Java - Abandoned - Night Games [RE Bugfix 5 Premium] [Silver Bard Games]

I miss Night Games. Back in the old days, when it was just me and my 3-band harem beating the shit out of each other and banging out our frustrations after the match; because that was the undeniable meta Strat. Then she began to change, get into these funny trends like "catgirls" and "dickgirl"; until eventually I couldn't recognize it anymore.

Feature creep, the game was "complete" 3 years before the final update, only missing an actual ending; anything else was just an add-on. 3 generic, but well written and likable girls and the walking sex machine known as the protagonist join the freshman league of the "Night Games". Struggle to keep up with your competition and keep the audience entertained, then maybe someday you'll learn more about the secretive sponsors and make it into the big leagues. Simple, effective, sexy.

But we never got the the finale, we got to what felt like the middle of the 2nd act and just never progressed. Instead we got new mechanics, power systems, characters and items; and with that any hope of completing the story died. Writing 3 good characters & ability paths to the mid-point took years, what hope did the game have when it had 9 to flesh out?

So here we stand in vigil, what was once a beacon of potential now but a wide, shallow pool of ideas and wasted potential. I'll miss this, but you could see the end coming from a mile away.

The game starts off pretty interesting, but suffers from a severe lack of polish. Fights are extremely inconsistent and unbalanced, with certain opponents being pathetically easy and others being insanely difficult; coupled with an RNG that ensures you will still lose a good portion of the time even if you approach combat perfectly, and playing the game is an exercise in frustration unless you're solely playing for the femdom.

Most aggravating is the "grudge system" that buffs your opponents every time you beat them until they manage to win against you. The idea is that you won't just pick on one single opponent and instead seek out others to fight. The problem is that you don't really get to pick which opponent to fight goddamnit. The player can't really help it if you keep meeting the same opponent over the course of the match, so if the RNG decides to shit on you by refusing to give you any other opponents, you're basically forced to either attempt to run away (which fails most of the time) and try to stumble across a different opponent, or just take the loss, which is unfair to those who play well.

There's a couple bugs that I noticed: sometimes your clothing seems to disappear, with no reason stated as to why. There's a trap your opponents can lay that will disolve your clothes, but there's supposed to be a text prompt when triggered. The other one is sometimes when you load the game, it'll skip forward to the end of the night with everyone showing zero wins.

That last bit is a pain, because the game has no way to address ties. If two competitors have the same number of victories at the end of the night, it'll just pick one seemingly at random (it looks to favour the AI here over the player though) to declare the victor and award the points.

Next, despite having over a dozen skills for the player to chose from, they are very, very unbalanced. Basically, your only option if you want to be a real contender is to dump points into power and just dip into the others to pick up a couple low-level skills you want. That kinds sucks for anyone who wants to do anything aside from beat the shit out if your opponents every fight.

Lastly, and this is the one that pisses me off the most, despite the game seeming to be geared towards straight males, three of the best skills in the game are locked behind forming a relationship with a herm. Even worse, even unlocking the character to form the relationship also unlocks them as a competitor, which means if you want the skills, you better get used to taking it in the ass.

Pleasantly well written, surprising amount of content, and decently engaging gameplay. Despite being a fighting game, it's very wholesome and positive, which I appreciate. The cast is varied and fun. It's very easy to get into relationships with a large harem - not sure if this is a cliche aspect of the genre, or actually somewhat justified. The gameplay is interesting and constantly changing, but ultimately pretty repetitive. At least the game provides easy access to a very flexible difficulty system. The sex scenes are varied and well written, but the UI design is pretty unappealing - you'll spend a lot of time reading walls of text, with little unique art to break it up. Overall, a lot of high quality writing, scenarios, and a positive tone, if you don't mind a bit of repetition.

An amazing well done combat sex game. It's not often you come across games with sex based combat that doesn't require losing to see the sex content and that also makes the combat sexy itself. Greatly done and a ton of variety.

Very good battle sex game. I love how all the characters are the same, but have their own stories and specific skill paths. The main character is free to choose to learn whatever skills he wants. The battles can also be made more challenging for replayability.

This game totally took me by surprise, and all in a good way.

As the OP states, you're participating in some "run around and try to win sex fights" game. For that you have multiple possible commands, trying to take down your opponents, trying to make them lose their clothes, different acts to pleasure them. Because the goal isn't to force sex but to make the opponent orgasm first, so you'll have to keep your own private parts as unenthused as possible. You have a lot of RPG stats, and when gaining levels and raising them, new moves will open, you will earn money to buy helpful stuff like zip ties, more girls will join the fray and you will be able to interact with your opponents outside the games themselves. And then everything just explodes, the sheer amount of content thrown at you in what started off as a simple game is astonishing.

