RPGM - Prowler [v0.117] [Grove Dev]

loved it may even buy the game later, it has:

- good gameplay
- good story
- amazing scenes

also:
- full unlocked gallery at the end of the game
I don't know what more we can ask.
I am waiting for the next one

Really good art. Can't say I'm fond of nargacugas or latex stuff, but the overall art was pleasant enough for me. The setting is nice and any complaints I might have about the story are just nitpicks.

I really dislike the fact that the majority of naughty stuff is accessed by being defeated, especially considering the hurdle of losing your stuff, but at least you get access to all the scenes after beating the game.
It's also really a shame that friendly characters' affection didn't unlock any scenes, but I guess these are being kept for later acts.

Combat is more investing than the usual RPGM slog, but that is a very low bar. Tonic effects were quite interesting, but one of them broke my game and I got stuck only ever having one spike. Thankfully there was a nice variety of ranged weapons.

Exploration in the areas feels okay, things changing after crossing a certain threshold is interesting, but the whole thing gets frustrating when you can't obtain an item you need because you didn't get the right screens from the randomizer (skill issue I guess).

And lastly, the inventory...
I'm down with inventory management, but it's really crappy when you have to hold certain items because they have zero weight on your bag, but somehow still occupy some space in your storage. Which in turn aggravates the biggest problem I have with the fact that this was made in RPGM: the awful and constant inventory surfing, selecting and confirming. Discarding items is extremely jarring, and with most stuff not being sellable, you end up doing that. A LOT.

Still, I'm interested in where they go with this. Hopefully there will be improvements.

Tried to give a go but the constant lack of inventory space and having to pick stuff up just to throw it away (slowly I might add) to level up was tedious and after enduring through the game most of the sex scenes were slime or tentacles and bondage gear which wasn't my vibe.

Regalbuster+ Sirlzike's second project, Prowler offers a different gameplay style(and protag body type ) to GROVE while keeping most its kinks and plot direction generally the same.

Art: More consistent than GROVE in artstyle and quality, the sprites are well-made and sexy, the CGs have fluent animation, the addition of the sprite of your character letting you see all the kinky effects and gear you have on is a great addition(plus the dozens cosmetic items you can put on him) and of course the amazing writing which has become trademark of these developers.

Gameplay: Tedious and grindy. Big part of the gameplay loop is looking for certain materials in randomly selected premade maps while dealing with the very limited inventory space. Rarer and more difficult to obtain items become a burden on your small inventory space making you decide whether to let them waste space or to keep them until you've progressed enough to actually use them. Crafting and deleting items has waaayy too many menus you need to go trough and considering this is what you'll be doing when you're not fighting It ends up wasting you a lot of time. Speaking of which combat is repetitive and boring as most optimal strategies boil down to spinning in circles while spamming left click without setting your stamina to 0 as that takes extra time to regen after or just using ranged weapons. Being defeated makes you lose nearly all of your crafted items which just makes you grind even more 'cause of every defeat. There are abilities you can unlock a bit into the game by drinking tonics from the shaman but they're bland, don't really change how you play the game and are even RNG as tonics give you a random of 2 abilities from a certain type. All of this is not considering the bugs as I'm sure the devs will quickly fix most of these.

Now the weirdest part- the actual porn and how to unlock it. This game absolutely *pales* in comparison to GROVE and Its direction. While in GROVE being defeated, be it intentionally or not, nearly always resulted in something porn-related happening, whether it would be status effects, currently unremovable items, in-battle sprites, CGs, a completely different way to play the game that utilizes the mechanic that's originally to your detriment and changing dialogue and scenes(and most likely story in future updates) based on how "corrupt" you are -in Prowler grapples, defeats and their punishments are strictly to your detriment. Being defeated is the way that you unlock CGs and most defeat scenarios end up equipping you with an unremovable BDSM item. That's a really cool concept which wasn't explored enough in GROVE but here these items take up a slot so you cant use your actually good armor AND debuff you(unsexyly >:c) AND you need to pay money to remove them. You also need to pay 5x the price and use a very rare item if you want to use these items without debuffs. So you just get punished with having to spend time on a mediocre game MORE the more you want the porn! All of this just kills my enjoyment of the game as I'm stuck with one hand on WASD trying to get lucky running trough a map for the third looking for a certain item or grinding money and my swiftly escaping boner in the other.

