Unity - Completed - Scarlet Maiden [v1.3.3] [Otterside Games]

Geez the reviews here are ridiculous.

The default controls suck, but you can remap them. I used Z for attack, X for jump, C for spell, shift for dash. Felt pretty tight tbh.

Combat is pretty good. Yes, you'll die early when you start. It's a roguelite. That's the point. But after you play for a while you'll learn the enemy attacks. I rarely take any damage at all on the first few floors, none of the attacks are terribly difficult to dodge. Pretty much the only one that is would be the flying wizards, and only if there's other stuff going on.

Itemization is good. Perhaps not super balanced, but tons of gear drops, so it's pretty easy to work towards whatever build you want.

The H content is pretty minimal, and honestly that's my only complaint. IMO you should be able to unlock a gallery through the "sin" currency. Maybe make it an NPC you only rescue after the third boss or something idk.

Difficulty wise it's actually pretty easy after the first few runs. I'm not sure how others are dying so quickly. All enemy attacks are very choreographed.

My only real complaint is the game seems unfinished. I beat the last/third boss and got told that was the end of the game and sent back to lobby. Pretty dissatisfying. I would have hoped for at least an H scene.

This is a platform roguelite using porn as an aesthetic and not the main focus you are not going to be jerking off while playing. The main focus is the gameplay, which is very solid and responsive as long as you are using a controller, seriously the controls are amazing and some of the best I've played with in a porn game.
It is currently in steam early access and with more content planned for the future, which explains why a few quality of life things are missing. It's level progression is a lot like Hades in that you have to start from the beginning every time, which is fine. I do expect upgrade prices to change in the future or enemies to drop less currency, as it is very easy to max out everything with a few good runs. It is currently a very decent roguelite that has potential for greatness in it.
The only real gripe I have is that the MC should have been a futa or have the option to be one, with all of the scenes with a strap on it feels like a missed opportunity.

Oh cool, a sex themed rougelite.
* Gameplay is solid. Maybe it misses some advanced stuff (like canceling animations) and weapon types are not very distinct, but nothing can be perfect.
* Artstyle is good. High definition art is pretty, low definition art is smooth.
Reused assets are showing but its ok.

Gameplay -> WOW ITS FUCKING ROGUE LEGACY !... ( so yee its good )
Graphics -> Nah... not much hentai graphics but its fine...
Controls -> Are You brain damaged?...
I mean ok... this game was designed for controller... BUT WHY THERE IS NO OPTION TO REBIND KEYS?...

Left/Right Arrow -> moving left right
You probably guess... ohh then UP arrow / Spacebar Jump?...

WRONG !...

Jump -> X
Attack -> C
Magic -> V
Dash -> B ( You can't rly beat some levels without that )

Who the fuck made controls like that without option to rebind them?...
If not controls i would give 5 stars... for these fucked controls only 4...

Game is really cool, well after all its just Rogue Legacy Hentai Edition but srsl... please... not these controlls... im on keyboard...

Pretty fun roguelike, the sprites and animations are amazing, the game just looks great and clean, the kind of thing you'd see from a really good indie game.

The hentai content is low but still there, although if you expect to fap while you play you will be disappointed.

The balance feels alright but daggers and swords feel way better than the spears and spells feel almost useless except in some very specific situations.

Overall very fun and is pretty long, definitely takes a while to complete

game was great, been waiting awhile for it. Cant wait for more content. a bit hard to start off, but once you level up after a few rounds isn't tooo bad. animations are wonderful, items are cool, and the way to get more mana, health, and power ups is interesting.

[Reviewed for V1.1.1]

What can I say? It looks good, plays great, and has amazing quality. I have two minor complaints for the entire game

Cons:
- basic controls are atrocious, they're nearly impossible to play with, that being said, you can change the controls in the main menu

- The h content in game is pretty minimal. There are a decent amount of scenes and variety, but each of the scenes aside from the ones in the abbey last about 3 seconds before being completely finished. It doesn't help that there's no formal gallery, but I feel that'll be added in due time.
I think another fix for the h content would be to have it run on an endless loop until you push a button to advance or end it.

Now onto the heaping piles of positives

Pros:
+controller support
+great spritework
+great enemy variety, even if some later ones are reskins
+controls are tight
+rng is very forgiving, as you progress you'll almost always find better and better loot. On top of that, most enemies drop equipment (like 1-2 equip drops per room) so it's easy to find a weapon you mesh with quickly and stick to it.
+core gameplay loop is simply fun, I found myself finishing a run just to want to immediately jump back in to beat the next boss or get to the next floor.

