Ren'Py - Parasite Black [v0.160] [Damned Studios]

I love myself a good fantasy story

Artwork is fantastic, extremely professional and the fact that there are animations has me stunned.

The game has very in-depth lore and great story set in a dark fantasy world.

The writing is more than competent and features a lot of branching as well which is a big plus.

5/5 highly recommended

This is one of the few games I support and love. In my opinion, it's a true gem with a lot of fantasy-medieval vibes.

• The story is fantastic, with multiple paths leading to different outcomes. I like the writing because it is not only suitable, but also conveys the right feeling for the genre.
  
  
• The art style is stunning and far above average. The drawings are extremely well done, and I appreciate the attention to detail. This is some genuine talent right here.
  
  
• All the characters in this game are lovely, interesting, and wholesome. It truly feels like you have a best friend, and the more you play through the story, the more you connect with them and see their feelings, personalities, and goals.
  
  
• There are animations, and they are of high quality. Only a few games have truly excellent animations in my opinion, and this is one of them. It's stunning and extremely well-made.
  
  
• This game's sandbox is fantastic. You have a free-roaming feature that allows you to build your character not only through experience but also through connections. It feels lively and dynamic because of the off-story interactions with girls in various locations. I hope this part gets a lot of attention from the developer.
  
  
• The gameplay is very fun. It truly seems to be a normal game. The fights are exciting and strategic. The style is similar to Final Fantasy, which I love. This is the first Renpy game in which I thoroughly enjoyed the battle mode.
  
  
• Finally, there's the music. That was a good decision made by the developers, and it complements the overall theme of the game.

V 0.144

Porn is okay
Gameplay is okay need a bit of polish
Story is GREAT with a deep lore and easy to follow.

After the intro which is very good(and I played it almost 1 year ago), there is not much to do, the game has little content despite a year and a half of development.

I have high hopes for this game, I just hope it doesn't become a milking of patreon money.

Extremely good concept and well execution. Though sometimes the art confuses the portrayal of the female characters, they are unique and not really a problem to understand. The 2dCG is good, story is good and the minigame is the perfect toppings.

One of the best games I've played on this platform. Art, music, characters, story, everything is great. Incredibly underrated. It's a dark fantasy without sexual violence, for people who are turned off by that while still being gory. MC is kind of a blank slate so you can customize him as you like. Great game, give it a shot.

Gameplay
Controls: All clicking dialogue with keyboard turn based combat..
Interface: Ren’py interface for dialogue, with occasional choices. There are also combat sections with abilities and health bars.
Writing
Plot: Phenomenal. The kind of thing that, if it didn’t have porn, would be a mainstream success.
Characters: Excellent, with many different personalities and motivations.
Typos: None.
Art
Models: Super well drawn, lots of details.
Animations: Smooth.
Background: As good as they need to be.
Audio
Music: Tons of different songs.
Effects: Lots of well used effects.
Voices: N/A.

TlDr: 3.5 out of 5 for v0.141
Pros: Great art, there's animation (not great, but better than nothing), unique story and setting, orc girl!
Cons: The combat is mediocre at best, there is a lot of text with not much art to go along with it (probably not an issue to some), the second act doesn't have much story yet, so that section feels like you are just kind of meandering to find the sex scenes with not anything else going on (early build though and the prologue was good so no points taken off for that).

I enjoyed the unique setting, with a post apocalyptic fantasy theme it definitely stands out. The powers of the mc transformation were interesting as well. The prologue was interesting, but could have done with more art to help with the text descriptions of things. While the prologue feels fleshed out, the second act is kind of just wandering around doing side quests so far with nothing substantial being added to the main story. The turn based combat itself feels pretty subpar right now, so either a revamp or overhaul on that would definitely make the game feel more enjoyable and feel less like a visual novel with messy gameplay tacked on. Overall, it's has a lot of promise if the gameplay elements of the game are improved and more main story content is added to the second act. Excited to see where it goes in the future!

The prologue is very good and intriguing. Alas once you get to the act 1 there's not much to do anymore except the side quests...
I hope in the future the main story will be fleshed out more.
Will be keeping a watch on this game

I was simply shocked by the amazing and quality art style of this game, the action packed and choice based gameplay and how well the story is made. I sincerely hope that the developers will get even more support on this project and will not abandon it, they deserve it. Hope to see this game finished in the future with its full and great potential that it has.

I love the premise and context for the Dark Fantasy world which was created here, it really nailed that AOT or GOT vibe of a world where the audience is in a meat grinder that tears through ordinary people.
Once the actual 'Parasite' from the title took over, however; for me the narrative sort of lost it's bite and became pretty cookie-cutter genre fluff. And of course, it's early days yet, but I wonder if some of that really solid tension from the intro can even be summoned again; you know, now that our heroes are invincible mega-monster killing machines.
I also worry about the turn-based combat, which seems to lack significant depth and be fairly robotic. And I'm not talking the animations, which are obviously slow on account of being placeholder. (I'm not so much of a bore to make fun of early development animations) I'm rather noticing the actual static nature of the combat encounters themselves. All attacks have a rigid value of damage that they always do, making encounters a simple game of mathematics rather than a encounter driver by luck and tactics.
Combat feels like the most boring part right now, and I'm a huge CRPG fan; turn based combat should be my catnip.
The H elements are slow-paced for the moment, and the slower burn should theoretically lead to more meaningful scenes. Again, it's early days so all I can for now is that I like the artwork. Which is about the same for the action scenes. Art work is solid, I'm more here for the world building at this point.

