Ren'Py - Seeds of Chaos [v0.4.08] [Vénus Noire]

Had this game in my "to-play-list" for about six years now. I must say that this is probably a must-play for NTR-enjoyers. I'm personally not to fond of NTR-content, but dissociating with my real life values and immersing myself into this fantasy world and acting like a tyrant was truly fun. Even the occasional cock up my arse was, though not personal preference, a humorous occasion, which lightend the mood.
The artwork is exceptionally well done and I found myself gazing for quite a while at some pictures, especially in Rivadael.
One of the best stories I've read in the eroge genre, maybe even in gaming itself (recency bias and personal interest) was with Greyhide. I really want to give my praise to whomever wrote it. Those stories felt immensely human and relateably, yet never failed to make me smile.
Of course not everything is ideal and there are some areas of the game where a lot of work has to be done, but it's not in version 0.3 for no reason. I will come back in a couple of years to see how it evolved.
I'm really interested to see, in which direction the castle building and world map will go (UI, Extensions, Events).
A big QOL improvement would be an indicator (e.g. red exclamation mark) in your castle when you return from exploring, to immeadiately see where a new event has been unlocked, as this was very frustrating to maneuver through all the time.
For now I would recommend anyone to at least give it a try for a couple of hours who likes the eroge genre.

PS: Fuck Andras - all my homies hate Andras. What a truly detestable character - well done writers!

Seeds of Chaos is a genuinely good game hidden behind thirteen different veils of randomness and a couple mechanics and things the devs thought of putting in the game and never ended up going fully through with it - also known as the wonderful world of biting off more than you can chew. It is the sort of game that is definitely too expansive for its own good - too many flags, too many checks, too much of everything - and eventually, something breaks, something snaps, one of the hidden variables didn't reset when you loaded the game or you moved them a bit too far because you walked left twice instead of once in your new gameplay attempt and now dialogues are changed slightly and the order of events has been thrown out of sorts - they're mostly random, after all.

Worse, some things can change a lot, and some things can change very little. Choosing whether or not a character has a closer relationship to you or not can change small pieces of dialogue, but it doesn't seem to lock you out of their route or scenes - but pushing back a bit too much in a single scene that isn't quite to your fancy or you don't feel that you should currently be getting? That can suddenly close the whole progression permanently, for what seems to be little to no reason. It's a hard game to understand.

Seeds of Chaos is also a lot about domination - maledom and femdom alike. Our MC can both be someone's maledom while also being both the sub of either a woman or a guy, if it so strikes your fancy - and it makes for an honestly pretty interesting story. I hope there is at least one route or path where eventually, you can turn the femdom relationship on its' head and become the actual ruler of the place, but only time will tell; the power struggles and chain pulling and how far you're willing to lend yourself out to someone to advance plot points is an interesting take, but since the game is so expansive and all variables are hidden, it's hard to tell what's really going on behind the scenes, and taking on a "measured" gameplay feels very redundant.

For the NTR content, there's not much to say - it's optional, partially stupid, and to me it barely feels like it, because Rowan is definitely not averse to fucking whatever he comes across with little to no regard for his wife if that is what you desire to pick for yourself. His wife, on the other hand, shows up so little and has such little characterization I can barely be bothered to even read the scenes she shows up in, with other characters such as Helayna or Liurial being a far more interesting read; even Jezera herself is, and I'm not into femdom.

The gameplay isn't bad but it utilizes classic DnD skillpoints - the events are all entirely random so sometimes you'll just lose a check that you didn't even know nor could opt into coming and it just feels so shitty. Sometimes events will ask for these checks out of the blue - you reload, try to spend your points wiser, and the event never shows up again because hey, it's random.

The "actual" gameplay is walking around a hexgrid map, being faced with random events, and choosing things. The game contains both an item system (the preferable way of raising your stats), and an equipment system (which I've never fucking used); just more mechanics that seemed like the devs wanted to implement and realized it was not worth doing. Choosing things in this VN is particularly annoying because as said in this review, they can change small things for a long time in the future or they can change big things very immediately but since it's all somewhat randomly triggered (or takes several weeks to trigger again and progress events) it takes time for the result of your choices to sink in - time filled with more random events, that when you reload might not even show up anyway. Furthermore, they removed how if you return through the scroll wheel/pgup behind a choice you can choose something different - choices are locked until you actually load a file, making managing the save files a bit of a mess when you're finding out everything the game has to offer and finding out the combination of choices that can lead to different lines of dialogue or things down the line.