Overall Scarlet Maiden is if nothing else, extremely fun and well polished. If you're okay with somewhat sparce h content in favor of playing something fun, this is it.

pros
- very pretty game, graphics
- leveling mechanics
- boss fights
- interesting story

cons
- repetable levels, could get boring
- lack of ability to start game in new areas after bosses get defeated as in library and forest

neutral opinions
- lack of male enemies and not much straight scenes (mostly focused about lesbian stuff)
- slime girls are a little bit too tough and they could kill you pretty quickly at the beginning and if u cant learn quick enough game can become tiresome

Well since it's considered to be an H-game I give this product a lowest rate possible. Why? Because pixel animations and models are poorly done, there's no actual satisfying porn gameplay, no gallery. It is a decent game for steam as roguelight genre that slightly spiced with some H-content. But if you are a picky wanker just like myself- go ahead and ingrore this game without any regrets

The first hour is very fun. Well balanced, variety of items... but experience quickly snowballs and you buy everything the game has to offer shortly after.

Animations are very short, you can't control them and there is no gallery at all, so if you want to actually fap to it, you won't.

Some items and magic spells are absolutely overpowered. Like the flame/cold shield, and stun/freeze weapons.

This is a weird one because the game isn't bad, it's essentially Rogue Legacy with porn. My main issue is that both sides of the game, the Platforming Rougelike VS Pixel Art Animated Porn Game feel like they're holding each other back.

The actual game segments are fine and polished enough but nothing here really stands out. If I wanted to play a platforming rouguelike I'd play Rogue Legacy 1/2, Dead Cells or Spelunky. Nothing here really hooks me from a game standpoint.

Meanwhile the porn is okay but too short and sparse. There's not much to go off on and after seeing another room with a sex scene I don't think "oh boy the spicy content!" the game part of the game after repitition after repitition as per the norm of roguelikes make me think "oh another chest! more currency! a boost in stats!" ect.

The game as it is is too split down the middle. As I said before it's polished which is more I can say about other games on this site but take its too halves you just get a mediocre platformer and mediocre porn, and bringing both together don't necessarily make a good product.

Since the game is still WIP I hope the devs would pic a side, either focus on the game or focus on the porn because as it doing a little bit of both isn't cutting it.

Must be one of the better games to be found here, writing as of v1.1, more content is anticipated.

+ Above average platforming - movement and control feels good.
+ Bosses aren't stupid hard.
+ Most enemies have fairly predictable moves once you've seen them.
+ Skill tree.
+ Very cool randomly generated maps, works really well.
+ Exploration is rewarded with loot rooms.
+ Quests are a bit meh, but adds something to do while grinding the dungeons. And rewarding with more mini H-scenes.
+ Beautiful pixel art + animations

- Default keybinds are flat out frustrating, I played with them til I maxed everything out before I realized you could change them in the main menu. Probably would have been more enjoyable.
- Progress is a tad on the grindy side.
- Loot generated at the main hub is super RNG, no way to guarantee a sword vs a spear etc.
- No gallery.. yet.
- Has futa content.

If you like side scrolling combat platformers, definitely give this a shot. I sunk a several hours into it, and I'm pretty sure I've cleared everything available except for the music notes quest. Got 9/10 notes on my last run, too lazy to go back through again. The game isn't too easy, but it's not ridiculously hard, especially after you level up a bit.

Oh, and Cheat Engine does good work on this game. Once you get bored with legit gameplay, you can lock your health and mana, and give yourself infinite cash. All can be found via 4-bytes.

TL;DR: Doesn't live up to the hype, not worth your time, play Rogue Legacy 2 instead.
2/5.

If you are like me, you'll have checked the comments on the first two pages and checked the two existing reviews.
And if you are like me, you'd wonder what all the hype was about.
And if you're like me, you'd download and try the game.
And if you're like me, you'd immediately notice that the spears have no attack chain, just the basic thrust with a little pause and then repeating that thrust. And you'll notice that some elite enemies stagger when you hit 'em and some don't, and sometimes you take single digits of damage from a particular enemy but sometimes you take upwards of 80 (on the second floor, no less) and 99% of the stuff you find is utterly useless because you only have four equipment slots (ring, necklace, weapon, spell) and if you keep finding things only for one slot then you're SOL and you'll wonder why are there teleportation points in direct line of fire of traps you can't disable and--

I mean, it wants to be Rogue Legacy, but it doesn't have any of the inspiration, the charm, the variety in classes (you're a girl that twats things with her melee weapon until the game randomly drops you something that returns mana, then you're still primarily twatting things with your melee weapon because it stunlocks them until you come across something you cannot stunlock then you can choose to cast a spell if that's so interesting). It doesn't have the spell or weapon variety, it doesn't have pretty much anything remotely resembling what RL has.
So why bother with it? Go play RL. This game isn't worth your time.