The good news is that this is still in early flux development and could evolve in any direction. I genuine think the basis for this game make for a fertile and interesting baseline across a sea of cut-and-paste scenario games. If the Dev can manage to capture and distil that essence going forward, there will be a special and unique little game here.

Magnificent!

Amazing art, Good animations, Epic storytelling like reading a book,
I thought it will at least fall out at sandbox aspect but no.

Only thing this game needs is more much more content.
Minor thing is that unfortunately characters in animations are often very different from ones in the actual novel/game.

but stil the potential here is Incredible.
Cant wait for future updates.

0.137

tl;dr As a book? It could be good - As a game? Its crap! Its the definition of a VN with emphasis on novel and i dont know why its missing the tag

Overall the balance between whats shown and whats described is off and boring. I couldnt play through the first plot and stopped in the desert after fighting the scorpion.

There is so much to read without ever showing it. There is like one illustation and then a shit ton of text which describes stuff not to be seen. Its like the text suggests a lot of stuff happening but you just look at ppl standing there and doing nothing at all.

I could overlook it if it would only be in the story BUT its the same with the lewd scenes.... i.e. Fucking Kiara in the tent:
So much text about how they do 69 and everything and all you see is two ppl standing there looking dumb...

So far the sex scenes only contain of one animation with different speed and expressions and thats not enough to keep me reading all the stuff i have to imaging...

A really fun game that I can't wait to see more of, Scenes are fucking great and the animation is beautiful. The fighting system has some work but when its all polished out it'll probably be one of my favorite titles.

This is one of those games you thought was gonna stay at 0.01 because it's way too good to be true. Glad I was wrong.
The art is amazing, animations are smooth, there's a nice soundtrack. Combat needs to be refurnished but hey, it's just a tiny gruge honestly.
Bloody well done.

Ok this one is hard to rate.
What is here is pretty good, art is just top tier, H scenes are amazing with well done animations and sound effects, story is good, plenty of interesting characters, good MC, the game is very promising and has potential to be a 10/10.
But there's not a whole lot here yet, the game so far is very light on actual content and and several parts of it are unfinished, this is not a fault as all games need to start somewhere, but I can't say the game is a 9/10 yet.
About actual things I think the game could fix:
Choices, the game could do more with the choices you make, so far most of them were basicly non-choice choices (nuke this route? Not nuke this route?) instead of each choice being a branching path.
The combat, I like the game so I'm not saying this to be antagonistic, but the combat really sucks.

Great Story and great art. Very rare to find games like these.
Highly underrated game. You usually do not get animations this early but they have them too. I can't see how this game won't be amazing in the future considering the current quality they are outputting this early in their development.

This game is rather fun!

The sandbox has a little bit of everything.
the Futa content is not an obligation but so far there's not much there.

The most advance storyline as of 0.134 is the Orc story. There's a good foundation supporting lot of things coming up.

this is extreme good but need more content. The battle system need to improve. There not much to talk out site it is a good story and have quite good character development at the moment but it need more content.

One of the best games on here. Very nice looking art, all of the characters look good and unique. Story is good and the characters do not seem bland.

Combat is OK. Nothing special or new. Just your normal expected turn based combat system. Looks fine but some small touches could be added to make it better. An ability to cancel a combat choice would be nice, for example.

The music and the sounds overall are good. Navigation around the map is good. Game has a lot of potential, I'll be supporting for sure.

Updated review for v0.146

10 months later, I've returned to the game to see what's changed. In general, I feel largely the same. The game definitely still stands out among the usual themes you see so often on this site. It's got some nice art, animated scenes, an interesting plot with some unique twists, and just an overall unique feeling as far as adult games go. For people who like actual "game" with their porn games, this is one to pay attention to.

As stated in the overview, this is a dark fantasy game. There are violent depictions of death and gore (though there's a toggle for it that I didn't use), and general dark overhangs of the world. It's stated there will never be any sort of sexual violence which I'm glad about, but there still are references to things like rape and essentially forced prostitution for some of the unimportant characters.

The game still very much feels like a work in progress, but enough foundation is there for me to have fun. It's a sandbox that doesn't really railroad you, which is surprisingly rare.

One thing I didn't touch on in my original review was combat. At the time, there was a supposed rework for it in progress. Unfortunately, It seems like all that has really changed was some touched up visuals. Combat was easily the weakest part of the game back then, and still is now. The problem is that it's very static. No variable damage, skill tree, stat altering items, or even ways to level up and increase stats in the first place. Since there is a lot of combat, it turns into a slog really fast. I'd prefer a skip combat cheat at this point should nothing change about it.

The MC still feels a bit lacking in drive to me. He doesn't feel like he has much of a backbone in most situations. Maybe solved with time as the story develops?

My other biggest gripe is that the art for busts and the art for sex scenes feel like they don't match. For some of the sex scenes, the girls look almost completely different, to the point where I wouldn't know otherwise had the game not told me. Nijah suffers from this as an example, as well as the blacksmith girl who's name escapes me.

For a game seeming to want to tell a story, relationship development moves rather quick. This might be more of a preference thing. but I wish the game would have slowed down and taken time to really build up stronger love interests. Some are better than others, like the orc, but even then you get scenes very quickly. It makes the payoff not as satisfying.

The last thing I want to mention is that in these 10 months, characters I wanted to see more of have not gained any content since the first time I played. Take that how you will.

TLDR - I enjoy the game, but it does feel like it has some kinks to iron out still. Given more time to develop, I can see this being a great lewd RPG game.