All in all, this game has great setting, some good characters, a somewhat wide variety of porn, and it is all dulled down very badly by a thoroughly randomized gameplay that truly just needn't exist. The storytelling, the characters, and particularly Rowan's (the main character) development carries this VN to a 4 out of 5 (helped greatly by the fact the sex scenes are very well drawn). It's a bit of an annoying game past a while though, and it works best as a 'one shot' play where you just go through it once and see where it leads you instead of fumbling around trying to explore every nook and cranny - the game just isn't meant to be enjoyed like that, I guess, with how much randomness is in it.

Notice: v0.3.08 review (though I played it a couple of releases earlier and will wait even more, I did not play this version)
To make this review even fair, or any review here fair one should know where ones interests are. This isn't like sports where one can "review" without being biased for their team, or in this case tags.
So I think it's good for you to know I am a fan of the tags Femdom and NTR, if you really must know I would say soft femdom IRL, but not NTR, not man enough to try that out for real. Or I am but I can't see it working out .

Now, I am sure that the art somewhere started to change and the game as well. The game started out good, a lot of femdom and NTR. I even bought the game on steam, yeah! My first and only game I bought on early access. But after that the game somehow went downhill, a little time after I bought it I would say. The moment before you could enter Rastadel, that's when this game started going south in my opinion. I am sure something happened and the game became more focused on other kinks and art became more different even if it somehow tried to keep it's style.
A guess would be that the devs became stingy and tried to cheapskate stuff while having a conflict but either way. They have done some good things too, not all is bad! The dancer prostitute dancer has good content, the NTR lacking, and the magic libarary woman, while still good feels different.
This game when I started it was a bit of a mess, they improved the gameplay but tbh, I would rather go back to the old gameplay and all if the game could just follow the same direction..
Another split and maybe you will have vanilla sex now and maledom fans and futa will go disappointed like me? Is that possible? Just an idea that struck me.
After this game I never bought another game on early access. well I mean we all learn that lesson sooner or later, I learnt it sooner

Also that was a bit of venting, the game is good! I mean it! I just wouldn't pay for it, as I did. I could do without it. If they at least tried to follow the same steps, as when I payed for it then yeah. Venting again . The game is good and worth playing! At times you would even feel the game is 5 stars but when you reach rastadel you will feel the stars falling, and in my case.. I ended up with 3 stars. - as I'm writing this review- 3rd October 2022
This game had the potential to be among the best.. I wouldn't say that now.

The content, art and premise are top notch, and the drama between Rowan and Alex is believable. I mainly docked it two stars because
1. A promising character that would have fufilled a great fetish of mine, Roise, was removed. X'artel is nice, hot, and lovey dovey, but the main reason I came into this game was the hope of futa NTR. I got plenty of NTR, but little futa, and no combination of the two.
2. The taking of the capital is an absolute drag, with no porn and scenes that strech on for an eternity, with new characters that I don't care for, I eventually gave up understanding and just skipped to the end. I don't know if there could be a better outcome for the city, but I'm not willing to find it.
I'd still recommend checking this game out, but if you want Futa NTR, you will be dissapointed, which is a subjective matter, but the capital is, I'm pretty sure, objectively bad.

Interesting premise with very poor execution and barely any content. What's worse, the game tries to cater to totally opposite target groups adding lots of homosexual content that's often hard to ignore. Thanks to that we're getting very few scenes that would interest either group each update, although even when combined the render count is pathetic. The artwork is nice in general but sex scenes are underwhelming since they comprise of few images only and the gameplay doesn't compensate for that.

Ah, yes, the gameplay. It's boring and annoying and the results are random so it encourages to save scum and reload for best results since the exact same path may be our death as well as a road to wealth depending what we will roll.

