Others - SCP: Nexus [Demo] [Tentacles Games]

Yet another cheesy Visual Novel.

I downloaded this because I'm a fan of the Foundation, but it's going not as well as I hoped. The art is delightful to look at, the color scheme and the art style is really good. Too bad the artists got shafted by the devs and writers.

For a community centered around writing, this game has really cheesy and bad writing going for it. I like the little references they do, pulling some lesser known SCP's like 7473, but the dialog is really bad. People talk so uncomfortably, always giving Marvel-like responses and quips. The "animations" are just images with some warping to trick you into thinking there's movement.

The combat system is really janky and unexplained and really dumb. For context, there's an "ability" that you can use (though i'm not sure how you even have it) that negates all damage during a turn. Too fucking bad that you can't control the order of your actions, so my character would shoot, recover, get attacked, or use abilities at fucking random, so my damage negating ability activates AFTER i get attacked. Stuoid game.

The demo is so short tha you can complete it within 15-20 minutes. Just do something better than play this demo.


2 stars because the art and my love for SCP's hard carry. Other than that, not worth the trouble downloading, extracting, and playing just to delete.

Damn what a shame.

So it's basically a badly written visual novel with some dogshit turn-based combat.


ART/AUDIO

Art is good, looks great even. I'd like it a lot more if it was in service to a game with some actual substance but hey, good job artist. I hope you can escape the gulag sometime soon.
There's some animation, simple loops nothing special. Music is... it exists. The default combat track is really bad. Idk. Oh there's some voice acting, when you do an ambush attack the character goes 'TAKE THIS!' and it's really funny in that it's really bad. Guess there's that.


GAMEPLAY

It's really, really... really... not good. For a start there's no tutorial and it's a little confusing because you have no idea what anything does or what exactly you are doing. Once you figure everything out and get a grasp of your abilities (which the game should have told you about) it's just... really boring. Animations are so slow and it's a boring grind of dealing with each enemy in turn. Even simple stuff like a visable turn order isn't shown so you have no idea when each character is going to act making stuff like defensive abilities kind of useless when they trigger at the end of the turn. Really hope they take another pass over this because currently it plays really badly.


WRITING - contains spoilers but you really shouldn't care.

Alright so you're some hotshit anime protag who is like the best agent of the foundation, this guy is so cool. In the prologue you are trapped in a hotel and have to escape fighting really boring enemies that hang dong. You can escape by going up or down, except you can't because going up is a waste of time as that exit is blocked and the game makes a point by going 'It's not a waste of time, it's always worth exploring around'. Explore what? I found nothing by doing this and only had to do another annoying combat encounter which also rewarded me with nothing. If the game was trying to say something here it really fucked that one up. So anyway you escape, meet the commander who distracts you with her tiddies while a town is bombed in the background (to stop the SCP's from spreading). Actually kind of based tbh.

There's this brief intermission where the character crashes out over the whole mass murder bombing thing and escapes the foundation only to be tracked down and re-recruited again... yeeeaaahhh this intermission basically serves no purpose except to establish that the protag is a good guy and NOT okay with mass murder. It's clumsily written though and inconsequential. Honestly just makes you wonder how he made it this far in an organisation like the foundation. Mind you in the next section the foundation is established to be completely incompetent and powerless so in retrospect maybe it's not that hard to believe.

Ok... so now the world is ending or something and our protag has to go undercover at a university in order to stop it. Wait what?
You are then quickly introduced to a lot of characters in rapid succession, including the university dean who is immediately suspicious of you and wants you gone. It's also at this point the game rapidly starts throwing random sex scenes at you which all last approximately... 10 seconds. Right. so. There's obviously something really werid going on at this university. They have weird tests, a ranking system, can expel low ranked students and have seemingly unlimited power and autonomy in order to get away with this. Ok. The foundation basically can't do shit to help you with your investigation as university records are private and making any move could draw the enemy into hiding. Ok. Wait, Hold on. Is this the same scp foundation built up in the fandom which has access to basically unlimited funds, power and is also pretty much the illuminati? I guess not. Ok, cool, just checking. Yeah makes sense that some random university would have them beat, so they really need to rely on this one guy to solve everything or everyone is dead.

It's really not worth going into the rest of the story... basically stuff happens and the game hits you with a 'To Be Continued' after maybe about 2-3 hours of playtime... awesome.


SEX SCENES

Ok so there's 'five'. Three are purely voyer scenes. Two involve the main character. One is a blowjob scene and the other is the previously mentioned tiddy fondling which is hardly a scene at all. All of them are meh, very short and randomly inserted, they add literally nothing to the game or story. You can do better.


CONCLUSION

To be blunt, in its current version it's really bad and I don't see it getting updated or improving much. It's a waste of time, if your time is valuable. Luckily mine isn't, so your welcome. Hope this helps.

Good artwork, but as a VN it absolutely sucks ass because none of the dialogue options actually do anything. Then they have the gall to make a "premium" version that adds nothing to the game.

Its a shame to see what this fandom has become going from the first 2000 SCPs to whatever Danganronpa lolcow autism this VN about. At least there aren't any trannies in it.

I really enjoyed the story!

It’s great to see an SCP game after so long.

However, I wish there were SCP scenes, maybe they do have some for future versions, and I certainly hope so.

For now, I’d give it a 3 out of 5.

The story was engaging enough that I read through it instead of skipping, and I loved the animation and art style!

I really hope someone will release the paid version soon. The scene teasers look pretty neat!

I’ll be back to update this review once I try a different version.