Updated Review for v0.2.9
Returned to the game after close to a years worth of development time. While I think there's clearly ways the game could improve and the argument could be made, for me at least, to rate this four stars, I still just really enjoy this game at the end of the day.
We play as a Roro, a former king of lust who was killed in his world during a war. Our soul gets cast out into the "space between worlds," and after some disembodied wandering, another world sucks us in and essentially revives us. What do we want to do with our new found body? Retire and live happily surrounded by a bunch of girls. A pretty nice goal I think.
It's probably important to mention that this game is a true sandbox fit with a relatively large amount of grind. It plays closer to a RenPy sandbox honestly. You don't manually control a character like you normally would in an RPGM game. Rather, it's almost point and click style where you click a button to move to adjacent maps. On these maps are various little symbols for different girls, events, shops ,etc etc. There's no actual combat and nothing like minigames you repeat over and over either.
So how do you grind and what do you grind for then? It's fairly simple honestly. While there's a wide range of stats to manage for both yourself and others, you raise all of them by doing mini repeatable events (which are usually just a few lines of dialogue). The exception to this would be the stats that gets raised from sex, which as you might expect, comes from seeing sex scenes. There's also a sort of rogue-light exploration system when hunting that's kind of neat too. This definitely feels very gamified compared to other games on the site.
What raised this up to five stars for me when I first played it and what has kept it at that rating now is the writing. Given that "retirement" goal, the game/MC takes an almost nonchalant approach to everything that I really like. It's weirdly relaxing in a way. The MC feels charismatic and actually fun to play, and I'm liking the subtler representation of him being strong and confident while still having flaws that get displayed as the game moves forward. Though there's not a huge in your face kind of story going on, the bits of plot and worldbuilding you do get is actually pretty interesting imo. The way the game slowly expands as more girls show up and our ambitions to turn this "haven" into our own grows is keeping me engaged. The girls in a similar way don't have incredible depth, but enough personality to them to still shine in their own ways and feel unique.
I had two bigger bits of criticism when I first played, and they remain the same bits of criticism I have now. The first is that the events you repeat are often just a black screen with a couple lines describing what's happening, which is kind of uninteresting after the first few times. At the least I think it would be cool to actually have those events rendered out so I have something to look at. I think this kind of extends out to things like story events as well. While they have actual renders, most of them are still pretty short and would benefit from more shots expanding them imo.
The other is with sex scenes. Probably the weakest aspect of this so far. While I do think the character models are hot, the scenes themselves are often on the short side and lacking in good angles and such. There's some scenes where you don't see penetration happening for example, just a single angle of like a side view. Now I haven't gone through all available content and thus haven't seen every scene so maybe some do get better about this, but at least for earlier ones it's a problem I had.
TLDR - If you like sandbox games and don't mind grind, this is a very solid RPGM lewd game. It's not perfect, but I'm a big fan of the writing and the sort of kingdom management feel the game is slowly building into. Looking forward to playing this more as it develops.
Returned to the game after close to a years worth of development time. While I think there's clearly ways the game could improve and the argument could be made, for me at least, to rate this four stars, I still just really enjoy this game at the end of the day.
We play as a Roro, a former king of lust who was killed in his world during a war. Our soul gets cast out into the "space between worlds," and after some disembodied wandering, another world sucks us in and essentially revives us. What do we want to do with our new found body? Retire and live happily surrounded by a bunch of girls. A pretty nice goal I think.
It's probably important to mention that this game is a true sandbox fit with a relatively large amount of grind. It plays closer to a RenPy sandbox honestly. You don't manually control a character like you normally would in an RPGM game. Rather, it's almost point and click style where you click a button to move to adjacent maps. On these maps are various little symbols for different girls, events, shops ,etc etc. There's no actual combat and nothing like minigames you repeat over and over either.
So how do you grind and what do you grind for then? It's fairly simple honestly. While there's a wide range of stats to manage for both yourself and others, you raise all of them by doing mini repeatable events (which are usually just a few lines of dialogue). The exception to this would be the stats that gets raised from sex, which as you might expect, comes from seeing sex scenes. There's also a sort of rogue-light exploration system when hunting that's kind of neat too. This definitely feels very gamified compared to other games on the site.
What raised this up to five stars for me when I first played it and what has kept it at that rating now is the writing. Given that "retirement" goal, the game/MC takes an almost nonchalant approach to everything that I really like. It's weirdly relaxing in a way. The MC feels charismatic and actually fun to play, and I'm liking the subtler representation of him being strong and confident while still having flaws that get displayed as the game moves forward. Though there's not a huge in your face kind of story going on, the bits of plot and worldbuilding you do get is actually pretty interesting imo. The way the game slowly expands as more girls show up and our ambitions to turn this "haven" into our own grows is keeping me engaged. The girls in a similar way don't have incredible depth, but enough personality to them to still shine in their own ways and feel unique.
I had two bigger bits of criticism when I first played, and they remain the same bits of criticism I have now. The first is that the events you repeat are often just a black screen with a couple lines describing what's happening, which is kind of uninteresting after the first few times. At the least I think it would be cool to actually have those events rendered out so I have something to look at. I think this kind of extends out to things like story events as well. While they have actual renders, most of them are still pretty short and would benefit from more shots expanding them imo.
The other is with sex scenes. Probably the weakest aspect of this so far. While I do think the character models are hot, the scenes themselves are often on the short side and lacking in good angles and such. There's some scenes where you don't see penetration happening for example, just a single angle of like a side view. Now I haven't gone through all available content and thus haven't seen every scene so maybe some do get better about this, but at least for earlier ones it's a problem I had.
TLDR - If you like sandbox games and don't mind grind, this is a very solid RPGM lewd game. It's not perfect, but I'm a big fan of the writing and the sort of kingdom management feel the game is slowly building into. Looking forward to playing this more as it develops.