Unity - ThornSin [v0.6.8] [Scarlet Paper]

Reviewed version: 0.2.0

A... Curious effort at a side-scrolling rogue-lite. However, it has a great many flaws that leave much to be desired.

In points:

• Combat, or the game's main focus (-2*):
  • Floaty controls: sometimes if you jump too near a ledge, the girl won't jump. Sometimes when you click dodge she won't dodge. Attacks feel floaty and lack impact.
  • Camera zooms in too close; both your and enemy's movement speeds cover the entirety of your field of vision in moments and can get cheap hits (attack spamming is encouraged to stunlock whatever is approaching, especially on chapter 2-X where nearly everything has high movespeed).
  • There's occasionally rooms with unlocked respawning treasure chests, so you can get infinite gold, keys, healing and fill your item bar with whatever you want by going out of and back into that tile.
• Runtime & Lack of challenge (-1*):
  • Look, I played this thing on the hardest difficulty it had to offer. I took a grand total of three hits. All of them cheap shots. The boss showed up and got taken down without even grazing me, then I blitzed through to the next boss - but there isn't one, apparently. Game ends after 2-5. Cuts to black. "Here's your scoreboard".
  • In total, it took me 45 minutes (a playtime that was padded by searching every tile and even going AFK for a bit). That's not a great runtime.
  • And what's there isn't very interesting; there's a distinct lack of enemy variety so all the game can do is spawn more goons that get stunlocked or spawn one of the three things that don't but are easily dealt with anyway via dodging. I won on my first run, and that's when I didn't know what the hell I was doing, which brings me to my next point.
• Lack of information (-1*):
  • So you can't drop consumables once you pick 'em up, but the game won't tell you that (or if you can, I've no idea how). You get two consumable slots, so they're pretty important. But, here's the catch: the game won't tell you what a consumable does until after you picked it up! Some consumables do standard things; "+2 attack until the next room". Some do... Different things, such as making the girl ovulate. Now, if you're going for the "good girl" route this potion is actively harmful to you, but you won't know that it exists until you picked it up.
  • Sometimes, when you pick a relic you get good points. Sometimes, you get bad points. Most will give you none. The game won't tell you if an item you're considering will give you one or the other or none.
  • Most relics don't tell you what they do in numbers. "Increases attackspeed but decreases attack" - OK, but I'm hitting for 6-8 damage, how much will it decrease my attack by? "I'm not telling you!" "Increases lightning damage" - OK, by how much? "No comment!" and so on, and so forth.

Ultimately, when I completed my first run I felt no desire to keep going, and no amount of unlocks will fix that. Because the controls aren't tight, they're not responsive enough, the enemies aren't fun to fight and the camera zoom is obnoxious.
1/5.

It seems like it's going to be one of those rare gems. Content right now is only 1 or 2 levels I think, but the animations are very well done, the art is beautiful, you can customize the heroin's clothes (or have none), there is randomized levels and item collections, controls are responsive and combat is fun for 2d, there is pregnancy planned... I hope the list continues later with as much props to the creator. Highly recommend supporting them, ci-en is only 3.50 usd a month.

As of 0.2.5:
Birthing event + your children follow you and help you in combat. The child you bear is also randomized and also categorized based on what impregnated you. I love that concept. They are also starting to develop more roguelite pickups, but it definitely still needs a lot more expansion. Sex scenes continue to be great, the new one especially. High hopes still.

Animations are really good, girl is kinda ok too but combat pretty simple :/

Game is just ( for now ) loop of defeating monsters, getting items and repeating same on next ( same ) level.

but well if this game will have like few different "biomes" many monsters and sex i could evne pay for it, game is really good but also in very early "WIP" :x...

Taking 1 star from score because of simple combat... tbh all You need to do is to walk and spam attacks...

Dodge? Block? etc.? to make combat more dynamic / difficult...
currently You can "beat" game just by spam clicking :x...

wow, i didn't expect this game to improve like that.
after v 0.1.1 game improved a lot, visually it looks decent, more scenes, more lvls and costomization too,. gameplay is quite simple and enjoyable, too bad there isn't a galery mode or something like that, enjeyed my time,
9/10

This game has the potential to be one of the best side scrollers. good arts, good animation, fun gameplay (although quite easy). Still needs to be fully translated tho so that's why 4 stars instead of 5.

New details for v 0.1.1, old review in spoiler below.

Still a 3 currently, likely a 4 if farther into development.

Art is still good, though a bit of weird proportions still, which I talked about in the old review. Unfortunately a number of the sex scenes really look like they're braking bones, or the PC has no bones. In particular, the mimics require a shattered spine / no spine and werewolves a broken hip / pelvis.

