If you like the complex management games that SsethTzeentach usually reviews, this might scratch your itch... obsessively, for a bit, and then you'll put it down and maybe pick it up again and maybe not. Allow me to explain.
Unlike a lot of other adult games, this one does not start off slow. The game begins with the player trying to gather up money to pay off loan sharks (this does not qualify as a spoiler, it's explained in the first dialogue interaction), and this does a really great job of creating urgency and forcing the player to figure out the game systems and hustle to get that bread. Very engaging, took me a couple of tries to feel confident.
But after that gets resolved, for me at least, the honeymoon period was over. The bones of something really good are in here, but the current state of the game (0.10.2 at time of review) is really, and I mean really clunky.
This game is fundamentally a management sim, with the player character taking the role of a disgusting nouveau riche swine who runs basically a woman sex trafficking farm. Just to be clear, I'm not objecting to that second part at all; I personally dislike the story trope of upwardly-mobile characters being portrayed as simultaneously naïve to the evil ways of the high society they barged into uninvited while also being shown as virtuous and clever. It's a symptom of a culture that fundamentally misunderstands the value of hard work and also I just personally hate the middle class in general.
Be that as it may, the player is quickly going to find that being the owner of a woman farm slave harem consists of a lot less of wild fucking and a lot more of tedious micromanagement. Like the rest of the game, this actually works pretty well at first. I can stand figuring out how to optimize wood collection logistics if I am collecting the wood to build a bigger bedroom so I can have bigger orgies, there is a very straightforward effort/reward curve there. But when I'm having to waste precious time clicking through menu screens to re-assign the FUCKING HAMMER to the FUCKING SLAVES so they can HARVEST SUGAR CANE or whatever faster because I re-assigned them from something else for the FIVE THOUSANDTH TIME because this game DOESN'T HAVE A WAY TO AUTOMATE ANY OF THAT SHIT... it gets old.
Industrial Light and Magic, back in the days when Star Wars was still this weird cool thing made by an autistic flannel-wearing guy, had this term, "greebling" for a technique they used on scale models of starships to make them look bigger. Basically it consists of adding lots of little details to models (by sort of fractal-tiling the surface with bits of lots of model kits) to make them look larger.
That's a pretty good metaphor for the current state of the game. There's a bunch of tiny detail mechanics that you can have fun juggling... until your brain runs out of dopamine. There are a lot of mechanics here, and some of them have interesting interactions that will get you to spend time toying with different builds and optimizations and concepts, if you're into that sort of sandbox type shit. But after a while you'll realize that a lot of it is greebling. A lot of this game is complexity with no real purpose or deep interaction.
This game reminds me of a 4X game from the mid 2000s; very fun at first, but as the game drags on the lack of adequate automation mechanics means that each turn takes longer and longer as you need to micromanage more and more variables in your growing sex slave empire. While I think everyone needs to know that actually running a sex slave empire in real life does involve a lot of paperwork and personnel management and other tedium, I, personally, am looking for a game that presents an idealized, fun fantasy version of running a sex slave empire. The moment that the pressure lets off from having to repay the loan sharks, the player is free to explore their own concept of what it means to operate a sex farm... and that freedom rapidly starts to feel like a second job.
Just like a second job, this game aggressively consumes your time. I don't mean that in the fun, "it's addictive, just one more turn!" kind of way. It's sort of like that at first, but as I played for a while I started noticing, and then being irritated by several parts of the game that cannot be sped up. There is no way to speed up the animation of swords crossing and going "ting!" before each battle. It was cool the first time. Maybe even the fifth time. It is not cool enough for me to tolerate for an entire playthrough, not just because I tire of hearing the "ting!" noise but also because watching the animation each battle wastes my fucking time and makes the comparatively uninspired battle system seem that much more like a chore.
Combat is a chore, by the way. There are dozens of fairly obvious, and probably several more fairly un-obvious ways to snap the combat system over your knee like kindling and it will rapidly begin to feel like something that merely exists to get in between you and the management and sex parts of the game. Yeah, you read that right; the combat in this game is so bad that I thought the parts where you're navigating a goddamn spreadsheet determining which of your sex slaves is the most efficient at harvesting winged gnoll ear wax or whatever to be more engaging than the combat after a while. I even found the dungeon crawls where you bust into a dungeon, kill a bunch of fools and take the survivors as slaves to be tiresome after a while because of the combat part. Attacking people who are minding their own goddamn business and randomly killing a bunch and then taking the survivors to be your sex slaves should be some of the most asshole-tighteningly cool stuff you can simulate in a game, but somehow this game has such tiresome combat that it makes pillaging and raping un-fun after a while.
My next complaint is all the jank. If you want to enjoy this game, I sure hope you played a bunch of ambitious, but unpolished Flash games as a child. That formative experience and the rose tint of your nostalgia goggles will help you enjoy the experience of this game more, because it's going to be very reminiscent. The interface is fucking obtuse. Why is the screen which shows the character's next level up class not also a screen which shows the classes the character's pre-existing classes? Why is the screen which shows the character's pre-existing classes the screen which is used to determine whether they will prioritize eating fish or vegetables and also how I should sexually torture them that day to break their spirit? Why does clicking vs. double clicking cause such inconsistent effects when interacting with buttons on the screen? Why do some buttons with an "x" icon to close a sub-menu require you to click on the outline of the actual letter "x" inside of the square rather than being able to click anywhere in the square the way it usually works? Why does the interface randomly hang for a split second after certain events? Why are the stats on items and characters not always listed in a consistent order?
I'm not enumerating all of these issues to own the developer or anything; UI design is actually pretty hard, and even a lot of professionally-produced games had horrible UIs in, say, the 2000s. It is a difficult enough art that they hadn't figured it out back then. But even though it is hard to code a great game UI, I would be lying if I said anything other than this game has an objectively bad UI.
I'll try to end this review on a good note, because I did enjoy playing this game, at least at first, and I think there are some good aspects. The text-based sex minigame is... actually pretty cool. The game uses descriptions of what each of the up to five participants are doing and to whom to develop a contextual text description of the sex scene. This is a modest number of personnel for an orgy, but I salute the effort that went into a turn-based orgy simulator nonetheless. The game does not really have a robust system for determining whether what you are describing is actually physically possible or not; whether that is a turn-on for you personally I don't know. Occasionally it fucks up the grammar of the text output for no obvious reason, and fucks up the context buttons for equally mysterious reasons, but that can and probably will get fixed at some point. The Marquis de Sade would lose his fucking mind if he had a toy like this. Well, I mean, more than he did anyway, the guy was pretty nuts.
There are also more traditional game CGs for sex scenes with the main characters, and the art is pretty good.
The writing is serviceable, and I even chuckled once or twice. The main plot quest guidance provided in the journal is extremely robust and I never found myself milling around trying to figure out what it was I was supposed to be doing. The only times I got lost were when I forgot what I was doing because the plot seemed kinda basic TBH and I thought it would be more fun to run a eugenics program at my sex farm instead. But that's mostly on me, really.
Anyway, I hope the developer keeps at it. The bones of something good are in here, and like I said, at first I found that the game really reached out and grabbed me by providing unexpected resistance in the form of an opening act that has actual mechanical challenge and urgency. But after that it was sort of like trying to masturbate with extremely fine grit sandpaper; no matter how much oil is used the irritation just kept building and I gave up.