I had hopes for this game as GROVE is the best M/M furry porn game I've played but I'm left pretty disappointed as It's almost like the devs forgot what made their first game so enjoyable.

Despite some gameplay issues like the combat being clunky and the grind being tedious, I genuinely enjoyed my time with this game. The writing is good, the sex scenes are hot, and the characters are likable.

It's not for everyone, but it's a good time for those who can look past its flaws.

An exceptionally tedious game. The game is full of designs that seem to exist purely to be annoying or waste time. The most egregious of which I think has to be the locations menu, which asks if you want to go to each area, one at a time, instead of just having a list of locations you can go to like any sane person would design.

Good porn, good writing, but unbelievably bad to play.

The game is so tedious due to the mandatory crafting and hoarding of resources. Which then your stash has an inventory limit. So you can't hoard items. Which also means any time you lose something, it's a big deal. Not to mention anytime you build armor which is useful. If you lose once, you lose all of it. Wholesale, lose all of what might be hours of work.

That prologue was the worst part. When will RPGmaker games stop doing the ". . ." part where they have the character look-around and slowly state an ellipses. It makes skipping through it painful!

Excellent game with a lot of very well written and animated scenes. If you like Grove, you'll love this. It's basically Grove with improved gameplay, art, and writing.

I don't like that you lose equipment when you fail the missions, they took a lot of time to gather resources and make, yet, could lose them all in an instant. So i just leave them in storage most of the time, this makes the enemies and gameplay loop feel more grindy, which is a shame

A very fun little demo, very good art work. It is definitely not a full game, but it doesn't claim to be, and it accomplishes a nice demo of a game with enjoyable combat mechanics and what will hopefully become a well rounded M/M furry porn game.

Well...the ratings aren't being very generous for the game.
I believe the Devs wanted to try other projects and take a break from GROVE.

Firstly, the game has a lot of personality, the art and cutscenes are good.
The mechanics of the game make it a little repetitive and sometimes it gets very annoying when you have to repeat the same map every time (even if it has changes every time you enter) it's not enough. However, it's demo, so. I won't go heavy on it. Inventory management is the biggest problem in the game and getting resources to make equipment is tedious.
Enemies are easy to fight once you understand the controls.

The story is interesting, but little else for being a demo.

I recommend giving it a try, it's simple and straightforward.

Nargacuga with human dick just looks weird.

Also, another bottom slut game zzz...
(Main character of dev's other game is also a bottom slut, that only has loss scenes, no win scenes. And dev has already confirmed that the sexual content of this one will be focused on submissive scenes as well.)

The gameplay is like a roguelike from 20+ years ago, tedious and boring.

I'll give it 2 stars just for effort and because the art looks decent.

It’s a Demo but For a Demo it’s quite good quality and has a lot of potential.
The grove devs have experience of course but this is quite the different direction from Grove as it isn’t a turn based game.
The current content features a nice starting selection of NSFW scenes which does give us some hints of what’s to follow and the style of how they will be done in the future. I am looking forward for more.

[Act 1 v0.114] Prowler is a game that has potential in its concept but suffers from severe gameplay flaws. The full game is largely unchanged in gameplay so I'll keep the same review that I had for the demo.
This review contains spoilers.

I'll talk about what's good about the game first:

• The art and writing is great. Coming from the developers of Grove, this is no surprise, as that game is incredibly high quality. Pixel art is crisp, and scenes are written in a way that focuses on the emotions of the character, allowing you to really get into it. The new story in the full game is engaging, and it makes me care for the characters a lot more than the typical porn game does.
• Clothing mechanics. The portrait on the left showing your character also adapts to the clothes you are wearing, and occasionally restrictive gear is put on you. I always love skimpy clothing, especially if I can see the difference, so this is a big plus to me.

