Tried a new game, thought I'd just write a couple of paragraphs—that didn't quite go to plan...
Nephilim by BuuPlays
This is another of those games that I’ve seen recommended a lot and wanted to give a try. Now, I have tried several fantasy games so far, because I like the genre in books and TV/film, but I rarely find a fantasy AVN that works for me. This one started out pretty decent, and I thought it might buck the trend, but sadly it didn’t last.
The graphics are pretty good, and there are a lot of nice LIs in the game (and I mean a
lot, which is actually part of the problem), but the story just didn’t make enough sense to me, and once the fantasy elements started getting too much, the writing was on the wall for this one.
What I liked: Other than the graphics and quality of the girls as mentioned above, I liked that (although slow) the start of the game did a pretty good job of creating a story, and a bit of (physical) worldbuilding. There was a good build-up of relationship with Eliza as the first “main girl”, and I thought in isolation that could give us a really good LI. There’s a choice (actually, it came up a second time much later in the game, too) between harem and non-harem, and although it was basically a tick-box exercise, I thought it was covered adequately in the dialogue. Once you start to develop relationships with other LIs, everything is choice driven, then eventually you get the option to “lock in” a relationship, after which sex scenes with that locked-in LI no longer require you to say “yes” or “no”, they just happen.
What I didn’t like: I mentioned the story not making enough sense to me, and this is largely around Eliza. You spend the start of the game getting close to her, kissing her a lot, building the relationship, professing your love for each other, and eventually exchanging oral sex in a couple of scenes, but no actual sex (until later on in the game). Then she is attacked and paralysed and you go desperately hunting around the city for some magic to cure her, during the course of which you can choose with one female vendor "Yeah, go on then, I could do with a fuck to take my mind off things", and then go on (not during the same night) to fuck a few other women quite readily too, while your “love” is lying in a bed with no feeling below her waist.
I also felt that it should be obvious to lock in Eliza first as she is clearly the main, and first, LI (presuming you choose to follow her path), but you get the chance to lock in several other LIs before being presented the choice to do so with Eliza, and I thought that was a bit odd. Once the game progressed past a certain point, it really started to feel that it was just throwing LIs at me in a never-ending barrage. While the vast majority of these looked really good, it was just too much. Once I decided to bail, I utilised the skip function to run through and get a bit of an idea how the rest of the game so far would go, and at one point it felt pretty much like “choice to lock in X LI, sex scene, choice to lock in Y LI, sex scene, choice to lock in Z LI…” and so on.
As far as the fantasy elements go, they just quickly became too much for me. I think in these games I must prefer something a just bit more subtle than eye lasers, vampire cures, having sex with stone idols, portals to have sex with goddesses, etc.
I haven’t done my usual LI cards because there were just so many LIs in the game and apart from some of the earlier ones (e.g., Eliza, Alice, Sylph), I just couldn’t make a connection with any of them. Going through and looking for images, then trying to hunt down names for them all, would have been too thankless a task even for me!