I'll be mentioning Karryn's Prison and Library of Ruina a lot through this, because it's obvious that this game takes heavy inspiration from both.
The game changed dramatically over the course of its development, and for certain will continue to do so, thus I'd like to talk less about the state it is in, but rather what it could be considering what it's already offering.
Saria Reclaimed takes heavy inspiration from Karryn's Prison, and interestingly enough, also wants to incorporate Library of Ruina's combat in it. That premise sounds fantastic on paper, however as it stands, Saria fails to capture the fun essence of either, be it in either gameplay or H-content.
The appeal of KP is the extremely fluid integration between its combat gameplay and h-content, the nuance of making small bad decisions every day as you manage the prison as Karryn slowly making her lose "control" over herself and the prison she governs. Library of Ruina is probably one of the harder card games out there, and it makes so much sense to try to integrate that kind of difficulty with a game that wants to capture what's great about KP, and yet Saria Reclaimed isn't deep enough in its gameplay options, leaving the optimal decision very blatantly obvious, and having easy cookie-cutter gameplay actively conflicting with what the game is trying to capture.
The gameplay should be harder, Saria should be allowed to equip more cards, and equipping cards shouldn't be "free", like how you have to prepare spells when you long rest in DnD, there should be prerequisites to equipping cards besides simply unlocking them, this is especially important because of how the lewd cards work, they simply just WORK when you unlock/play them, regardless of the situation the battle is in. This can be fixed with something akin to the Emotion meter from Ruina, which builds up as the battle goes on, this can creatively have a lewder twist on it, which allows you to draw/play the lewder cards. Speaking of the lewder cards, as it stands they are nothing but gateways to the cut-in CGs, there is no state where you use them as “battle fuck”, leaving the flow of combat feeling VERY similar to a generic turn based RPGM game with a card game skin.
Why can Saria rest freely? Why is the map so needlessly big with enemies respawning easily? Saria should commit to the kind of game it wants to be instead of being a generic RPGM CG collector eroge where you beat mobs and loss to bosses with a fake “lewdness” meter in your pause screen, there’s enough of those already. A little mean spirited perhaps, but I have a particular passion for this game as it is the only game trying to make something in the “genre” that KP birthed.
As for the H-content, its quality is amazing, but it’s integration is lackluster, thinking back on KP, you don’t really unlock static vn-style H-scenes ever, every bit of erotica is interwoven with gameplay be it minigame or combat, and that’s important because it solved the problem with static scenes, it negates the whole passive/corruption meters and mechanics entirely, as they are, funnily enough, static. You won’t see Saria have a different reaction to the same move an enemy does in those, and loathe as I am to say it, it feels like wasted artwork that could’ve been instead spent on integrating more scenes and interactivity into the combat.
And as all the other reviews say, this game has potential, but as the updates rack up all I see is the game bee lining its way to becoming another RPGM game.
