VN - Unity - Abandoned - The Spellbook [v0.20.0.0] [NaughtyGames]

Some really weird decisions in this one.

First there is a ridiculously long transition to get to the main menu and no options in game and no rollback. The game also stalls for several seconds all over the place.

The player is giving ridiculously cringy choices and as for paths its love or ntr there is no corruption without ntr so it's trash.

MC is ok but has a tomboy girlfriend and is so stupid he tells his immature friends about his magic book. His 'friends' who you also cant stop from groping your interests.

Pretty good game, great renders, good models and fap content.
Spellbook contains two games in one.
On one hand you have the classic incest shenanigans. It doesn't reinvent the wheel but that's the point of incest games.
On the other we have a ntr focused game around the mc family and friends.
So if you're into incest or ntr this game has content for you.

I'll be honest. I really didn't get very far into this. There was so much bad, I had a hard time finding anything good to keep going. There's not much to say that hasn't already been said by other, likely more extensive, reviews than my own but felt the need to add to the reviews because I just really don't get how this has even 3.5 stars at the time of writing this.

The story is bad. Completely cliche and rushed lines right out of the starting gate. And I mean everything is rushed. From the sex scenes to the transitions to the regular plot lines. Hell, it's clear even the devs rushed creating it as the story sometimes backtracks on itself by repeating lines and scenes. Or like in one sex scene, the lines talk about the MC blasting his load only for the associated renders to come around like 5 images later. Entirely disjointed. And that's overlooking the endless run of spelling/grammar mistakes.

Then comes the UI which is just bad enough to be on the verge of infuriating. No backing up dialogue. Saves don't actually save where you want it saved. Story goes by super fast but some scene transitions are obnoxiously slow. And yeah. Preferences screen is a complete joke.

Honestly, it's really not worth the time to download the nearly 7gigs, even free.

Version: 0.20.0.0
Chosen path : NTR


The Spellbook is a mediocre visual novel that follow the story of a generic MC who has a penis for brain and transform every women he love into a slut by corrupting their mind with a magical book.

The focus, at least in the path I played, was Incest(mother&son and brother&sister, if you use the right keywords), Mind corruption, Netorare, Femsub, Maledom.
The minor kinks and I'm sure there are more( I just didn't bother to see them all) were: Sole woman with men, Voyeurism, Older female with younger male, cheating, stealth sex, Blackmail, Lesbian, etc.

Bad:

• Visually uninspired.
• The 3d model of the main character and his friend are without real personality. The boys have zero charisma and the mc look like all the others mc from any generic porn game with 3DCG.
• Some little problems of consistency between scenes(change of hair cut) same for small typo in writing.
• Rushed introduction with a stupid plot setup that set the tone for the rest of the story.
• The little ad segment that fantasizes about the fact that the game studio is a renowned game studio and has is own convention combined with the permanent Patreon/Subscribestar in the left corner of the screen is a bit much. But may be I'm cherry picking there because in the end I am still able to play the game for free.
• Dialogues worthy of the most braindead porn movie, cringe and without subtlety. Clumsy writing and a story that moves too quickly . The reactions of the characters are again, the same as bad porn actors. In a way, that's what you would expect from a porn game, in the other, a game with heavy writing that is supposed to be a Visual Novel need to be qualitative about his writing.
• Unity may not be the best choice of engine for this game. The files of the game are big for nothing, no backlog, no rollback and the save doesn't load were you saved but at the beginning of the scene.

Good:

• Some scenes are nice, their ideas at least, but once again poorly done and not believable.
• Being able to change the transparency of the dialog window.

So is it fapable at least? I guess so, there is a variety of scenes and kinks and a little replayability with the differents path. It's not the worse, it's just mediocre. Count maybe my rating as a low 2.5 ✰.

There are two main paths, a vanilla path and a spicy/NTR path. While the vanilla path is boring imo, the NTR path is very exciting. Both paths have a linear story and make sense per se.

Renders are beautiful, writing is good. The best part is how the sex scenes are written, one of the best in any VN!

The animations are a bit slow, sometimes my game crashes even. Also this game fails to have the basic mechanics like rollback, the skipping is too fast.

The game has an inbuilt game updater which is quite useful.

The good:
Models are beautiful.
Sex scenes are very hot.
That's about it. Funny thing - that's actually enough for the porn game to be good, even if everything else in the game is bad. Speaking of...
The bad:
They failed at realization of basic VN mechanics. No rollback, no log, no text speed option. Thank god they did made the skip function. Which still feels to be going too quickly and can just stop randomly. But it is essential because
Dialogue is bad. It's mostly cringe, with a pinch of repetitiveness. And remember - no rollback, no log. So if you lost attention and clicked through beginning of interesting part - sucks to be you.
There is a lack of transitions - too often locations switch suddenly, from replica to replica. Simultaneously those transitions that are there are very long and unskippable - you'll have to watch the screen with the word "meanwhile" for about 3 seconds.
Speaking of unskippable things. 20 second disclaimer on each entrance to main menu. Why?...
Sex scenes can sometimes lock you into non-skippable animation as well.
Gallery is there. But it's buggy - you can get stuck on black screen or character names can get reset. And it can only be accessed from inside loaded game, not from main menu.
There is a hilarious "options" menu. There is exactly one option there: audio volume. Which only affects music, not SFX. You'll find it out because the first thing that you'll get after starting the game is a loud school ring SFX.
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But as i said - "porn" part of the game is good, so overall it is a good porn game. It would benefit greatly from being made on good old Ren'py, or at least proper re-creation of it's VN mechanisms.

