This ended up being the next game to come out of my backlog. I was honestly a tad leery of picking it up, given that the Dev's previous game was both mediocre and had a lot of performance issues. This game still has some performance issues ( at least in the city), but it's nowhere near as bad as the previous game, and it's simply much better in all aspects than the Meiru/Mellia/whatever game.
Given that this is the circle's second game, the amount of improvement is honestly remarkable. If someone presented me with both games without any context, I'd have been hard pressed to believe that they were made by the same person/group, it's that big of a difference.
Overall, I'd say that the game is above average in terms of H-games. It's not necessarily an amazeballs omfg so ghud game, but it's definitely a game worth playing if you're into FMC games with sluttification and corruption and a dash of NTR for flavor. Still, like most things in life, it's not perfect, and the game does have its flaws to various objective and subjective degrees.
Starting off with the gameplay, for the most part, it's pretty standard RPGM stuff. You have your character, you run around with her, you fight monsters, you level up, you find H-events on the map and whatnot... yada yada. The game tries to be interesting with a skill-tree, but skill trees have not been something new in RPGM for ages now, and the one in this game is honestly very basic. On top of that, combat against most enemies can easily be resolved by using a combination of normal attack and Heavy Slash, while for bosses, you just buff up and then hit them with the debuff-slash attack once you unlock it. It's not an exaggeration to say that you can easily end up killing most bosses in 1-3 hits if you keep on top of your upgrades for the sword, and you'll pretty much almost never need consumables. This is further emphasizes by the fact that all dungeons have a full HP/MP restore point near their respective boss fights, and there's a quick travel point near them too, which means that the more dungeons unlock, the more of these points you can jump around too to keep up your HP and MP.
All in all, the fighting is just not that interesting. The skill-tree is very basic. The crafting is also very basic. The gearing is uninteresting. The boss fights are boring since all of them go more or less through the same motions. Most consumables are pretty useless outside of rushing. Worse, the game tries to keep things interesting by making mobs level up with you to an extent, but that just makes material grind more tedious more than anything else tbh. Oh and the dungeons aren't anything special either. By the time you reach the last one, you're probably gonna have a "can we get ON with it already" sort of feeling. At least I did.
Basically, if you want your H-games to have solid combat and whatnot, I wouldn't recommend this game.
What I would recommend this game for is its story and H-content. The story is, for the most part, the typical "Female Knight gets sent on a solo mission and runs into lewd shit" thing we've seen a bunch of times before. However, what makes Nightmare Knight's story fun is the characters. Rain is genuinely amusing with her "Inner Rain" bits and how she goes all fangirl over Jas or thinks all sorts of other things. The other supporting characters play their roles well. The two other girls that appear in the game are different enough from Rain in personality to genuinely make the game more fun with their inclusion. Additionally, the game has a twist near the end that most games of this type don't have, and honestly, the only flaw with it is that it's not properly communicated to the player.
I honestly loved the fact that the game established that the True Ending is through a balance of Desire and Reason for Rain, with either being in excess leading to the same bad-ending in different ways. Have max reason? Can't unleash desire during the final fight. Hit max desire? Auto-bad-end. It's great! The only problem is that the game only tells you about this through a flashback, which is stupid, because there's no reason for Rain to not have that information until then and be unable to try to act on it. She's on a time-limit, yes, but it's not so tight that she can't take a day or two to figure things out and whatnot.
The other weak point of the story is that, well, Rain is kind of stupid, running face-first into problems that she really should be able to avoid... but how much this bothers you is honestly a matter of subjective preference.
Oh, and there's the NTR too. Honestly. I would NOT recommend this game to NTR lovers. The NTR is pretty much just tacked on so the dev could add the tag or something, but it's in no way a real focus of the story even though it clumsily tries to be. There's only FOUR events with the game's so called bull, and an ending that isn't built up properly at all and kind of just ignores the game's reason vs desire mechanic in favor of a trigger that depends on how many of the four events with the bull you triggered. Nothing else matters.
For that matter, how much Rain sluts it up besides the bull ALSO doesn't matter. You can turn her into the town bicycle and have her fuck almost literally every man there, and you can still get the true ending with Jas. Though this is not as bad on account of the whole balance between Reason and Desire thing. So at least this somewhat makes more sense.
