RPGM - Wayward Lord [v0.3.7] [Sebas_Guzman]

Version reviewed: 0.3.7
A truly great game held back by a few poor design decisions.

THE UGLY:
Point and click: Most of the player's interaction with the world will be through point and click mechanics. This is great for quickly navigating through town. But the need to move my hand from the mouse to the arrow keys in order to select choices gets tiring fast. You can simply click the choice you want, but it's often faster to opt for arrows instead.
Text speed: It's not horrendously slow, but it's still a far cry from instant. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally selected the first option selected in a prompt because I was bashing z to either skip already read passages or stop waiting for the text to display.
The start: It's rough. Really rough. There's nothing to do except slowly gather gold to buy scenes with the town's two prostitutes in order to gain power. After this the game opens up and there's a lot to do. And to top it off players are left adjusting with the point and click environment at the same time. I can see a lot of players dropping the game in this beginning phase.
WORKAROUND:
Go to the options and map WASD(or whatever your non-qwerty equivalent is) to arrows and Lshift/Lctrl to page down. Doing this allows you to navigate prompts with your left hand as well as auto through already read text.

THE MEH:
The combat: There is none, aside from a single bullet hell-ish boss. Don't worry fellow bullet hell haters, I am one of you and managed to get through it on my first try. This is a blessing or a curse depending on how much one likes RPGM combat.
No gear: No equipment to collect. Again, a blessing or a curse.
Girl variety: Thicc assets are heavily favored. There are slimmer girls, but they are the exception. It's not a spectrum or a balance, it's a weighted heh scale.

THE ★SEXY★:
Setting & lore: I really do enjoy both and it was fun to uncover more about them as I progressed throughout the game.
Writing: It's a breath of fresh air to not play an MC with the sensibilities of a modern college/middle school guy. Humor is well placed and genuinely funny. Darker tones are achieved without scratching your eyeballs with their edge.
The smut: Ohhhh boy is there a lot of it. As most scenes award you with a point of EP and I ended my game with ~108 EP I can safely say that there is over 100 sexo scenes. Tons are animated too.
Playtime: My save reported 33 hours of playtime. I'm a bit of a completionist, but I can assure you that this game will last you quite a while.

If you've read this far give it a try. Just solider through the game's start.

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.