What's maybe the worst though is that the game is one big, slippery slope. It starts good and interesting and then it's just worse and worse.

Pros:
+Art

Cons:
- While art is good there's not much of it here and it has fetishes for opposite groups which makes it a game for no one.
- Boring and short sex scenes
- Gameplay is atrocious and encourages save scumming
- With each update it's becoming worse not better

Version 0.3.07c (September 2022)

Summary

Amazing adult game with unique story, great art and interesting game mechanics. Reason for 4 starts instead of 5 is that at some point it becomes very repetitive and basically the game is just throwing sex content at you.

Game's weak points

To me it feels like the game developers had grand plans in mind for this game, but at some point it became clear that it makes more sense to just please Patreons with steady sex content updates instead of actually polishing the game mechanics. Can't blame them, most adult games end up like that.

There is a lot of content and the game starts out strong. But at some point you see a pattern where the game introduces story to you just in order for player to get the sex scenes. It is questionable if those choices in the story you make have any impact on the later parts of the game. My issue is that you can't tell what impact the choice will have or if it will have any impact at all. So is the player actually in control of the story? The game throws some odd curveballs with the story sometimes and it is very immersion breaking. For example:


I really wish the game would receive more polish. There are lots of game mechanics that are really neglected. The story should as a whole make more sense instead of just introducing new story and characters to add sex content.

Game with lots of potential. Its actually quite interesting and looks like it will be actually fun to play for those that like homm series etc. There is plenty of content and multiple choices makes me want to play again but with different choices. Over all 10/10 for now.

I think this is the most quality game I have played. Unique game, a lot of content. graphics are not that great but the writing is excellent.
I wish i hadn't given 5/5 ratings for multiple other games because this is 1 step above everything. it's not perfect, but if there is a game worthy of being a 10/10 then this is it.

fappable 10/10.
story 9/10
H-art 10/10
H scenes animation (nearly nonexistent, 1-3frames changing occasionally)

you can even be forced to suck cock as a male... there are futas as well, it has fun for every taste.

The story is really coming together now. Definitely feels like a proper RPG. Great cast and feel there's been a lot of fleshing out of the character arcs vs the first time i played. Area i'd like more focus is Jezera/Rowan where it needs to move on from tension/teasing imo.

Not normally a huge fan of dual protagonists but feel it's done quite well here.

There a wide array of kinks. Personally not into NTR (especially) but it is easily avoidable by your choices.

By and large the most ambitious H-game I've come a cross on this page and else where. It's simply immense. Moreover, it's an *actual* game, you can't just wank at it and be happy, need to actually deliver sound strategies and shit. The worlds first ever grand strategy porn game?! This is it folks, the Civilization of porn games.

All the above being said, the game contains some bugs, and it's still rough around the edges. Some thorough spring cleaning will be needed at some point. And a tutorial wouldn't hurt. I dearly hope this game claims the potential that it has!

Also probably useful information: all futa / gay / NTR scenes seems to be optional for those that want to avoid them.

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I really love parts of this game. I wish I could love all of it.

The game has tons of content, but it can be pretty hard to figure out where the content you actually want to experience is in the game. I'm not a fan of everything in Seeds of Chaos and, frankly, the tone flip-flops from devastatingly grim to uncomfortably sexual at the drop of a hat. You can tell this game has multiple writers. Some of these writers are much more skilled than others, with some being able to handle characters they're not in charge of with tact and others pushing them out of character with the first word they write of them. Different writers handle violence differently, too. Under certain ones, any violence is handled as grim and dangerous, where others seemingly ignore the consequences of possible battles to the death. Part of this might be due to the way events can be triggered in whatever order one wants, with a character that was just beat to a pulp having to be able to pop up, unhurt, for the next scene. Of note is a scene where a minotaur turns one of the main demons into a mess of broken bones and blood, but then he was completely fine for the next scene where he kept seducing the female protagonist.