The game is good, the characters are okay, the visuals are amazing, but it's a buggy mess. After some time, everyone experiences a black screen problem that the developers don't bother to solve.
I mean, they said they would fix it and we just need to use the update tool, but the update tool doesn't work. There's no connection; the servers probably weren't even online.

Why bother with an update tool anyway? They could simply make the files available and be done with it. Now we have months old bug that we can't solve in any way.

Really disappointing, developers.

a masterpiece. the artwork and choices are great. I really loved the animations. the corruption route is great. it is a wild journey. looking forward to all the updates. keep it up. dont put it on hold.

Oh my god, i can't believe how hilariously bad this game is. The only good thing about this game is the renders and the animations. But the rest is so bad.
I dont understand why so many devs have this fantasy of creating a Beta pussy MC. Why cant you have an MC who is confident or at least becomes confident when you have a magical book or a fairy at your command.

The girls jerk the MC around so much, specially the girlfriend. Her character is such a bitch, whom the MC cant even fuck properly even with the Magic corruption.
In the end i will only say, that with so much pussy to go around in this game, the MC is the biggest pussy here.

PS - Also using unity is such a bad idea. At the end some where the screen just went blank and i had no idea what to do. With no auto saves, i just deleted the game all together.

Quality dropping day by day and lets not forget new chapter upload is extremly slow. In the past I might say it had potential but right know it became a milk machine for patreon donators. We are living hentai golden age, when we have bulks of great titles don't waste your time on this

I saw the cover and a bit of the synopsis of the game (which seemed normal to me) and I thought this game was going to be good because of its design, I thought it was going to have a good animation... I was disappointed, apart from the story is pretty mediocre ...

THE GOOD
I think the only good thing that I can highlight are the renders, the setting, the characters, everything is done in an excellent way, good modeling of the waifus and the other secondary characters look good too and the setting too... but I only highlight that, but on the other hand...

THE BAD
The plot is complete rubbish... BEWARE this is from my point of view. But seriously speaking, I played it as far as I could but it really seemed boring and the plot of this game was poorly developed... it's as if all the budget has gone into the design/drawing/modeling and in terms of plot 1%. There really isn't any other sound apart from the background music that sometimes plays. There are no animations, only the render of the scene and now, if suddenly there were animations, I would play it until the end but I preferred not to.
No moans.

THINGS TO IMPROVE
I really don't know what can be improved, because I would say the plot, add animations, add different music for each scene... but by saying this it would be up to the creator to make a new game...

FROM MY POINT OF VIEW, this game is not worth it, I mean they are just images with a poorly developed story and little argumentative content. I mean if you just want to see static 18+ scenes, search on google and that's it, don't waste your time here when you can play another game with a better plot, animations, atmosphere, etc. I give credit to the creator for the modeling, but the truth is that the story lacked a lot in terms of plot, well I wouldn't recommend playing it anyway.

Summary:
o Character Design/Visual: 4.5/5
o Background music/sound: 2/5
o Plot:1/5
o Animation: 0.5/5
o +18 Scenes: 4/5
o Gameplay: 3.5/5
o Interface: 4/5

Another case of what could have been a really good game torpedoed by bad writing.

There are two paths you can follow Love or NTR and neither is very good. The love path is devoid of actual love, I'm not sure the Devs understand what that even means and the NTR path is complete garbage.

The MC is a whiney idiot either way, the only difference is the NTR one has more crying and bitching. It's no wonder the MC can't get laid without a book of spells. He has no clue how to actually talk to women or how to treat them.

I don't know what Devs have against the name David but if the MC has a friend or sidekick in V/Ns named David you can be fairly sure they will be an annoying, useless piece of garbage, no exception here. He's not only butt ugly but an even bigger cry baby than the MC. Any female who would even consider touching him for ANY reason, even a magic book isn't worth the time of day.

It seems a lot of Devs can learn to make good looking games but can't learn to actually write a good story line. Maybe they should learn to write first then teach themselves the rest after.

What a waste of potential.

v0.19.5.5

One of the best models, renders and animations. Lewd scenes are to die for, especially the NTR route(sadly, or maybe understandably).

But to be frank that is all to it. There's almost no reason to be emotional invested in the story. Writing is quite amateurish, the story is literally a teen's wet dream. Storyline is pretty incoherent, lots of inconsistencies and the narrative is all over the place. Plot is not well thought out and kinda disappointing. Dialogues don't feel natural and organic.