The platforming s good, until you find the 2 rooms with thorns on the floor. One has a chest, and can be finicky to get to the top and the other has the mimic on it and makes it rather hard to dodge the mimic's attacks.

The game now has a working settings menu and translations. The items you can choose from in locked rooms or buy from shops have descriptions so you know what you're getting now.

The game now allows for 2 different (but locked) keyboard control sets. So you can now move with either wasd or arrows, attack/jump/dodge with jkl or zxc. It's not perfect, since some things don't acknowledge the second control system, like only E moves areas or grabs items. Also, the new wardrobe system only uses j to change the outfit parts.

The game still has issues with drop rates, where I frequently had a massive amount of coins with no shops spawning, or many keys but no rooms / chests to unlock, with the opposites frequently happening as well.

Getting chests and the shop with HP recovery in them is more frequent, but mostly requires coins or keys, see the last point. There is at least a rare chance for a chest to not require a key.

It would also be nice to have some kind of stat increase / progression for beating enemies (or a chance for enemies to drop HP / keys). Being able to jump right to area 2 could also help, since getting past the first 5 areas and a boss left me with almost no HP both times I got there.

I love the side scrollers and this game have a good vibe in that category, I hope this will not turn into another abandoned project like the usual tipe of game that has a good launch and then a huge fallout

v0.0.2

• Pretty good aesthetics
• Decent metroidvania gameplay
• Hstatus tab in the pause menu looks interesting. Can't read it because chinese but it seems to keep record of sexual acts like blowjob, penetration, and fertility based on the images.

Nothing too impressive.

Very early demo so the review may be harsh and prove to be wrong in the future, so consider it more like a warning, but playing this demo I already suspect that the final product will be a generic, bland Japanese game like there are countless on this site, where you grind boring levels for 1 hour then regret not having just watched the gallery instead. Basically it seems to me that the developer has no clue about game design and hopes to be carried by their art, copying things that exist in other games but without understanding their purpose.

The gameplay and art is extremely similar to Night of Revenge, which is a good sign, but your hopes will likely get ruined fast.

Most glaring issue, the gameplay is boring after 30 sec and essentially revolves around spamming the attack button. The enemies are slow and very easy to kill since your weapon stun-locks them, yet they take 3 hits to die, so you need to spend 1 minute mashing one key until the room is cleared, and even though you can literally run past enemies without taking damage (yes, they are that slow) the game still forces you to kill them just to advance.

In a massive game design paradox, you have to take damage to see sex, BUT the enemies are too slow to inflict damage, and even when they manage to, you can escape the animation by pressing the struggle key ONCE (I even did it accidentally), so this is yet another of these games where you have to intentionally lose to see something.

There does not seem to be any advanced mechanics like combo-ing or dodging, the keys are there but you can do everything without them, just spammed the same key repeatedly and got a 30-hit "combo" (do you understand why it's called combo?). Even for a demo, this is very weak. The levels feel empty, there are platforms which serve no gameplay purpose, if you fall you can retry without consequence and this is just annoying. For only 2 enemies there are already ~10 screens and locked rooms which make the game feel like a labyrinth.

The art style looks good at first, but it is not that great in practice, the 2 scenes are very zoomed out and don't show much "flesh" anyway, so you don't really see much sex, the animations also have creampie sound but AGAIN you don't see any of it. Dev, this is a porn game, it is FINE to show the sex in it.

Other minor but concerning issues: the controls are terrible, you need to use the mouse in menu, then it plays with keyboard, and in fact the key are mapped at the opposite sides of the keyboard so it requires two hands to play even though 95% of the time you'll probably only do 3 things move, jump and attack.

The ambience and background are honestly well made but it would have been great to have just one sentence explaining the plot or an introductory picture to set up the mood, idk, so we can feel interested in the heroine.

Night of Revenge is exactly this game but better in every single point. Having low amount of content is acceptable and can be fixed later, but the game design issues are not and need to be fixed now.

I've played demos on this site that had even less content, yet were still able to show engaging gameplay and appealing art.

This game and SiNiSistar 2 are the two games im really looking forward to, although there arent much content at the moment, after playing the demo and reading the ci-en article i can see that the dev is very ambitious when making this one, with such beautiful graphic, stunning main character, many AI behaviors and many things more in the future. I think this game is gonna be wholesome when it is fully released! Man i am unesessarily hyped up againLets just chill for now and support the dev, hope he will successfully polish this gem.

Potential to become another quality game like Alien Quest Eve by GrimHelm

Art is great. Animations are great (2) and combat is fluid.

You an tell a lot of work went into this despite being low amount of content.