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

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.

This game definitely stands out in it's story and character interactions. It's a turn-based-combat dating simulator that surprisingly fits together quiet nicely. The character backgrounds and personalities are nicely fleshed out, (at least to the extent to which the game is developed to right now), and there's at least 3 hours of content available (.29) before you run out of scripted events. I do wish there were more dialogue, events and interactions, but it's still pretty early in development as of right now, and it seems like more will come. I passed over this game a couple times before trying it, and I definitely wish I did earlier. 4/5 Worth a try.

God bless. What a mess.
Game is just full of questionable design choices.

Lets look at progression, fucked on every single level:
You can pick if you are good or bad at stats 3 times each on chargen. But it doesn't list 90% of what any given stat does. Ie it doesn't tell you damn near every sex act scales with agility. Like nearly all of them. Pure agility or partially, nearly nothing doesn't involve it.

You can grind agility if you fucked that up (or do what I did and not bother because the sex is also fundamentally flawed anyways), but you gain pathetic stat growth per day and grinding stats means you aren't interacting with the girls; the thing you played this to do. You CAN do both at once. After day like 20. At which point the game is full of other issues anyways. And studying with a girl adds no unique interactions or anything; they just also gain exp, which means you fuck yourself over doing so.

And you will want these high stats. What for? You don't know yet. You see, the game is very linear. On X day you will get an event with Y girl. You may be able to make this event less shitty if a girl is submissive enough to you, you have a high enough x stat or xyz stats, but you won't know what stats you need for X day until X day comes. So either suck it up or replay half the game to try and reach enough to see that result. How much is enough? Game doesn't say.
A lot of these events make no real sense even if you have good enough stats. Why is athletic girl 1 (not a bitch) 'settling' on training with me when athetic girl 2 (a bitch) won't do so? Saying they're the only fit girls around? I have higher stats than both of them physically.

Even if you do reload the game to do a dozen days to get x stat higher, make y girl like you more or just to try out the dozen functionally identical options presented to find the one that actually differs in an encounter, enjoy how fucking slow the game is, for no apparent reason.
Click thing
...
...
...
Hey it happened! Like 2-3 seconds per action. Doesn't sound like much, but it adds up.

And even if you are only wanting to redo a single event to see all the options, unless that's at the start of the day, you will have to redo more. Because you can only save at the start of every day. You can't press back arrow to go to last option either. Why? Far as I can tell, because fuck you, that's why.

At one point 2 girls have a fight, you can help if one likes you enough. That's the only check. Your other stats? If the OTHER girl likes you? Irrelevant. Fuck you. If girl 1 wins, girl 2 becomes 'more open to talking with others'. But she'll amost always lose. Time to savescum for this bonus you likely won't know exists.

At another point, you are offered 3 spells; hypnotism, binding, some other one. What do they do? What do they scale with? Do they act differently in convo, in sex, in sex fights? Name aside, you get no fucking info until you pick them. And that's just 'you can use it in battle' or the like, not what it does; need to go find someone to talk to, fight, etc, to see if what they do is worth a damn. Enjoying replaying that day 3+ times over. And hope you made a backup here for when it introduces sex fights, so you can reload, mash through all the days to the sex fight day, THEN see what it does in a sex fight. I don't care enough to do this. Fuck off. Just tell me what the fucking thing does when I'm given the choice, goddamn.

And speaking of speaking, good luck with that. Girls have a near permanent -20 'mood' debuff. All of them. All the time. You have to click them to check, wait a few seconds, be told 'lol fuck off', wait a few seconds, then you can try on another girl. Fuun. And if you DO talk to them, what you can do per turn is random. Say you are trying a dom-sub relationship with grass girl domming you. You want to ask her for headpats and the like. FUCK YOU. Enjoy nothing but 'call her a whore' and 'rub her ass' options 20 times in a row.
Now say you are doing this to make fit girl like you for that guaranteed static encounter later on. Enjoy reloading until you can talk to her, then again when it makes you only able to call her fat. Fuuun.

It gets worse once you unlock the combat. Hoo boy the combat. Its so bad. You just spam freeze or whatever until they get to 0/5 control, mount, zap tits, fuck until you win. Except when they escape instantly for no reason. Which they do. Reload.
You can team up with people to make it easier, but so can the AI. And the AI does this. A lot. Get ready to be 3 v 1'd when 2 girls who hate fit bitch 2 but explictly love you inexplicably help her rape you into submission every time you try to do literally anything at all. Want to train? RAPE TRAIN. Want to read? 5 v 1 rape train! Its fucking absurd. Any fight where you outnumber the enemy is just absolutely trivial so you end up just hiring and raping everyone yourself just so you can do anything at all ever.

On top of all this, sex itself is just a series of 'you sucked her dick' messages identical for everyone; one size fits all sex, ala liliths throne and similar games. So its not that tittilating. Its similar to jacking it to a calculator. And when you DO have sex, you go the girls room to do it. So you have to click to exit her room, then go up, then go up, Then you can click to any of the rooms relevant to training stats. 2-3 seconds per input.

Like holy fuck why does it take so many clicks, so many rng checks, so much bullshit, to do anything?

Why is so little explained? Why do I need to replay like 5 days just to see what 'shackle bitch' does in an actual fight? Why is the map so bad? Why are 90% of the stats and character relationships useless, despite being 100% of the fucking game, only being checked with any meaningful level of interaction during entirely static, pre-determined scenes, which barely use any of them even when they should?

As a last note, if you are hear for the futa; you can all be futa or all not be. There's no option for only futa protag unless you pay for a cheat version that apparently has that. If you want to pay for a slightly less bad version of a game stitched together entirely from flaws.

Good game with a lot of potential. Each update has shown some decent progress. The battle system and character interaction system seems to have enough bones for some interesting possibilities in future updates.

Probably the most interesting web game so far. that can go many ways
A hidden gem more should play

The focus on NPC's that have different goals and objectives simulating something akin to an A.I that has goals contrary to planner means a game that can vary quite alot based on your actions

Battles in my opinion can be a bit long and could benefit from some art and icon navigation but the content and design of this game is second to none and is fresh air in this engine

It's strongly alright. It has good writing for once, but as per usual for games of this genre it gameifies both raunchy sexual scenes and more mundane ones into "thrust into pussy" or "compliment looks," that sort of thing, to have values go up. Start-of-day events actually have proper stuff and are usually engaging enough, while the whole premise itself is sound. With development this could be quite the gem. It's still relatively early on, however, and quite the grind.

It takes a while to understand what stats really do, what effect the socialization and sex has on the characters, and how the systems work. It's also difficult to get into the stats and how exactly you should build your character. With all that said, I love this game. The systems are clearly thought out and the writing/characters are excellent.

I'd probably give some examples of simple ways to play at the start, you can spend a lot of time socialising and getting into the game but then when the challenge system is introduced you find out you built your character in a way that you don't like. I'd also unlock saving a bit more, the autosave wasn't enabled for me and it is really frustrating when you forget to save but then see a choice where you want to understand the different outcomes better. There's an argument to be made that it's anti-save scumming but I'm not going to play through this game twice just to see exactly what happens if I reject Nash that one time.

Overall, really looking forward to seeing more from this game!

Gameplay at the moment can be a little confusing in terms of what stats do, and what the parameters do during conversations between characters. However the characters all have unique characteristics and engaging dialogue. So far even in the version I'm reviewing (0.2) you are given quite a bit of agency in how your PC is viewed. Either seen as a Dominant and constantly challenging others to make them serve you, or as a Sub and letting others dictate what you do, and how you're treated. Overall I really enjoy it so far and will keep it a 4/5 until more game play is added.