Graphics: Okay, let's start with the weak point. This game isn't kidding when it uses the tag "text based". And the text actually is very well written and lacks the usual amount of spelling and grammar errors, so many props for that. But in return, there are only a few graphics - status images of the girls in various states of undress, and some extra graphics for special occasions, but nearly not for all of them. I do like the style though, just wish there were some more.

Story: At first it seems there isn't much of a story, and in the end this impression rings true, but there are a lot of substories, introducing you to the characters, having sessions with them, introducing more characters and a lot of crazy stuff you didn't expect in the - apart from the idea of "sex battles" - innocent enough original setting.

As I said, there is a lot of text, some events have two full screens of it. And some of that repeats (you will find that out quickly enough), but you don't have to reread it, one keystroke and the game goes on. You should read all of that at least once however, not only does it make you understand the game more, it is very well written and actually erotic instead of the IKEA sex prose you sometimes get (insert penis A in vagina B, screw tightly, moan). Which is nice because story wise there will be a lot of "insert penis in vagina and have fun".

Gameplay: this actually is a game. At nighttime you'll have the "games", moving around and in turn based combat style using your abilities, which will become more and more - but your opponents level up as well. During daytime you'll have a couple of hours (i. e. actions) to train your stats, buy useful stuff, meet the girls in private. Sometimes this combines. The gameplay itself is intuitive and feels interesting enough, even though like in many games with hundreds of options you may find yourself using more or less the same tactic very often and 75% of abilities will fall by the wayside. Which isn't helped by the fact that, the more abilities you get, the more clunky the interface gets.

The AI of the girls isn't that great, sometimes they will move around campus randomly on their own, not having a single encounter and thus not winning, in fights they sometimes use moves that don't make sense (like reducing your stamina when you're already helpless on the floor). The difficulty can be adjusted very smoothly in the beginning with a couple of sliders adjusting starting levels and experience speed of the player and the opponents, making it possible that you win more or less by showing up or not having a chance at all. Whatever floats your boat. To progress through the story however you'll need to win once in a while.

The UI is clunky but serviceable. All your options will be displayed in up to three rows, you can click them or use a key. However these keys are not assigned to actions as such, the actions in the first row will always be QWERTY..., in the second ASDFGH... and you get the idea. You get arrows if there is not enough space on the screen for all actions. But the better you get at handling it, the more likely you are to mis-key when one action is missing because of a lack of mojo and all others move up by a letter.

But the main point of this game is the sheer amount of content. When in the beginning you have four interactable characters, ten actions, and a pretty straightforward goal, suddenly there's a dozen characters, 7 new statistics to raise and probably (did not count) around 100 new abilities to explore, all with unique effects and text, given you a lot of long term motivation.

I already sunk many hours into this game, many more are to follow. Yes, it doesn't look very polished and is a bit rough around some edges, but it just is a great game.

Scenes are well-written, characters are interesting, game-play is compelling.

No-one should expect from any summary of the game that the protagonist won't have 'Marty Stu' qualities, a popular element of sexual fantasies, and I believe this is rather well balanced in this game where one isn't necessarily an omnipotent and omniscient being masquerading under the flimsy pretense of a 'normal person' on challenging journey of growth and development. Neither is he presented as a pathetic omega male ('beta' is rank 2 in a social hierarchy and is not as derogatory as is commonly believed given there are typical more than 3 ranks) who inexplicably manages to attract and retain a harem by virtue of deus ex machina. The subtle and understated identity of the protagonist allows one to focus on the stories of the characters with whom one interacts.

I also greatly appreciate the absence of common F95 3F* fare (5F?). 'Vanilla' is not a derogatory comparison when one considers that being the most popular ice cream flavor in the world is one of the most objective indicators of goodness.

* Family, Furry, Futa sexual targets

It's amazing something like a hunger games. Very interesting and unusual battle system. Interactions with characters are also quite interesting. Great idea and implementation of locations and battles in them.

I love this game and have been playing the free versions of the game for about a year now I think and it has only gotten better. There are some minor nit picks I have but since this is game is still undergoing development they can wait for later I guess.

