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- May 24, 2018
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Maybe I'm just a little bitch, but this game creeps me out, and occasionally scares the shit out of me. Kinda sucks because I enjoy the combat, but I don't know if I can make it all the way through this lol
- Jan 7, 2022
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- Sep 13, 2023
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No update rn. People with subscriptions can view upcoming H scenes. Otherwise, it looks like the dev will try to release an update in mid-Feb.
I'm of two minds here. In principle, I agree that it can elevate the H-scenes when it's an organic consequence of gameplay. But it has to be balanced against fail-states and the frustration they can bring - as well as the player's overall power and agency. A "roguelike" with extremely linear and gated level/enemy progression I feel is quite bad for that.
The frustration of being reset and having to spend time and effort re-treading all that same ground tends to take a lot away from at least my own ability to enjoy H-scenes - especially if I've already seen it and was trying to get to the next one I hadn't, or to beat the game to unlock a gallery - and especially if I can only see two or three of them before I have to experience that fail-state and corresponding frustration. Equally, being entirely removed from context and viewed from a gallery can be diminishing as well.
I think the best way to handle loss/failure states in H-games is to largely avoid true "game-overs" or full resets, except when it's demanded by thematic context. Have the player-character wake up in some side-room that reconnects more or less back to where you were. That way it stays a part of an unbroken continuity, and enables players to have their cake and eat it too - enjoy "loss" scenes, without losing much progress.
A "roguelike" of Thornsin's kind is quite antithetical in design to that - but there are steps that can be taken to bring it closer. Less-linear level/campaign design, overarching progression, a "hub" world/menu with more shorter, self-contained levels etc - though it might all work better in games that are more strategic and "attritional", than action-oriented and decisive.
For example, "Apostle Angel Liebe" by Mad-Script is a much more traditional rogue-like. You have two player-characters who have massive pools of energy, from which HP regenerates. When HP is 0, the character is simply knocked down for a couple turns. Energy depletes with movement, special ability use (iirc), HP regeneration and climaxes. HP can also be restored with potions to preserve energy. When one character's energy and HP are entirely depleted, they are captured and the other retreats. Your objective is then to attack a new dungeon to rescue the captured character - but you might have to wait and skip some time on the campaign layer to regenerate the surviving character's energy enough to succeed, and that's where the meat of its H-content is.
There are quite a few in-game animations, un-detailed, short and simple as they are - another developer might balance those things differently, and AAL certainly has plenty of its own flaws in terms of progression, gating content etc - but the overall principle is there. I get to experience almost all the game's content without continuity ever having to be broken, without being frustrated by the individual failure-states required to see it, and the only way I fully lose and have to reset or load an earlier save, is as a culmination of many prior failures - or it's directly engineered by me. In other words, you can lose many proverbial battles but still win the war.
Another couple examples would be Kudarizaka Guardrail's games - Quarta Knight Emerald/Amethyst - where the battles are pretty much all about H-attacks and their consequences stacking up, and persisting between them. I don't even remember if either of them had true game-overs to speak of, and IIRC you could reverse basically all the debuffs. If you were defeated, you got a scene and then crawled out of the bushes or whatever, and either continued the level or retreated to base.
T&A is the main selling point of any game we talk about here. Anything else is secondary. The ideal H-game will accommodate both the player just looking to get their rocks off, and the player who wants to lock in for a challenge (with sex). Difficulty levels, cheats, galleries, level select etc are the most common ways around that and for good reason. Overall, it's about developers respecting the players' time and priorities.
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- Sep 13, 2023
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that thing is too much big
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Hey is this the paywalled preview?
The bigger the better, hope that it ends with a CUMFLATION
- Sep 22, 2017
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Pacha.gif "Most Likely"
They also need to adjust various pregnant belly size states, but it happened in other scenes with smaller insertions... so yeah, that'll happen for sure.
As for actual "inflated size" your guess is as good as mine.
I think you make some reasonable points about avoiding frustration and tedium for the player, but overall I have issues with this analysis. The biggest problem imo is your suggestions effectively amount to changing the genre of the game. The death-then-restart loop is core to what a roguelike game is. Alleviating this in favour of no true death-state, just never-ending progression with minor setbacks for failure fundamentally changes the whole nature of the game. At that point you might as well just be saying, "I don't like this genre, it should be this other genre instead."
For example, I haven't played these games you're suggesting here (but thanks for the recs! I might check them out), so please correct me if I'm wrong, but these don't actually sound like roguelikes to me. They sound more like at best faintly rogue-lite, taking the ideas of procedural battles/levels, but discarding permadeath entirely.
That is one way to get rid of any tedium induced by permadeath mechanics, but it's crucial to recognize that fans of the roguelike genre actually tend to like the permadeath. As far as we can tell, it seems pretty clear that Scarlet Paper has designed this game from the outset to involve permadeath as a primary mechanic. So if that mechanic is causing tedium for many players (and it's not just because those particular players aren't fans of permadeath games), then the right way to address it is to make the early levels less tedious to play, by introducing more enemy/trap variety, enabling ways for experienced players to move through early sections faster, and so on.
I accept there's many players who would agree with you on this, and it's not necessarily bad advice for a lot of games. But I think there's also a difference in philosophy going on here about what games (and hentai games) are or should be. I don't think all games need to or even should try to accommodate both these types of players. Now, if what the dev cares most about is selling as many copies as possible to the widest audience possible, then sure they'll need to target the lowest-common-denominator of player. But not all games need to or should want to do that, or else we'd live in a pretty bland world.
Maybe that sounds silly to some people, but I do think (at least some) hentai games have the potential to be real works of (pornographic) art that are more than just pure consumer products whose main responsiblity is to "respect the
.P.S. I do agree with you that for all these games the porn is the main selling point. That's undoubtedly true, it's what gets hentai game players in the door (including myself). But I don't think that means anything else is secondary. A game can have amazing porn, but if the gameplay is garbage then the game becomes only worthwhile as a glorified image/animation gallery. And I think this is partly the reason so many people on F95 seem to just want gallery unlock codes for every game: because they're used to wading through garbage games with no challenge that are boring, mechanical copy-pastes of each other. So it becomes a self-reinforcing loop, where bad games set poor expectations, and poor expectations lead to pressure on devs to make bad games.