Basically, the endings and the NTR element could have used more work, but overall, they're still a lot better than plenty of other games that I could name out there.
Now, I'll talk about the H-content, the reason we all play these games over games with better gameplay and story.
The H-content for this game is pretty typical of the story mentioned above. There's in-combat molesting/rape, but only with specific enemies. There's defeat rape that happens when losing in the dungeons. There's events in town where Rain can slut it out for various reasons. Unlike some other games of this type, Nightmare Knight does make more effort to give the protagonist reasons to slut it up besides it's an H-game so of course you'll have her jump on dicks. Besides the Reasion/Desire thing that affects her personally, there's also the fact that people are affected by a Desire amplifying spell and serving them with her body helps calm them down for a time. There's a variety of events in town, and more steadily unlock as the story progresses.
Another element that affects scene progression is Rain's Vulgarity stat, which increases with each unique town event and her personal desires. She has stats for various desires, that unlock and upgrade based on what kind of sexy stuff she's exposed too, and progressing or unlocking certain events needs certain desires at certain levels. The system is pretty interesting, but also weirdly implemented tbh. For the most part, desires make sense for the H-scenes they unlock. (Eg. Needing Exposure Desire for Rain to be willing to pose around in Bikini Armor), but the desires themselves are weird in terms of leveling up. (Why does Creampie Desire need "Cum Splash", aka people cumming on her? Hell, why do a BUNCH of things need that specific stat? Also, why does the Penetration desire specifically require Interspecies Experience which you can only get from defeat rape?)
This system means that you kind of have to run around to unlock scenes, and you can't just focus on your favorites. There's also a bit of stat grinding involved in the sense that you need some defeat rapes and getting Rain exposed to random molesters helps too. It's not really possible to progress stuff with just the town events. Personally, I liked that, but that's because this game doesn't really have any scenes that I can honestly say to dislike. For other people, mileage will vary.
If there is one problem with the H-stuff, it's the fact that there's a bunch of outfits for Rain, but very little content for some of them, and pretty much none but the default outfit can be used in combat in the dungeons. (Not that this matters that much, given that the in-combat stuff isn't that big of a deal...) The main variations for the outfits comes from the in-town night prostitution stuff where you can run into random dudes and service them. (Handjob/Face-Fuck/Blowjob/Sex/Anal) Also with molesters, who, if Rain is at maximum Estrus gauge, they can also fuck her and her outfit is reflected then, and this has some position variations.
Sadly, these things I mentioned in the above paragraph are NOT in the gallery, and that's kind of annoying tbh. Beyond that, most outfits just don't have any unique scenes or CGs associated with them, which is honestly a shame... but what can you do?
Lastly, for the H at least, and this is more of a pet peeve, is the fact that Rain's boobs are described as huge on more than one occasion, but they certainly don't look particularly huge by Hentai standards. More importantly, they vary in size a LOT depending on the scene, far more than position and perspective would account for, which is kind of annoying if you're detail oriented. I figure it won't bother most people, but it's definitely annoying to me. Oh, and there's very few tit-fuck scenes in this game, in spite of the fact that, again, Rain's boobs are supposed to be "huge". It honestly feels like the Dev didn't quite know what he wanted to do with her for a good chunk of the game's development and didn't correct things once he did make a decision.
Oh well...
Finally, I'll say that the version of the game I played was the Otaku Plan version... and the translation quality is... not great tbh. There's more than a few weird turns of phrase, clearly incorrect pronoun usage and in general the kind of stuff that makes me think the translator didn't know proper English, or that this is edited MTL of some kind. Quite frankly, the translation itself is NOT worth any money, even if the game itself is worth supporting. If you wanna support the dev, buy the game on dlsite, because Otaku Plan does not deserve any money over what they did with this game.
All in all, this is a pretty good game. Not the most amazing game ever by any metrics, but definitely over average and worth grabbing to have fun with if you're into its specific fetishes. I could see some people liking this game a lot, and if you do, throw the dev some money if you can afford it and all that jazz.