Next, the issues:

• Inventory management is terrible. Crafting items takes several steps of viewing the recipe, then quitting out of the crafting table, then taking the item out of your storage, then walking back to the crafting table, then going through several menus to craft your item. You can't see your items in the crafting menu and you can't see recipes in your inventory. Why?! Oh yeah, did I mention that you only have a limited storage chest at the home base? Good luck remembering what you needed because you'll definitely have to toss everything else.
• Combat is boring and finicky. Attacking with your primary is a slashing attack directed at your cursor. It stuns enemies and takes a bit of stamina. These can potentially stunlock enemies until you run out of stamina, so it just becomes a game of landing the first hit and mashing left mouse until they are dead. For enemies that can't be stunlocked you can walk backwards while slashing at them. Your secondary is shooting a spike, which you have 3 per mission. It's okay, but the ammunition is too low. The way the enemies fight back is occasionally shooting projectiles at you. There are bosses that do more, but they are few and far between... and all it means is just running when they attack and mashing left click when they stop.
• This game is incredibly tedious. The core gameplay loop is that you are attempting to gather resources in a field of premade rooms that are randomly selected between each other. Sometimes they can have the material you want, sometimes you can go several missions without seeing something you want. You then take those materials and craft new armor, tools, and weapons to increase your power in the world. The issue is that these resources only spawn in some specific rooms, and the best strategy if you are looking for a specific one is to quit out the mission when you don't get the room you want. Rarer loot found in chests in the temple, which is randomized, suffers even worse because you can't reset until you check the chest guarded by chargers enemies, forcing you interact with the janky combat.
• Bad ends are strangely punishing. For a game based around scenes you view when you get caught/lose all your health, it really wants to erase your progress. The crafted armor I mentioned earlier is lost when you fail a mission, wiping out potentially hours of progress. Of course you can just save scum it, but then why is it even here? The fact that the gallery is unlocked by beating the game instead of actually engaging with each scene to be immersed in how you ended up in the situation is very telling to me.

To me, this doesn't feel like a porn game. Rather, a mediocre game with porn scenes and skimpy clothing slapped onto it. The hack and slash and survival gameplay doesn't mesh well with these themes, as it requires too much focus to get you in the mood before the game throws a scene at you. While the problems with tedium and punishing mechanics could be removed with future updates, what would be left of the game, and what else could be added? Unfortunately my patience and willingness to see more scenes can only last so long before I decide to put the game down. Very disappointing considering Grove Dev's previous work.

v1.09 Review:

It's like everything that should have, could have, and would have been learned from developing Grove was cast aside intentionally. This game is terrible as a normal game, and atrocious as a porn game. Amazing art and acceptable writing utterly butchered by some of the worst designed gameplay fathomable and, of course, punishing players for wanting porn.

And this is clearly a porn game. Porn. Game. Porn first, game second. Your cock is out the entire time. But what's worse is that it's a glorified walking sim with combat below the level of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. I've SEEN, neigh, played decent action games in this engine...yet this isn't even akin to what I've seen literal teenagers make in Roblox.

You create an "extraction" type game, yet punish players for actually finding unique loot early on. You let them waste time, real world time that cannot be gotten back, to find an item their camp isn't ready for yet. Nothing given. Just wasted time. You make AOE attacks that one must dodge by running in a straight line in an engine that makes it impossible to dodge those if you have to heal, meaning a single one spells immediate death if your stamina is lacking. You give a stamina bar that is seemingly based on the real world endurance of whoever made this atrocity, leaving you unable to do anything but sit there like an louse until it finally decides to regen.

Why have all that amazing art that you punish players for wanting and discourage them from getting? Terrible game. I had hoped desperately it would become...something, anything better after the demo, but no. Atop a mountain of praise built upon the back of actual gooners, the path has been lost, the vision blurred, and the quality sullied.

Such a waste.


Initial demo review:
I love the art, and I really love the Dev's other game, but the engine they're using is just NOT cutout for an "extraction" game. The combat is passable, but that's the end of it. With how the combat is center stage in this game's progression, it's just really weak. It's clearly intended to be fun first, then have porn second, and that just does not work with such a horrendous, antiquated system of real time combat.

It's clunky, it's slow, and it's only slightly closer to fun than the traditional RPGM turn-based combat. Choosing to make an entire game focused around this is just so sad to see. If they would have gone with battle-fucking instead, this game could honestly be a ton of fun. Instead, it's the ever-tiresome system of losing to get scenes, which is even worse in this game since when you lose, you lose everything you've gained. Because extraction type gameplay. Seriously, how did they think this was a good idea for a porn game?