HTML - Unholy Arts [v0.4.6] [Deep Interactivity]

Great Game

The story is captivating and easy to follow. The girls are very well written, each with unique personalities, backgrounds, and fun dialogues. (My personal favorite is the shapeshifter girl, btw.) Every character, even the side characters, feels "alive" with how they talk, creating a sense of realism and immersion in the world building.

The game's combat is balanced enough to enjoy the story, even on the hardest difficulty, as long as you know what you’re doing. The learning mechanic can be a bit tedious without fast travel, but it isn’t a big issue imo.

The girls' artwork is eye-catching and effectively showcases their personalities. The UI is clean, and the colorful dialogues are a great touch. I always have trouble remembering names, so having different colors to indicate who’s speaking is a big help.

The sexual content is diverse, featuring many different acts. However, the animations aren’t really my cup of tea. Fortunately, I can turn them off, along with any sexual content I don’t like, in the settings menu.

The game runs smoothly, even on older computers and laptops, with very few bugs. The only bug I encountered was with the lizard girl. Sometimes she retains her genital virginity, while other times she doesn’t. When I used a "dick attack" to penetrate her, the game sometimes states that my character has taken her virginity, but other times it doesn’t say anything. This could be because she is inconsistently marked as a virgin, or it might be an issue with the game system not displaying the message properly.

Overall, this is one of the better games out there, a hidden gem even.

Well it is a mediocre rpg and a very bad sex game. Too many convoluted mechanics that offer nothing to the game. The creator has put a lot of effort in the combat system and the relationship system and has left the sex system bare bones. Also too much luck involved in almost everything. The save system is simply annoying and offers absolutely nothing to the experience. Personally i think the game is designed purposfully to make you "donate" to the creator for the cheat system. The only reason i put some effort in the game is that is well written and i really like the concept, sadly the execution is really really bad. I would recommend to the creator to stop complexify the systems and instead build a very robust sex system with as many fetishes as he can. In the state the game is right know i would definetely not recommend it. This game is a text based rpg with some sex sprinkled in not the other way around, and for what it offers there a simply far better options around.

I don't know why the person below me was so generous. Two stars?
What is here?
The game is just a grindfest with no clear progression.
I played for far too long last night, hoping for something, anything.
After I went to bed and woke up, I realized I had just wasted my time.
In the game, my character had a dream, where she spoke to someone and said something like, "I think I'm falling behind the others."
My first thought was, "bitch, how can you tell?"
The sex scenes are pretty meh. And, if you play submissive, you have no control... which makes sense from story-perspective, but not from game-design perspective. Game designers, remember that your player is not your player character. Wanting my character to give up control doesn't mean I want to give up control, nor does it mean I want the NPC to randomly switch between sex positions.
I feel like more criticism is warranted, but there's nothing else to criticize. It's just so boring and lacking in anything to justify playing it.

v0.4.5c
I am, once more, so entirely baffled at this game's rating. The UI is atrocious, the sex is less descriptive than most AI slop, the "conversation" function shouldn't even exist with how hollow it is, and the animations are...actually really funny. Terrible, but funny.

This game is a visual mess. 5 minutes in and you will understand. Colors are everywhere, stats are many, and meaning is lacking. This reads like a computer trying to turn sex into raw stats, and THAT is what's supposed to make you coom. What info do you get when having sex? Not lewd information. Not sexual depictions that are delightful to read. You get fucking numbers. The scripted events have details, but the interactive sex? Nothing. Next to fucking nothing.

The colors are everywhere thanks to this game's attempt to make things clear. Instead, it draws attention to everything else, making just how messy the setup is all the more apparent. Great idea on paper, but not so ideal when you're actually trying to read things. It would be better off with an itemized chart.

Am I supposed to...care for these characters? At all? Because if yes, why the actual fuck is there a "conversation" function in which it just tells you that you're chatting. No dialogue, no reactions, no expressions; nothing. Jack all. Everything in this game follows this function in execution. Mechanical. Lifeless. Devoid of feeling. I genuinely think this is the kind of system that you'd get if you told an AI to make a "meaning interpersonal bond forming system". It's just so soulless.