Oh, maybe it's good for the adult content? No, it isn't. What's there is a few sprite animations you'd get far better and easier elsewhere, and there isn't even a gallery so you can't excuse it by "shooting for 100%". There is simply no reason to bother with this.

In points:
Combat is whack (-1*): if an enemy hits me for 3-5 damage with a particular move when I have 0% damage reduction, it shouldn't be able to also hit me for 60-80 damage with the same move on the next run when I have 60% damage reduction. Remember, your starting maximum health is 88, so if you took ANY damage before that hit, you're within one-hit-kill territory even with 60% DR. What is this, a sniper rifle headshot? No, get back to the drawing board and balance this nonsense.
No gallery (-1*): self-explanatory. I don't know why developers stopped making those, but by God Almighty I'll score every single game I review -1* if they don't have one. If I were the kind of person who really liked something in the game and kept this installed (although in this case, there really isn't any reason to), I want to be able to see the goods on demand once I've unlocked them. This not only gives you a clear way to tell when you've seen everything, but also makes shooting for 100% interesting, fun and worthwhile. Lacking a gallery is missing out on all of this.
Why are there teleportation points in direct path of traps? (-1*): this is a personal pet peeve, but this is my review, and I'm not going to let this slide. If you dared to minimize while it's loading, and the particular point you chose has traps on it, you come back to being dead. This doesn't make any sense, does nothing for game balance, does nothing for progression (as someone else pointed out, you can probably unlock most things in a few hours anyway) and only frustrates you if it happens, and the game this thing is trying to ape figured this years ago, so I don't understand why this is still a problem.

2/5. A poor imitation you shouldn't play because Rogue Legacy and Rogue Legacy 2 exist and are both infinitely better.

As of posting the game is not finished, despite it being released on Steam.

I recommend this game just for the gameplay.
Aside from a rather abrupt ending, Scarlet Maiden is some kind of love-child between Rogue Legacy and a random hentai schoolgirl.

Gameplay loop is on-point. Each run (if you survive to the end) can take anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes, and it's all buttery smooth and decently challenging.
Platforming is responsive, combat is snappy, and exploration changes each run.
My only complaint would be the dark rooms, with no light. Ranged enemies that you can't see hitting you from off-screen is just rude.

The game looks good, and I would have loved to see more of it. There's a lot of fetishes for a lot of different folks, from spanking, blowjobs, strap-ons, futas, giantesses, slime-girls, lactation... the list goes on.
Sadly, the animations are terribly short. I'm not sure it's even possible to actually get off to this game, especially with no gallery.

But it is just good to play. By the 3rd hour in (of like, five, I dunno) I was actively avoiding the smut because it slowed the gameplay down.

Heroine-chan~! I need you to fist my lewd, dripping, giantess pussy~
Hell Naw! I stacked flame damage, upgraded my dash, and grabbed a Fire Shield.
No time for your needs; I'm killing the boss!
Pain train comin' through! CHOO CHOO!

So, yeah. Game's good.
I despise unfinished releases, but I ain't even mad on this one. Game's good.

'Rogue Lewdacy' plays way better than it has any right to, somehow this is a proper roguelite! The way the characters are styled in their sprites isn't my thing, which is a shame when the majority of lewdness comes from in-game miniscenes, but I have respect for the level of craft at display and wouldn't want somebody passing this without giving it a shot. My eyes are on these devs for whatever comes next

They've done it, the horny man's Rogue Legacy. For real though this is basically rogue legacy meets porn and it's done pretty well. Its far easier than RL and still has a decent variety with the weapons and spells as well as the accessories that support a variety of builds. There is definitely a ton more game than there is porn with porn being just the visual theme of the game for the most part.

That said the difficulty being far easier than RL means you can have a more casually fun time with it as it's ridiculously easy to amass a ton of sin (money) per run that you can probably max out all the vendors in about 3 runs depending on how good you are. Aside from that you just pump it into stats and this game snowballs at a pretty good pace that'll still beat your ass if you sleep on it and try to rush through everything.

I think if I had to point out some issues it would be some relatively minor nitpicks. Things like not knowing which chests drop what or even if you have to trade for them are never explained, although you learn quickly that they're all free. There's a handful of interactable things that are all basically just a different porny visual of a chest. Other than that there's definitely a lack of survivability. There's no health drops anywhere and most life steal weapons are at like 2-5% chances. Once you're out of potions you're at the mercy of the game and whether or not it rewards you with a place to buy another potion. Also the bosses barely give you any sin compared to all the sin you accumulate through just destroying objects, let alone killing everything.

Don't play this if you just want the porn. This is one of those ones where the game is the priority and it's done well. You'll definitely need to beat the game before you can really enjoy the animations but even then the pixel work and animations are pretty great. Definitely worth it.