I’ve been watching this game for a while and finally downloaded it when I saw it marked as "completed." Turns out it’s not really finished, but that hardly matters, since I won’t be finishing it either.
The game is buggy. Within an hour, I encountered three separate softlocks. These aren’t rare edge cases either; most players will probably hit them. You can get stuck in a locked room with no way out, bind yourself without an escape method, or just watch your character turn invisible and stop responding entirely. Some enemies can grab you, and even though you’re supposed to be able to escape by wiggling the directional keys, you'll stay stunned on top of the enemy. Before you can react, they grab you again. That means a single mistake can lead to a rapid game over, especially since some enemies are so aggressive that getting spotted even once is practically a death sentence.
These issues would be forgivable in a new release, but the game has been in development for years. Some of the problems, like being able to run out of lockpicks and trap yourself, seem like things that should have been resolved long ago.
The gameplay itself isn’t enjoyable. It’s neither intuitive nor particularly sexy. You spend most of your time sneaking through empty corridors and hiding from enemies. The minimap and item system are confusing early on, and the mechanics often feel like they exist to create friction between the player and their goals. That kind of design can really work, especially in a game with BDSM themes. The BDSM equipment acts as debuffs that restrict your character’s vision, movement, or abilities, and you’ll need to use lockpicks or other means to remove them. If you run out of resources and get caught, it’s game over. I actually liked the potion system and figuring out how items work, but the stamina mechanic was frustrating. Instead of slowing down or showing a warning, your character will suddenly trip and drop half of her inventory if you run out of stamina. It’s easy to trigger this just by sprinting through the level, and there’s no attempt from the developer to add a visual indicator to warn you. This mechanic never punished me during actual enemy encounters it just made already large and maze-like levels feel even more tedious.
Enemy difficulty is wildly inconsistent. Some areas are laughably easy, while others are filled with aggressive enemies that turn the game into a frustrating trial-and-error slog. Worst of all, getting caught isn’t rewarding. You get a generic animation, a fade-to-black, and then you wake up in a prison cell or get sent back to the main menu after a game over. These transitions are slow, and every reload drags you through another round of black screens and loading. It kills pacing and kills the mood. It takes too long to reload the game and get back into things. Oh, and you did save your game, didn't you? The game doesn't autosave, so I imagine a lot of players lost all their progress during their first playthrough.
Speaking of the mood... For a while, I was playing and wondering why the animations and sequences were just doing absolutely nothing for me. It occured to me how they're sprung on you so suddenly without build up, context or consequence. The gameplay requires too much focus and isn't titillating enough for the sexual content to be so sudden (and sometimes annoying if you're actually trying to progress.) Instead of starting the game with a vaginal sex scene, and repeating that every time you get caught, what we really needed here is escalating punishments in each level for getting caught, and a contextual corruption and increasing usage of BDSM implements from the levels enemies to hinder you. And all it'd require is reshuffling all those back-to-menu game overs into scenarios that occur naturally through gameplay. There are like 4-5 'Fat Goblin' scenes I missed because I barely game-over'd in that zone, but I got caught like 4 times, and you could have drip-fed them to me right then, and I would have been quite happy with that. But by isolating each instance into a single failure state there's no progression or consequences based on your actions and personal failings as a player, and I think that sense of agency would have gone a long way .There does seem to be some effort to do this in the last level currently available, but it feels a little too late for me, and the game overs still frequently break up the gameplay.
The sex animations themselves are decent, and I liked the sound effects. That’s what earns this game a 2 instead of a 1. But the way these scenes are delivered feels clumsy, with slow text boxes and poor integration into the overall experience.
There’s a decent foundation here, and it’s possible some players might enjoy it, especially if they manage to avoid the softlocks and bugs. But at its current state, Nurtale Nesche is frustrating, unfinished, and deeply unsatisfying, both as a game and as adult content. There are far better titles out there that respect the player’s time and desires more effectively.
The game is buggy. Within an hour, I encountered three separate softlocks. These aren’t rare edge cases either; most players will probably hit them. You can get stuck in a locked room with no way out, bind yourself without an escape method, or just watch your character turn invisible and stop responding entirely. Some enemies can grab you, and even though you’re supposed to be able to escape by wiggling the directional keys, you'll stay stunned on top of the enemy. Before you can react, they grab you again. That means a single mistake can lead to a rapid game over, especially since some enemies are so aggressive that getting spotted even once is practically a death sentence.
These issues would be forgivable in a new release, but the game has been in development for years. Some of the problems, like being able to run out of lockpicks and trap yourself, seem like things that should have been resolved long ago.
The gameplay itself isn’t enjoyable. It’s neither intuitive nor particularly sexy. You spend most of your time sneaking through empty corridors and hiding from enemies. The minimap and item system are confusing early on, and the mechanics often feel like they exist to create friction between the player and their goals. That kind of design can really work, especially in a game with BDSM themes. The BDSM equipment acts as debuffs that restrict your character’s vision, movement, or abilities, and you’ll need to use lockpicks or other means to remove them. If you run out of resources and get caught, it’s game over. I actually liked the potion system and figuring out how items work, but the stamina mechanic was frustrating. Instead of slowing down or showing a warning, your character will suddenly trip and drop half of her inventory if you run out of stamina. It’s easy to trigger this just by sprinting through the level, and there’s no attempt from the developer to add a visual indicator to warn you. This mechanic never punished me during actual enemy encounters it just made already large and maze-like levels feel even more tedious.
Enemy difficulty is wildly inconsistent. Some areas are laughably easy, while others are filled with aggressive enemies that turn the game into a frustrating trial-and-error slog. Worst of all, getting caught isn’t rewarding. You get a generic animation, a fade-to-black, and then you wake up in a prison cell or get sent back to the main menu after a game over. These transitions are slow, and every reload drags you through another round of black screens and loading. It kills pacing and kills the mood. It takes too long to reload the game and get back into things. Oh, and you did save your game, didn't you? The game doesn't autosave, so I imagine a lot of players lost all their progress during their first playthrough.
Speaking of the mood... For a while, I was playing and wondering why the animations and sequences were just doing absolutely nothing for me. It occured to me how they're sprung on you so suddenly without build up, context or consequence. The gameplay requires too much focus and isn't titillating enough for the sexual content to be so sudden (and sometimes annoying if you're actually trying to progress.) Instead of starting the game with a vaginal sex scene, and repeating that every time you get caught, what we really needed here is escalating punishments in each level for getting caught, and a contextual corruption and increasing usage of BDSM implements from the levels enemies to hinder you. And all it'd require is reshuffling all those back-to-menu game overs into scenarios that occur naturally through gameplay. There are like 4-5 'Fat Goblin' scenes I missed because I barely game-over'd in that zone, but I got caught like 4 times, and you could have drip-fed them to me right then, and I would have been quite happy with that. But by isolating each instance into a single failure state there's no progression or consequences based on your actions and personal failings as a player, and I think that sense of agency would have gone a long way .There does seem to be some effort to do this in the last level currently available, but it feels a little too late for me, and the game overs still frequently break up the gameplay.
The sex animations themselves are decent, and I liked the sound effects. That’s what earns this game a 2 instead of a 1. But the way these scenes are delivered feels clumsy, with slow text boxes and poor integration into the overall experience.
There’s a decent foundation here, and it’s possible some players might enjoy it, especially if they manage to avoid the softlocks and bugs. But at its current state, Nurtale Nesche is frustrating, unfinished, and deeply unsatisfying, both as a game and as adult content. There are far better titles out there that respect the player’s time and desires more effectively.