Then the animations. My GOD, the animations. First one I got was with the slime girl. First animation was with my girl and the slime, who was, at the time, just a grey outline. Then I got some actual lewds and the slime took form, and it was...not good. The art was smeared while it moved, and it actually looks identical to how a lot of things on the 3DS look. It's uncanny how similar it is. The faces are horribly skewed, their features stretch as they're animated strangely, and the proportions of the eyes and lips are...wrong. This is all to say that they really don't add to the lewds.

Then we have the fucking true sin of the battle system. You have to scroll every single time you choose something. Yet again, we have a highly rated porn game with zero emphasis on utility for said porn.

Everything in this sucks balls. Moving around the map sucks. Spending your time sucks. Having sex sucks. My character was getting plowed and the closest option I had to engage was "Give handjob". Yeah, you do that, pal.

This game has a lot of flaws. Lack of visuals, non intuitive mechanics and very strange system of progress (there are A LOT of stat checks and almost every aspect of a game gives or requires some stat/relationship points but you simply cannot grind them because of time dependance to story). When you start a fight all you can see a thousands of numbers and sometimes it is hard to understand what is going on. I can name a lot of other cons of this game but it would change nothing. The writing is brilliant. The story starts simple with "it s a magical boo-hoo world where everyone fucking everyone" but soon enough starts to be fucking awesome light passed thrilling story with excelent characters and most important it gives you right to choose and YOUR CHOICE HAS IMPACT on everything and everyone, story and gameplay wise. Give it enough time and you will gain awesome experience. I really hope in future UI will be better and there will be a graphic part (that has a start already). Can't wait for the next update

review as of v0.4.3

I have a love-hate relationship with this game.

On the love side, there are:

+ Very nice, albeit limited, art. The characters all look nice, and animations, while rather rough, are not unpleasant either, for an early feature especially. But you don't play HTML games for visuals, so it's just a pleasant extra.

+ Good writing. The setting is fun, the story is interesting, the characters, while kinda one dimensional, are not unpleasant to be around and have some growth over the course of the story. Basically, yes, reading is a joy, not a chore in this game.

+ The general idea of a "school" where you go about your daily life while making others submit to you (or submitting yourself, whatever you prefer) is not something you see too often, especially implemented well, and I would say this is one of the better examples.



However... when you get to the actual mechanics of this game... oh boy does it get bad...

- For starters, the optimization is actually kinda bad. This is the only HTML game that takes more than a moment to do things. Moving around can take a second or two. Saving and loading take around 10. It's a little thing, but it definitely detracts from the experience. Add to this that you can't fast travel to a distant location, so if you want to move 5 spaces, you have to click the adjacent one, wait a few secs, click the next, wait, etc.

- Sex scenes are so... unbearably... boring... 30 turns is way too much for it, but that is, thankfully, customizable, but even then, just adding "end scene" button would go such a long way to making it less of a pain to go through. I don't want to be here for half an hour just clicking "Thrust -> commit action -> thrust -> commit action -> thrust -> commit action...". What a chore.

- Same can be said for combat, although for some reason I find it less tedious.

- Talking... talking to characters is one of the worst experiences I had in gaming ever. And there are two main culprits for this.
First is the fact that characters act COMPLETELY out of character during these. The shyest of girls will start touching and caressing you out of the blue when you were just talking about weather or something. It ruins all the nicely written events and personalities that were established before that. Completely immersion breaking.
Second is the fact that you can't tell other characters to fuck off. You start talking to someone, then someone else joins the conversation, and all you can do is leave yourself. No. NO. This is a game about domination, give me an option to tell them to fuck off. I don't want an orgy, I just want to work on a character I like.

This is done atrociously. You have zero control. And this lack of control over anything is my main issue with this game, I guess. You are way too dependent on game interacting with you, rather that letting the player interact with the game and... you know... play it...

I feel like this game would be better served as a renpy game, or one of those numerous "choice of games" projects, with just story and multiple choices, abandoning most of mechanics entirely. So far, they do nothing but detract from the overall experience, unfortunately.

It's a sex game where you'll actively be avoiding sex because it's so boring. A "dating sim" where you'll be avoiding social interactions because they break characters. An RPG where you'll be avoiding combat because it's simply frustrating.

