It didn't get named here recently, but
Healslut has got a few more updates. The story didn't progress very far from
that frontier port town, but there's another
mindfuck backstory scene with
Lel. We discussed here before what the hell's going on with her. I must say it isn't what I thought. And it has implications for the
"game" world too.
Some of you may like
Transylvania. It's a HTML horror adventure, not in the
usual way that HTML games are horror but it features monsters, magic and forced feminisation with a unique drawn style. The game is imo more oriented to submissive playthroughs but you can get a dominant stat with a bit of grind. And I think you can't avoid feminisation becoming "permanent" after passing the first day. Personally I disliked the time management element and I felt the transformation into a
succubus foreshadowed submission to garbage dudes, but I could be wrong there. I hope so.
I expect most of you who care know already but Talothral has a new game out:
Tribulations of a Mage. Again with a tall, bearded and emotionally distant male protag, but this time he's an initiated mage in like a high-fantasy world. I can't comment too much on the plot now, but it's got plenty of action and drama for a 0.2. It's typical Talothral, so expect detailed world building, automatic sex scenes without narration and
hic fuerunt (futura sint?) serracula (uxorum).
It's not story first, but I know some of you like BDSM that's more grounded than "capture someone, abuse them long enough and presto, a lust crest appears". In a sense
Bindr gives that. It's about a dev who made a kink dating app and got rich. It's an excuse for him to play the field so expect a bit of a fuckfest. The dates are structured as an intro where they discuss kinks and limits with options to chicken out and then there's a series of sex scenes that you can choose when it ends. The intensity of the BDSM is usually low or mid, except that the bondage in some scenes, really
Soumiya's later scene, is like totally insane at that stage. The scenes end without after care. You can choose between sub, dom or switch roles, choices add up to a meter that I think locks you out of some scenes. There are fantasy bonus scenes too that are a little wilder. So its groundedness may be high mid in the end. May be hit or miss for you.
So I tried Superhuman. I'll preface with saying that I'm probably very early into the game's story and yet... My expectations were probably overinflated by all the praise it's gotten here but I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed.
It's not anything big, but a plethora of small things that kept grating me while playing. The visual style is, to not offend anyone, amateurish and sub par. I get why the author went for it because there's no way 3dcg would be able to visualize all the things that are in the game, but at the same time it probably would have been better to not go with any images rather than this. Not everyone can be Elvensang when it comes to amateur art and with text only would serve the mood of the game even better.
Gameplay aspect feels like it's actively fighting against the story with how janky and unintuitive time slots and optional stories are. Am I missing something when I choose one option over the other? Some of them become unavailable later and some have effect on main story and there's no way to know. It also hurts narrative integrity of those optional side stories because they have to be written in a time agnostic manner to be playable at any point and they feel irrelevant. Sandbox just breaks my narrative immersion.
The main plot itself is fine. Good, even. But, man, the characters I just can't give more than 0 shits about. I'm probably going to keep playing to see what happens in the main plot, but no joke, my favourite character so far is a fucking dog. The game also struggles with establishing the setting with the world being this weird mishmash of contemporary and some weird half-dystopia that is not clearly defined. There are many cases of fourth-wall breaking humour, self-referential jokes and copious lampshading of the tropes used which is funny... first 10 times.
I played it over a year ago and my opinion was kinda similar, but not the same. I couldn't get in the style and didn't really like the MC and hated
that goth girl.
And that's an achievement for me! My favourite character is probably the
black genius mentor idiot friend. The superpower element felt a bit like a power fantasy isekai to me. That a lot of the training was blind decreased the power fantasy element I guess, but it's not a mechanic I like.
The vague contemporary-dystopian setting and the strange style did contribute to a very gloomy atmosphere that works well for the game, I gotta say.
Brother, you're living life on the edge a bit here. This is probably the least meme-friendly thread on the entire site, and I don't know if we're collectively ready for change. After two years, I think the closest we've come to a meme of our own is that every now and then someone kids jufot about his shocking (alleged) bias against college VNs.
You might have noticed I tactfully avoided any mention of Superhuman technically being a college VN...considering the MC has pretty much dropped out now anyway, I felt like I should pick and choose my battles. Luckily, my secret is safe because jufot never reads inline spoilers. Whew, that's a relief.
Actually, come to think of it, our lack of memes may be less about thread culture and more about Raife just not being confident enough in his Photoshop skills yet. If someone gets the right book for him as a Christmas present, our world may never again be the same.
That's like
old now, though.
And there's no "alleged" about it, the good man's completely open about the bias, like yours truly. Agree that Superhuman doesn't feel like a college game. And for me the real problem with that genre isn't that they're set in a college or uni, it's that they don't feel like a university but like an American high school movie often with a paramilitary bully brigade and a
prostitution sorority. So it's people playing this fiction trope straight that's the issue for me.
But if you want homemade memes, I've got them. Some are even SFW.
No smartphones OR social media: it was paradise on earth. To entertain ourselves, we had sex... LOTS of sex. With no memes to distract us, there were other fun activities to enjoy.
So this man's previous life puts the average MC to shame, but he dislikes fuckfests in
adult porn games?