Protagonist is really unlikeable, just another stupid, dumb teenager trying to get some pussies and getting lucky. The love interests have pretty shallow characters and backstories, really disappointed considering they have beautiful models and quality facial expressions. Though worth of note there are some attempts on creating somewhat of a decent plotline for some of the female routes, like the sister(i hope it gets better, her storyline so far is the most promising and has great potential, non-ntr route of cos).

That said, believe this is still early in development? At least thats what it seems to me. Then again quite a lot of chapters are out, chapters are short though. So perhaps the bulk of the storyline is yet to come, moreover the game has yet to receive polish. Really hope the dev review the narrative and put in extra effort towards the story. Right now the models & animations are single-handedly carrying the game. Imagine if it had a solid narrative & well crafted characters to compliment it.

If you plan to play this game, my recommendation is don't.

I know what you're thinking; that the renders for this game look good, and that it seems to get a decent amount of updates. However, that's all it really has going for it.

The story is the game's biggest failing. It's terrible, even by porn standards. I can work past a bad English translation (even if this game's English is worse than most), but nothing can fix bad writing. Characters behave inconsistently, there is very little coherent plot other than what is needed to move you to the next sex scene, and the central premise of the game is largely ignored after the introduction.

No matter which path you choose, it's a hot mess. The MC starts as a whiny, apologetic crybaby, and never moves much past that point (I didn't feel bad about going down the NTR path, considering how unlikable the MC is to begin with). The women are hot, but are all completely insane. The domination path seems more like them dominating the MC rather than the other way around. The impression I have is that the spell the MC cast isn't working properly (since it makes women slutty, but also incredibly jealous), but he never thinks to go back the spellbook to learn more and try to fix it. (Remember the spellbook? The thing that's in the title of the game?)

The absence of sound (which is not a fatal flaw in my opinion), the lack of rollback, the clunky UI, and the unskippable animations are all just the icing. I could forgive those things and scrape them off, but the cake of the game is the story, and it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Bottom line; if you really want to see this game's renders, then just exact them from the game files. I had a better time making up my own scenarios looking at the renders than what the game's story provided. I feel bad having to give this game a poor rating considering the quality of the rendering, which is definitely made by someone with talent, but unfortunately that talent did not transfer to the writing.

Played this awhile ago, came back to current update- [19.0.0].

Overall, artwork-renders and animations are decent for this day and age. Characters all have their unique style as opposed to the copycat daz dime-a-dozen you see elsewhere.

Dialogue is passable, not the greatest, not the worst, but at least it seems to avoid translation/proofreeding issues.

So based on the aforementioned, did I misclick the rating? No, for a single reason.

The interface is terrible. Still has the bug where it'll be stuck skipping large swaths of text after using the ctrl skip key. Still has a cumbersome load/save system. Still has no kind of rollback feature - which is especially frustrating given the lack of telegraphing in decision menu prompts- (Yes? No. )

And finally, my personal pet peeve which would condemn any game to a 1 star review if I rated them all: UNSKIPPABLE lengthy animations.

To me, nothing shows more contempt to the player or arrogance by the dev than forcing players to watch any animation longer than 5 seconds. They know they have a captive audience, and unlike traditional video games where you can just do something else (say you think some RTS has bad building animations) - in AVNs that's the sole stream of information/entertainment.

If your animations are good, the player should WANT to watch them, you needn't worry about making sure they don't skip them if they're high quality.

Played through the harem dark path. currently playing the harem love path. The haram dark path left lots of options to be able to play and get the content that you want. really looking forward to seeing how the author finishes each story. Not easy to do multiple paths really well, but the author hits the points very well.

Edit: The submissive/cuck path is fucking brutal.

Truly one of the best games if you care about choices and consequences. I love how low you can sink or how cool you can be. Many kinks are satisfied and the renders look great. A fresh outlook on a tried and true trope but is still very satisfying based on the choices you make. Awesome game highly recommend.

This may be the best porn game ever, the animations, the models, the paths...

Man, if i wouldnt play Being a Dik and some other titles before i would put this game in my TOP 1

For real, there is not much to say about it, just play it, of all the games i played since 2016 ( porn games: renpy, rpgm, unity, UE4... ETC) this has one of the best animations, sex scenes, i've ever seen

I can say with shame that i don t last much playing it every time i decide to...you know what i mean

Mates, play it

Wow Wow Wow! This game is just an all you can eat buffet of great renders, animations, and scenes. If you're looking for a quick fap this game is perfect for you! On the flip side the only cons is the story is not that deep and fairly linear. However, who the hell cares?

This game has some of the best animation scenes i have ever seen! Just a ridiculous amount of content! Every fetish and scenario you could ever think of within reason of course is included in this game! A truly hidden gem that is a travesty it isn't receiving as much attention as it should be.

It's a fucking masterpiece!
- Excelent renders
- Captivating story
- A lot os choices for a lot of fetishs
- The game engine is not laggy

I missed more femdom and submissive cuckold humiliation scenes (like licking another man's cum in a girl's pussy), but that's my opinion.