Does a great job of simulating the erotic games at a good pace in which you finish exploring the basic interactions before being introduced to more interactions and characters. Makes good use of the QWERTY-ASDFGH-ZXCVBN keys, so the game can be played with only left hand. Despite being mostly dependent on text, this game paints a descriptive image during each night. I expected to put it down after 2-3 go's at it, but I've come back to it to see what bits I may have missed.

For a guy like me who reads a lot anyway, this game spurs your imagination and it has a pretty interesting backstory to it, which ultimately makes you wonder... Who even started the "Night Games" to begin with?

What I love most about this is that you're completely free to customize how your character progresses (even if certain traits have better abilities over others tbh...) and the interactions with the various members of the games itself.

Can't wait to see how this whole thing wraps up.

Version VNOb1 review:

Ok, I'm going to say it. This game, for me, is nearly perfect. I love almost everything about this game. First and foremost, it's actually a GAME. You play and game the system, you have goals, objectives, etc. Does that gameplay at times get a little repetitive, yes, but I can name AAA titles that do the same. Themore I played, the deeper it got, as new characters, options, upgrades, etc unlocked. New challenges and handicaps came into play. Anyone judging this game on the first 30-60 minutes of play is only seeing maybe 1/10th of what the game has to offer. You have to play through several days before you even start to unlock the ability to START romancing the women in the game.

I will say that for my taste, the difficulty curve is a little bit high. Also with no way to re-allocate your stats, you're probably going to want to plan on what type of attacks you're going to use, what you want to spend your money on, and build from there. Don't be afraid to save scum and go back a few days if something doesn't work out... I wish I had.

I really hope this game continues to grow, as the writing is sublime and I've found myself playing this for literally hours over the last several days.

5/5 easily.

The following review is based off my personal experience with playing this Game/Visual Novel... I try to be as brutally honest and detailed as I can, and these are my own opinions and thoughts, from one or more play throughs... The version this review is based on is VNOb1...

It has a few more visuals then your typical text based erotic/adult game...

The visuals are sort of hentai inspired looking 2D hand drawn characters... There are not a lot of visuals, mostly just a basic UI, various female characters in different stages of undress, and the basic navigation map...

The script is pretty good, as I didn't see many spelling/grammar errors... There really isn't much of a plot, but what there is revolves around a male protagonist who is participating in nightly sex battles... It is a somewhat unique approach to a erotic/adult based text game... Now, even though there is lots of erotic things going on each battle, there is also a lot of physical and somewhat brutal fighting going along with it... Involving things like hitting, slapping, hitting with horse crops, zip ties, groin attacks, kissing, sex toys, oil (debuff/buff), and the list goes on... And after each match you can get advice, train stats, buy equipment, etc...

The problem you run into is that this game is highly repetitive... Once all the characters start getting geared up, the fights can last a long time with just repetitive text based combat in an attempt to get the your opponent to have an orgasm before they cause you to... There are also things like laying traps, making potions mid-match, etc... It feels like there is more physical punishment occurring to subdue your opponent to take advantage of them, then anything romantic or sensual... You get beaten into submission with the crop by pretty much every woman, so many times in each battle, you'ld think the school would noticed the bruised and beaten and battered students walking around campus and think something was up... And being as repetitive as it is, it loses that sense of newness very quickly...

Overall, it's an interesting concept for a text based erotic/adult game, but I got bored after about an hour or so of play... Eventually calling it quits as I approached that 2 hour mark... It's just doing a match, recover, spend money/train stats, repeat... I never saw anything story wise ever pop up beyond that formula of game play... It's just a masochistic fight till an orgasm, over and over and over again... If it had a bunch of story based content, outside of the matches, then I might have better feelings about this game, but for now it's just a mediocre combat game in text format, that just so happens to have some sexual context added in to spice it up... I see no need to really revisit it...

A text based game with a bit of artwork on the side to give you a physical image of each female character you interact with during battles, the mechanics are incredible (one of a kind), the writing is great & there are tons of scenes so I'm sure you won't be bored quickly especially knowing that each one gets triggered based on the way you ended the battle (as a winner or a loser, and how the defeated got finished off sexually) or they can also be story related during off battle hours (while training with teachers too)...The story is very interesting, it's like a battle royal of sex and after each day you get to hone your skills and train or meet other opponents/teachers/shopkeepers, each player has a unique experience of his own since this is basically an RPG (you level up & get skill points to spend) the fascinating part is that other characters evolve as well so you won't feel superior by a lot even when you become strong, you'll always find challenge. A TOP 3 of all time when it comes to text games in my opinion hence the 5 stars I gave it, try it if you're into reading you won't regret it & also support the developer in any way you can if you like the game.