I came across this thread a couple days ago looking to play a game with battlefuck mechanics. A lot of the reviews on this thread are older, which always makes me doubt how well a game will hold up. Upon downloading it, I also realized that I'd downloaded, played, and given up on this game after a couple of hours back in 2020.
This time around, I ended up really enjoying my experience. However, there's a fundamental paradox to this game - it's a fun roguelite where sex is the main mechanic, but it still manages to not be particularly fappable. On the bright side, the game provides great "recollection" features if there's scenes you would like to watch again and a highly enjoyable core gameplay loop.
In the game, you wake up each day and wander around town processing loot from the night before and collecting buffs. The four benefits you can level up are associated with four girls: The "main girl" cooks you food that lets you walk farther in the tower and gives % boosts to your stats, the "scientist girl" gives you random good/bad passives, the "shopkeeper girl (futa)" expands her stock as she levels up, and her sister the "lockpick girl" opens chests more effectively as she levels up.
Once you've done what you need in the town, you step into the tower, either onto the first level, or you can skip to any level that you have already reached. Most of the levels (other than the ones with bosses) are randomized every time. In the tower, you walk around grabbing items, avoiding encounters and searching for the stairs in real time. When you fail to avoid an encounter, you end up sex battling a monster girl or succubus to survive. Each girl has weaknesses you can view with skills and remember for later runs, which provides a pleasant "ramp up" of game knowledge that makes you stronger through better decision making. However, once you get good enough equipment, spamming "Caress" (basic attack) and "Deep Breath" (the basic healing skill) will get you through most encounters. Nonetheless, the game does a good job of encouraging the use of particular skills for certain situations/girls. There are also a number of non-combat NPCs spread throughout the tower, who will provide positive/negative buffs to further mutate gameplay. Once you speak to them in the tower, they also show up in the town between runs, which was a cool feature.
Once you lose or decide to leave the tower, you go back to the town at night. Here, you can let the girls I mentioned before "drain" your levels to level up (you can guess how they do it
). If you go to sleep with levels remaining, "Torte" the "big bad" succubus will drain your levels instead. I found the lockpick girl to be the most useful, although I also leveled the store clerk and "main girl" a little bit. The scientist girl seemed kinda useless, but maybe she's good at high levels.
Although I really enjoyed this game, there were some things that held it back from being 5 stars for me. For one, the RPGM engine isn't my favorite, and although this game pushes the limits of it, simple things like the resolution (and how blurry it looks fullscreened) pulled down the experience. Another issue for me was the progression. I spent about 3 or 4 hours on the first 16 levels of the tower (up to the second boss) who beat me a few times. However, once I got a run past that second boss, I proceeded to roll the remaining 30-odd levels of the tower in the same run (with my main concern being running out of "sanity", which allows you to move through the tower without a massive debuff). The way you get items is random and seems a little arbitrary, so much of my run's success had to do with getting the "Healing Ring" which was both best in slot for most stats, and also provides full immunity to all status effects in the game. However, items are kept permanently, so picking this up trivialized a lot of the game (the normal power curve does involve stacking more and more items with debuff resists, but this item made many would-be upgrades meaningless. Notably, it led to me beating the game with all of the girls in town at level 20 or lower (each maxes at 100). In the game's defense, there are two harder difficulties (I was on "Normal") that I haven't tried, and other incentives to keep playing after winning.
Altogether, I achieved my first ending right before the 6 hour mark, and had a lot of fun playing. There are 5 more endings and numerous other scenes I could grind to unlock by leveling up girls (this would probably take 10+ hours- my successful run took almost two hours and ended with me a little past level 50, so grinding 500 levels for the girls (4 helpers + Torte) would clearly take a while.
As I've said throughout the review, I had a lot of fun playing this game, and was debating even giving it 5 stars. However, in addition to some of the balance issues mentioned above, I found an annoying bug when winning a battle with Nicola in the tower, which crashes the game. This is seriously a bummer, since you can't save on randomized levels, so you can lose 40 minutes or more if not prepared to avoid this bug. I see posts from 2019 and so about a patch, but wasn't able to track it down myself. I would be tempted to play more of the endgame, and might come back to this title, but for the time being want to play some of the other games created by this circle, since this game was quite enjoyable.