And yet, it's a game that I tend to enjoy and wish for it to succeed. But it's not there yet. Far from it.

Rare to see a game focus on rather arcane gameplay maths, choose your own adventure and longterm interpersonal dynamics created by gameplay. It's honestly too ambitious for it's own good, but remarkable ambition and quality for what's honestly a game that stands on it's own legs as one.

It's very hard for me to evaluate this game: I like it despite serious flaws some of which are quite fundamental, and most likely can't be fixed at this point. I give it a good score because it deals mainly with slow-burn power dynamics, corruption sub-dom relationships inside closed group of people, which few if any other games do. It opens numberless possibilities... at least on paper. The game consist of two parts: story and gameplay, they exist on their own, and almost don't "feel" each other . The story is by far is the best part, author knows how to write high quality engaging text, characters are written pretty well too. Events and the story are the main part that make you keep playing, not sex per se (you can and will bang every love interest almost on day 1, so there is no much reward in this area, progression will add very little to generic h-scenes), events however put characters in more interesting spots and dynamics between them can be written beautifully.

Now, gameplay is the sad part, during this time you will try to craft stats to get this or that event, but other than that it doesn't match the story, it's very dry, basic and few-worded, characters are acting out often randomly and out of personality and numbers (if you have fetish on numbers you MUST play).

There few parts to it, including battles (passable, for this engine), sex (gets boring after few times) and social interaction, those are torture: you are forced to click one button for hundreds of times to get a little boost for a one stat in relationships with one character, it's the worst part of the game by far. There are few other features, but special relationships don't have much story behind them, and bondage is basically just a debuff.

tl;dr:
A unique game, with unique concept and well-written story, but very boring and repetitive gameplay. As for now game has 1 in-game month of content, with almost daily events, first adventure completed and a little content after that. It's about 1/6 of the plan, so keep waiting.

The sex scenes could use a rework. Its just a combat system that could be fun, but there is no real narrative there, you have your sex battle and its done. If there was a way to maybe take the combat encounter and turn it into a descriptive story at the end or something that ads some sexiness to the scene. As it is, its just bland and after a couple of encounters, I had zero motivation to progress with anything.

Absolutely loving the game. I always wanted more games like Night Games, and this one really does it.

The story seems interesting with some twists here and there. The progression is really nice and I love the events happening, really give the game flavor. The combat feels nice, though some more ingame tool tips about skills and attacks, and how they interact with your stats would be great. It's a battlefuck, a really nice one. Artwork is great, animations are really good too and with time I am sure there will be more diversity in body types, positions etc. Consensual acts and socializing are quite repetitive, I think maybe making the chatting shorter but more impactful would probably be better (actions taking and rewarding more points so you don't have to spend 10 mins in every converstaion).

All and all a great game already, with a lot of potential. Easily up there with other text based games like DoL and BDCC. It does what Night Games wanted to do, but way better, because it actually has a story and character story arcs that flesh out their personalities and backgrounds, which is just awesome. Hope the gameplay loop gets updated slightly, because all the stuff in between the story arcs is really repetitive and not really that interesting.

One of the games I've really considered subbing to on patreon with how good it is!

Really good game, characters are fun an interesting. I just wish it had a couple more art assets especially for the characters to make the interactions and sex scenes more engaging. Love the way that they release the mechanics as you play vs other games that give you everything after the tutorial is over. Looking forward to future releases.

Updates are still just ott "adventures" instead of fleshing out the actual game and how it plays. Interaction is inconsistent and boring at best, even with cheats to give them max personality based on what you want, the characters still just do and say random stuff. This feedback was common since the start but the game is still so hollow outside of the VNs that feel like sidetracks honestly, very disappointed

This game is honestly amazing - a dom/sub focused with cool power dynamic, characters and gameplay, the illustrations for the characters also very well made so it enhanced the characters and dialogues a lot (as far as text games go).