The cheating or cuckoldry content causes quite a contention with most people, but it's completely avoidable if you're not into it. As someone who is drawn to that sort of content, I feel it's watered down and sequestered away to try and please an audience that doesn't like it. The focus jitters all over like a sniper who just did ten rails of crack. I wish the game focused in on the fetishes it ostensibly was made to explore, but it feels like they have put far too much effort into catering to everyone. In addition, the lack of consequences to the various scenes adds to this problem. The story plays up that this is a dangerous dark fantasy world... with only characters that aren't important to the story having consequences. I realize the amount of writing that would be required would be prohibitively large for a small team, but maybe the team should have concentrated on the core rather than just kinda letting it wander about with side plots and characters that don't connect to the main story. At this point, it's not like they can go back and redo things, though.

The exploration part of the game really doesn't serve the rest of it well. Sure, it adds to the feel of the world, but, really, the best parts of the game are the protagonists interacting with other characters through the end-of-week scenes. The orc camp is the only part that competes with that, and, honestly, you could scrape everything about the exploration out of the game and make it a better experience. I would rather just play this as a typical branching-paths VN rather than what it is.

Hopefully the promised "Act 2" coming in the future tightens up the experience, drops the frivolities, and adds more consequence to the scenes. Only time will tell.

The artwork is great and so is the concept but the execution was done very poorly.

The gameplay is fine, it works but the RPG system and mechanics just make the game tedious and not as fun I love RPG's but not in a game like this it just does not work well as it just ends up cutting content from the game because you can't pass a skill check.

If you want to play the game without NTR and without being the twins bitch your going to miss out on the majority of the game. From the description the developers make it sound like you will be able to eventually take control but at this rate I don't see it happening anytime soon.

The game dont really deliver what it promises but I seen much worse games.

I tried the game last year and didnt liked, but got persuaded to give another try since the upcoming updates/plans sounded promising. Almost a year later I gave it another go but all I can say it was wasted time.
Dont get me wrong, art is good and the sandbox COULD be something decent if it was properly done, but how the game handles its VN part and Sandbox made it tiresome to play. What adds more salt to the wound is the rather "unpleasant" content in this game and how it executed.
Surprisingly no bugs in my two playthroughs (NTR path/"NO" NTR)

Lets say if you thinking to give this game a try with the prejudice playing a male lead having his fun the "normal" (hetero) style without anything fucked up, you will only somewhat finish this game in his 1/3 of its content....and its not much I must say as a warning.
And there is only one Path which you HAVE to choose, and its the corruption, otherwise you will even get less H-Scenes. And if you think that the lack of these normal scenes could be balance out through the story or their characters....well, you will be even more disappointed in it.
Its more of a game where you have to disconnect with the characters (no male/female lead) and to somewhat the strange/silly story its going.

Like I said, I seen worse games and with the current new artstyle it seems to been better (at least some H-Scenes are good tho) but I personally cant suggest this since everything feels like thrown together with the hope it will somewhat make sense.

Fantastic art and decent writing (as far as porn games go) marred by terrible gameplay. This is more unique than many games, and is certainly far above most things made in RPGM, but still lacks intuitive design and QOL. It's easy enough to get a bad end that essentially breaks your save unless you made numerous check points, and there isn't much that you, the player, have control over. There are choices you make, but they're few and far between in terms of anything meaningful.

Progress through the game itself is slow, and though the scenes are grand, they take a while to get rolling. Once they do, it's much less like a stone rolling down a hill and more like one moving on a treadmill. The pace only picks up slightly, and by the time you start really enjoying, you either game over or hit a gap with no scenes at all.

A lot of my disdain for this game comes from a very personal opinion on the core tenants of what makes a good porn game, and that involves not having hard game overs. This story does not captivate me enough to read every last line, and in doing so, I might miss a very important line of dialogue that isn't mentioned anywhere else, and thus, lose. I don't want to have to follow a walkthrough or spend 5 hours reading through everything just to have a wank for a game that I enjoy the style and setting of.

Tl;dr
I'm mainly here for porn, and you know that, so stop punishing me for not clicking on the right tile in a boring, slow paced game.

Berserk but Guts is a bitch and is also serving Femto, only it's worse because there's two of them and even the one with the vagina gets to cuck him. Not badly written, and the art is pretty great, but really feels like a setting and story that are dark just for the sake of being dark.

