items (primarily contributor-sourced) will be added sporadically; and NPCs and side content pulled from nowhere will show up and be largely fleshed out despite the dismal state of what should be the primary focal content. If you start trying to take into account the developer's public statements and laid-out plans for their direction of the game's development, this becomes even more abhorrent, but given that the game's thread here is filled to the brim with bashing that, I'll leave you off with that.


TL;DR: This game is at the forefront of "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle". While a novel toybox and can be plenty enjoyed as such, the underlying game is built upon a never-ending pile of placeholders and duct tape. You can almost feel the developer's lack of passion and frustration with having to continue working on this game. For all intents and purposes, take this game with the assumption that nothing else really changes, and go from there. 3/5 when all is said and done.

Another great example of failed hopes and dreams. While Lilith's Throne looked promising 3-4 years ago, it slowly but surely became an eyesore.

Another potentially grand sandbox game with impressive content tailoring on par with many competing titles, but which is essentially managed to stay an echoey empty room. You do have a lot going for this room, you can choose where to put the doors, the windows and what to have as flooring and paint, but you won't ever get to the fun part.

The most this game provides as of an experience so far is a very shallow fever dream of a furry who want to aimlessly fuck its way through strangers in what is essentially an alternative for London downtown, just to end up passing out laying in its own shit and vomit in a dark alleyway. It does that pretty well though, to give credit where it's due...

So much potetial, yet so many problems.
One of the best txt games on the website, and basically the only one that can hang somewhere on the level of heavy-hitters like COC. However, six years in the game is in a terrible state - roughly 4-5 hours of content, completely unbalanced - no matter which class you take, 30 minutes in you will be one shotting all enemies. The game runs like ass as well - in a couple of hours every action will take several seconds to load. I would wish good luck to the devs, but sadly I can't see any solution to increase the quality other than a complete mechanics overhaul

After some consideration and some anger management classes I'd like to revert my one star to five. It's a great game but can be a bit confusing and is a bit laggy. However the gameplay is cool and once you get past the auntie introduction you basically become a slave owner of random horndogs in the world. Someone act like their big daddy on the block? Slave. Pup girl tries to make you her bitch? Slave. Intersex fox wants your pups? Can be a slave or a lover.

Very customizable base gameplay, and the mods for this game are really good. You'll find horny options for all gamers. I'd say in terms of text based games this is top 2 for me. Only beat by Broken dreams correctional center. That's a personal bias and I think if you're furry or a someone who wishes there was more catgirls/animal ear girls, you should play this game.

If you're like me and not into the grind while beating the meat, the debug command is just "buggy" while mid game.

Forgot to mention this but the drugs in this game are extreme, you can make someone more feminine, masculine. Have x animal ears with y animal tail. Give someone puffy horse anus with a canine pussy, or change someone to a completely different species.

Despite several years of development, this game hasn't changed much. It only provides 4-5 hours of enjoyment.
It's disappointing and not worth the wait.
The writing and scenes are decent, but the gameplay quickly becomes repetitive.
Too much grunting and squealing in every action.

V.0.4.9
Really fun little sandbox with lots of things to see and monstergirls to fuck.
Mechanics are fun and so are the story NPCs.
It has less noncon and transformation than similar games: Fights are relatively simple, and even if you lose not every NPC wants to stretch your anus with its horsecock - some are satisfied with jerking you off.
In my opinion this game can be enjoyed by both Dom and sub, FemMC as well as MaleMC.

The only (subjective) downside for me is that the writing in the sex scenes doesn't do it for me. It's a fun game, but I'm not getting off to this.

At first this game seems to offer a lot of options, but you quickly realize that there is very little underneath the surface - the apparent large amount of content boils down to the repetition of the same few scenes.

After 6 years of development, this game features less content than many other games do during their first year.

This is always my go to game. There's something so fun about it, the Sandbox it provides is second to none. Everytime I come back to it, I feel like I can do anything, be it a dumbass challange run (Elemental Only, All Male, No Health Potions) or just to dick around (How many Boys in a row, Lets revive an unimplemented species, Slave Army) it's always so fun to play and learn more about the mechanics.

Best open world game. Lots of freedom. You can customize so much and tailor yourself and your partners and entire world to your taste. You can create your own mods for the game, but if you are lazy there are mods from modding comunity in discord aswell!

Great game cool story and combat system, serious competitor in this type of game.
Maby need more pictures and would need more frequent updates.
Realy like the character customisation and wait for the futher updade with eager .

game is updated slower then the trials in tainted space or corruption of champions games, and that's saying something. Dev has problems with the code being strung out to far and in a poor editor like that yandere sim dev. Dev also has problems with sharing the games code with others, even in the case of paying someone to help them code it. This is not worth waiting multiple months on end for maybe a new sex scene and one new race, why in gods name can we not just get a good text based sex game that can let you be the bad guy and profit from it like the old corruption of champions.

I really love charachter creation system, propably most detailed I've ever seen. Also, the game has really interesting plot. These writings are way hotter than most of visual novels. Game mechanics are really amazing as well.