Also I see people complained a lot about the beginning of the game being overwhelming, and the combat / team up is unfair etc. I agree somewhat but at least for me this game has one of the most balanced sex combat I seen in a while, maybe because I played a lot of RPGs lol. Anyway here some tips (with spoilers) if you are struggling:

• The most important stats to train are: Agility > Int > Charisma > Resilient. Explains: Agility makes everything easier - hitting, dodging and acting first. Int because the best skills in the game scale with it. Charisma helps with applying buffs and debuffs, and Resilient improves your defense overall.
• Physique and Will are always nice to dump some points into, but please ignore Luck until you are actually strong enough, since it provides minimal advantages at the start of the game.
• This game is a lot like the Shin Megami Tensei games in the PLEASE USE BUFFS AND DEBUFFS category.
  Spoiler

  You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

Still, I am sure the game has potential to be a lot more. Hoping the author the best and sincerely wish that they will complete the game as true to their vision as possible.

I've only played version 3.9 for a few hours and I'm shit at reviews but I highly recommend this game and hope it continues. All the characters and kinks are great, and most importantly there's a good story. The portraits for the characters are well drawn, and I like the fact that there's only one of them for each girl, they never change at all so I know what the characters look like but can still use my imagination for everything else. The only bad I've encountered in this game is sometimes actions that shouldn't be possible go through but others don't. I don't mind one way or another, would just like for it to stay consistent. The only other issue I've had is when a character's being a dom or sub, the dialogue that pops up feels random and doesn't pertain to the actions the characters are doing.

Really good for early dev!

The only cons are being able to save. I really wish I could save before training days. The battles are nearly impossible to win, so any advantage would reduce the frustration.

That and being able to switch workloads. Once you pick it you are commited for the whole day. It'd be nice to back out and pick a secondary workload.

Other than that, very awesome and original idea! Can't wait to see where this goes!

I got some time on my hands and I've been following this game for a while so i thought a review was past due. First of all any game that has more than the bare minimum search-for-the-next-event-and-trigger-the-next-scene linear gameplay, maybe with some default engine assets thrown into the mix, immediately looks promising to me. Unholy Arts very much falls into that category, as it has deep mechanics with regards to relationships between the MC and the other contestants.

The main gameplay loop consists of spending your time doing actions that improve your characters attributes, as well as actions affecting relationship values between you and the other candidates. The other candidates AI do the same, and a lot of interesting procedural interactions can occur. These interactions are usually generic, which depending on who you ask can be good or bad (in my case i see this as good as it leaves more room for player interpretation), however there are also hand written scenes to be discovered.

The main gameplay loop was interesting enough that i've already gotten hours of fun gameplay just poking around, and seeing what reactions and results i get. It was also fun seeing how the behavior of the AI changed over time. The game is relatively early in development (as of 0.3.3 when this review was written), but with such a solid framework it seems even if the rest of the development was spent decorating and tweaking things into place you'd still have a very high quality game still.

One part that is slightly disappointing to me are the lewd scenes. While you can argue that the sub/dom relationship attributes between the candidates are nicely fleshed out and are sexual in nature, the lewd scenes themselves are a bit lackluster. Atleast in terms of effect on the overall playthrough. Yes, depending on what actions you chose during the scene, you will get varying changes in relationship values. But outside of that the scenes feel empty, and the choices you make inconsequential.

As for the story, i don't know if i have that much to say because i generally don't pay attention to it outside of the parts that are important for the game setting (and it has been a while since i played through the intro). You are a candidate priestess chosen by your tribe, to compete with other candidates to determine which of you will become the next Valley's High Priestess. There is a lot more to it and the story is far from finished, but the main draw for me is that the world setting makes sense and is immersive with respect to the gameplay, and the writing is high quality.

Overall I'd say this game is definitely something to look out for, and even in its current state provides hours of gameplay (if you like text based sandboxy games that is). Will be interesting to see the world get more decorated and made more "alive" as development continues. Aside from the sex scenes, everything else looks good from a design perspective, so looking forward to see where this goes.

Not fully to my tastes, but what is there is very well done! I am reviewing version 0.3.0.

I quite enjoy the gameplay overall, building the characters and maintaining interactions and relationships with the rest of the cast felt like a fun puzzle, even if it was one where I felt like I was at a bit too big a disadvantage for what I prefer in my smutty games.

The one feature of the gameplay that might to turn people off is the relatively grindy nature of the moment-to-moment gameplay. However it didn't bother me much at all, despite my usual aversion to grindy games. It also provides some sandbox time for you as a player to do whatever you want and interact with the characters, which feels great.

