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.
