Based on ver 0.5.19c. Strive currently has the skeleton of a solid slave manager/brothel type game. It is of the "buy slave, train slave, sell for profit" genre similar to Jack o Nine Tails (but without the creepy cannibalism fixation). The UI and basic mechanics are workmanlike and in very playable condition. However, the "household management" functions are slightly limited and a little tiresome to actually manage.
Strive is text-based, and so non-unique slaves are largely ciphers of names, descriptions, and statistics--and there are lots of sex-related and not-sex-related numbers to juggle with no consistent or integrated way to see them all. Slaves have health, energy, stress, obedience, and a short list of more static physical and mental stats. You will have to swap screens to manage them all, and the presentations are very different between, say, the slave detail screen in the brothel, the "capture-a-slave-after-combat" interface, and the "equip-a-slave" screen. It's understandable, I guess, that some of the stats are hidden behind the "mind-reading spell" mechanic. That's a legitimate design choice. But it doesn't have to mean that managing those stats needs to be tedious--mind-reading is well integrated into the buy-a-slave screen, for instance, but shoddily done in its after-combat incarnation. The UI is otherwise functional, and you do get a slave spreadsheet that summarizes some of the important statistics for your whole contingent.
To make the game a little more visual, custom portraits and body images are supported--but you have to provide the images yourself. The Strive community is small but despite this there are a few image packs and even some mods floating around.
The quest content of the game appears to be either totally or nearly complete--unusual for this genre when still in development. The main quest appears to be playable from one end to the other, but it doesn't have a lot of depth in my opinion, and the first half feels like tutorial content. There are several side-quests that are mostly for obtaining NPCs as sorta-unique slaves. The "sandbox" mode is playable, but you do lose unique quest content by not playing the "story" mode.
***It also does appear that sandbox mode prevents you from discovering one merchant who sells critical alchemy items. You have to find them as exploration rewards, and that slows progression down to an enormous degree. This is a critical oversight.***
As for porn, though, the porny parts are almost completely isolated from the rest of the game. First, you have a handful of one-off events: text-and-image scenes with specific town NPCs and NPC slaves, some of which are only available in story mode. Like most games in this genre, you slaves can do night jobs, some of which are pornographic. Disappointingly, though, sexy night jobs (whore, exotic whore, etc.) are not described in the kind of detail that other slave management games provide. This is a porn failure for this game and takes away from the "brothel management" part of the game: when you assign a slave to whore herself, you're just doing it so that you get 50 more gold or whatever that evening, and not for any text porn you might have been hoping to read. You can rape defeated enemies in combat, but again this isn't fleshed out in the way one would expect in this genre.
The real bulk of the sex in the game is the "sex interaction" mode, where 100% of the text-based sex takes place. You pick a willing slave or three or ten, maybe add an assistant and some livestock (seriously), and then there are a wide variety of individual actions in the "interaction" screen that each produce one or two lines of fairly generic (but not badly written) text. A good imagination is recommended. However, I must commend the game on allowing you to have an orgy with, for instance, seven slaves and a dog and three horses, even if there isn't a whole lot for everyone to be doing at once. There is a credible attempt at allowing simultaneous interactions.
Even with a brothel management engine, combat engine, map exploration, a dozen or so races, unique enchantments, and the other RPG features that are already in the game's framework, the game still cries out for more content. The amount of work that the devs have done so for does show, but it feels as if there was much more intended to be included. I understand, though, that the game's main quest is complete, and that does not bode well for the prospects of further content. It would be a shame not to add more unique NPCs, more quests, and better-fleshed-out sex interactions. With the understanding that the game is still in active development, my final message is this: the skeleton is here, and it's nice to work with and look at, but we all know how much nicer it would be with meat on its bones.