I really enjoy the characters and writing overall. When it comes to my tastes it basically boils down to the fact that the game is designed as a fight for dominance where there is no real incentive to playing as a sub - I played with a female rather than futa protagonist and the sex gameplay is super awkward if you want to receive because you often lack ways to initialise specific positions or acts, you're at the mercy of the AI, and the AI rarely picked positions that I enjoyed tbh. The bondage elements also felt overall fairly poorly integrated with the sex/fights, but it didn't bother me too much. Similarly random threesomes and general interactions between the AI characters sometimes ruined the mood or just made things kind of strange too.

Overall, I would say the elements of the game that relate to AI actions and randomness are the weakest part, while the writing is quite nice, the art is good and the gameplay is fun.

Its a great game, no doubts about it. Great concept, gameplay is engaging tho a bit repetitive at times. Art looks great as well, the multitude of options there are to try is really something. In fact its good enough to convinve me to subscribe to the patreon because i want to see more of this game. Its a 5 star easily. However, a 0.3 in a year of development doesnt sound great tbh. I hope its not a patreon scam, the creating the game for as long as we can to get as much money as we can type of deal, because im about to sign up for this.

After so much time I feel it's right to do a review of unholy arts. So... let's do it!:

-First of all we have to talk about the concept and how the game works, overall we are the chosen one of the human tribe to become the high priestess and we see a demonic woman in our dreams that can be our character first time.

It's a decent way to introduce but suddenly we have to choose what we are good and bad at. The thing is, at this point we don't know what is a decent build, the effect of the stats or anything like that. Something that should already be in the game are a few presets with an explanation on how to use them later on, but no, at this point a blind new player has to guess what should be chosen and this is what I would call a mistake in the game.

Later on we meet the candidates and we can see their personality and interact with them, we can see that some are more pure and are weak to you being forward, others will use your flirt and counter you while we have even a beastgirl that is quite aggresive at the start. We can even have sex with one out of 3 friendly rivals.

I would say that on the story level everything is okay, we have a motive (wanting to be high priestess), rules and a competition aspect. But then... we meet the gameplay.

-Gameplay: I will be quite direct, this is kind of the worst part of the game, all the interactive system and the storyline aspect is really nice but on this aspect it just needs a lot of improvement:

*For example, when you are moving in the temple there are many things that need to be changed:

1º If you have a map you don't need the hyperlinks, let people just clic on the map and give a better use for that space

2º The map shouldn't be below but on top and in fact it should be 2 or 3 times bigger.

3º Related to characters in the room it should directly say to the right of it what each character is doing (like walk towards east library) it is kind of meaningless to write it below the character list. Still out of the 3 this is a minor thing that can easily be ignored.

Still we fall again at "we don't have any freaking idea of what to do at the start", what should we train? what stats are important? we don't know it, starting players have it quite hard unless they love to make mistakes and learn from them.

On the other hand soon we get an introduction to events, I would say that events are the best thing on this game cause they are quite fresh compared to generic interactions. It would be kind of nice if the generic interactions could actually have a bit of that spirit.

But finally we have the fights, again this needs at the very least to give some customization to the player and... use colours and explanations. Seriously add a colour depending on the stat that the action chooses and especify if it's a lust/control or what type of action it is. Even more let us hide some of the actions that doesn't fit our current build, if I'm physique focused I would love to hide mage actions and viceversa.

Another point that would be nice is the ability to be able to hear what is happening on nearby rooms but well, that's a bit secondary.

I have to say that the game is nice, especially how interactive it is, but it has so many minor mistakes that make it harder for people to start/learn to play that it kind of overcomplicates stuff, in fact I kind of feel like on the setting level the game is starting to go a bit on the wrong side (like the overall setting being made for all characters being futanaries but you can just disable it and being able to choose if there are servitude relationships or not, I mean, all that is canon shouldn't be an option, but that's just what I think).

I think the system is in a good place. Hopefully more and more story events to flesh out the world are added. I think the developer is already going in this direction but having events that build a character to certain fetishes would also be nice. I like where this game is going.