This game is excellent.
Its main allure is the gradual downfall of your co-host as the main character slowly gains full control over her sexual life and corrupts her into a mindless fuckbunny.
The most genious thing about this game though, is that it is one of the only games in which the gameplay actually joins hands with the porn and the story. For most other porn games, the gameplay consists of decision trees or non-related puzzles.
In News Desk, the main gameplay consists of a cardgame you play each day. You play against your co-host, who starts off with an incredibly overpowered deck against which you have no chance of winning. At the end of each bout of cards, one of the stats is turned into another meta-game stat called honor. Whoever reaches 1000 honor wins the game as a whole, not just the card game, and gets to keep their job as anchor at the news station.
The ingenious twist here though, is that the remaining gameplay besides collecting cards, upgrading cards or training different stats, consists of gathering enough of the blackmail stat after each card bout to trigger a scripted scene once a day.
In these scenes, the MC uses his blackmail to his advantage to corrupt his co-host. This is significant because the cards she uses in the card-game which represents their battle to keep their job at the news station, are cards like "spotless reputation", "good connections" and "brilliant daughter". Through your corruption in these scenes, you can start to undermine all of those categories.
Once you've gone through enough scenes in one category or "card", her card downgrades and becomes worse. This spirals until the point her cards actually help you win rather than her. (the card art also becomes lewder and lewder which is a nice touch)
This feels amazingly satisfying if you're even a little bit interested in powerplay, bdsm, domination or similar things.
In this way, the porn and the story aren't the only arousing things about the game, but the gameplay as well. Far more creators should approach erotic games in the same manner, imo.
The problems of course are the same as they always are with porn games. The game takes far too long.
There's about two pages of fifty each of these events, nearing a 100, not to count future events that could possibly be added. You only get to play one of these events each day. You see where this is going.
In the beginning you naturally get stomped. For probably half the game you continue to get stomped, and the AI continues racking up honor points, acting as a ticking clock. This is actually fine, since you don't really care about the honor at that point, what you want is to get enough blackmail to trigger the scenes each day.
But maybe you haven't caught onto that, and you continue trying to win the card game each day, which is impossible. But lets say you do catch on, and you do go for blackmail each day.
You still have to watch yourself get stomped 20-30 times in a row. And you have to play the card game a 100+ times to complete the game.
The card game is not complex enough to facilitate this many replays. The gameplay is repetitive, the options too limited, the cards too few and the opponent the same each time bar the slight changes as you progress the scenes.
This makes the card game tiring, and feel like busywork. It feels like the game is intentionally keeping the next scene from you. Rather than act as amazing porn gameplay of its first kind.
The drearyness is so bad that the developer could probably allow you to complete three of these scenes each day, effectively trippling the speed of your progress, and the card game would STILL feel tiresome and repetitive in the end.
That does not mean the game isn't worth playing and that there isn't a lot of entertainment to be had here. Simply go to your house, go to the cheat console, and type in the cheat found in the changelog here on the forumpost. Start cheating once the grind sets in, and start cheating early. Turn on skipping the cardgame. Give yourself some blackmail, complete one scene each day. The game is amazing then. Then once you've made some progress, turn the card game back on and play one match. Rince repeat.
The UI is not good. Some of the art is missing. The writing is excellent. Plenty of fetishes, not too vanilla. The interplay between gameplay, porn and writing is unparalleled. The grind is unbearable, luckily, there's cheats.
I wish the developer(s) all the best and look forward to many amazing updates. Thank you for the game!
Its main allure is the gradual downfall of your co-host as the main character slowly gains full control over her sexual life and corrupts her into a mindless fuckbunny.
The most genious thing about this game though, is that it is one of the only games in which the gameplay actually joins hands with the porn and the story. For most other porn games, the gameplay consists of decision trees or non-related puzzles.
In News Desk, the main gameplay consists of a cardgame you play each day. You play against your co-host, who starts off with an incredibly overpowered deck against which you have no chance of winning. At the end of each bout of cards, one of the stats is turned into another meta-game stat called honor. Whoever reaches 1000 honor wins the game as a whole, not just the card game, and gets to keep their job as anchor at the news station.
The ingenious twist here though, is that the remaining gameplay besides collecting cards, upgrading cards or training different stats, consists of gathering enough of the blackmail stat after each card bout to trigger a scripted scene once a day.
In these scenes, the MC uses his blackmail to his advantage to corrupt his co-host. This is significant because the cards she uses in the card-game which represents their battle to keep their job at the news station, are cards like "spotless reputation", "good connections" and "brilliant daughter". Through your corruption in these scenes, you can start to undermine all of those categories.
Once you've gone through enough scenes in one category or "card", her card downgrades and becomes worse. This spirals until the point her cards actually help you win rather than her. (the card art also becomes lewder and lewder which is a nice touch)
This feels amazingly satisfying if you're even a little bit interested in powerplay, bdsm, domination or similar things.
In this way, the porn and the story aren't the only arousing things about the game, but the gameplay as well. Far more creators should approach erotic games in the same manner, imo.
The problems of course are the same as they always are with porn games. The game takes far too long.
There's about two pages of fifty each of these events, nearing a 100, not to count future events that could possibly be added. You only get to play one of these events each day. You see where this is going.
In the beginning you naturally get stomped. For probably half the game you continue to get stomped, and the AI continues racking up honor points, acting as a ticking clock. This is actually fine, since you don't really care about the honor at that point, what you want is to get enough blackmail to trigger the scenes each day.
But maybe you haven't caught onto that, and you continue trying to win the card game each day, which is impossible. But lets say you do catch on, and you do go for blackmail each day.
You still have to watch yourself get stomped 20-30 times in a row. And you have to play the card game a 100+ times to complete the game.
The card game is not complex enough to facilitate this many replays. The gameplay is repetitive, the options too limited, the cards too few and the opponent the same each time bar the slight changes as you progress the scenes.
This makes the card game tiring, and feel like busywork. It feels like the game is intentionally keeping the next scene from you. Rather than act as amazing porn gameplay of its first kind.
The drearyness is so bad that the developer could probably allow you to complete three of these scenes each day, effectively trippling the speed of your progress, and the card game would STILL feel tiresome and repetitive in the end.
That does not mean the game isn't worth playing and that there isn't a lot of entertainment to be had here. Simply go to your house, go to the cheat console, and type in the cheat found in the changelog here on the forumpost. Start cheating once the grind sets in, and start cheating early. Turn on skipping the cardgame. Give yourself some blackmail, complete one scene each day. The game is amazing then. Then once you've made some progress, turn the card game back on and play one match. Rince repeat.
The UI is not good. Some of the art is missing. The writing is excellent. Plenty of fetishes, not too vanilla. The interplay between gameplay, porn and writing is unparalleled. The grind is unbearable, luckily, there's cheats.
I wish the developer(s) all the best and look forward to many amazing updates. Thank you for the game!