Would've liked the whole thing much better if the protagonist were a demon making his way through the ranks or something like that. Being the bad guy can be fun, being the bad guys' bitch gets tiring after a while.

Every year, I check for updates on this game, and when it looks like there's enough new content, I give it another tumble. Every time, it's worth it.

As excellent as the artwork is, lewd or otherwise, it is the writing that is the most enthralling part of this game. Whatever your initial choices might be, or what you may decide to become later on, the writing pulls no punches in regards to detail and nuance of the setting or characters.

As long as this game has been in development, it is pretty apparent that a lot of passion and commitment has gone into it. I hold no small amount of hope that this project is completed eventually.

It's a great game in concept, with a lot of excellent visuals a dark but not overly grimdark setting.
The main character Rowan and his wife are put in compromising situations and it always feels like they walk a fine balance between control and surrendering to the same level as their surroundings.
A lot of different kind of characters as well, it's nice to see a good variety of both body types and of both gay, lesbian and straight schnupping going on.

The overworld map and build mechanics appeal to my strategy gamer senses, but is often quite slow and sometimes more trial and error than actual strategy. I'd like to progress a bit faster or at least have clearer objectives. Maybe more side missions and less random events would solve this.

I have also had a few game crashes that have ruined at least one playthrough. There are apparently some issues with the coding.

I still recommend it and I have bought it on Steam and earlier was a patron. But the three star rating is there to show that there is some stuff that needs work before it can be called truly great.

I feel like this is very much a "your mileage may vary" game. The people who are into a super-dark world filled with rape, ntr, and making the best of only shitty situations will love it while those who don't won't get much of anything at all.

The overall gameplay is mediocre at best. You wander a world map trying to find things to do and eventually roll a dice to see if you pull it off. It's forgettable at best and tedious at worst. Fortunately the art redeems the gameplay to at least a degree, as it's quite good.

The story... is the hit or miss part. I can roll with a certain level of grim dark. Unfortunately, Seeds of Chaos is more than a bit much. In my opinion, the fun of a grim dark world is struggling against the grim darkness. The world can try to drag you down into crapsack it's become, but your character is too brave, smart, or just stubborn to give up.

Seeds of Chaos manages a little of this, but the "good guy" path is basically rigged. No matter what you do, you just keep getting punished. The world can't ever get better through your choices. Your best result is less bad. The game doesn't feel like it's designed to truly have a good guy path, just brutal speed bumps if you struggle on your way to almost inevitable corruption.

Speaking of which, I have a major bone to pick with the corruption. I'm down with a nice slow burn fall from grace. I think Seeds of Chaos can actually deliver on this to a degree as well. The thing that I hate though, is that Seeds conjoins sexual corruption and moral corruption.

Sluts are not war criminals. I feel like I shouldn't have to say it, but Seeds makes me feel like it needs to be stated. Just because Rowan and Alexia sleep around and cheat on each other does not mean that they'll suddenly enjoy rape or murder. Enjoying a big cock does not mean you desire the fall of civilization. Fucking a succubus or seven does not mean you must be down with a demonic uprising. It's really brutal to watch Rowan and Alexia become worse people as they like sex more. I understand that it probably made the game much easier to code, but it pretty much killed my appreciation for their characters.

Overall, I feel like having the two of them fall to sexual corruption, even inevitable sexual corruption, while maintaining their morality would have made for a better character arc overall. It would also have allowed the main story to feature the two of them trying to save as many people as possible even as their bodies slow begin to belong to demons. Remember that whole fighting against the grim dark bit?

Anyway, between mediocre game play, good art, and a story that made me legitimately uncomfortable through sheer darkness at a point or two, the game just wasn't for me. I guess I'd recommend it to people who are extremely into ntr and bad shit happening to good people.

Seeds of Chaos is an excellent VN with two maps to bring order to the huge amount of content. It is true that the fate of our protagonists is far from being decided.
As a good element, the story allows us to react in different ways to various situations, allowing us to influence the moral system individually for each main character in a much more noticeable way compared to other games of this style..
100% recommended if you like this type of game. By the way, the art is very good.