Recent reviews by Bombyxさん

[Played on Hard mode].

Interesting story, tense/scary atmosphere and gameplay, great soundtrack and sound design, voice acting and graphics.

Silkworm/Moth themed (i love em')

Also has plenty of bonus side content in the form of free unlockables ( as the gaming gods originally intended) you can easily get after your first playthrough (plenty of Kaiko cosmetics, 2 optional endings and 2 sound effects for chase and roaming) granting some decent/fun replayability.

Definitely recommended.

I wold have liked to recommend this game but i can't as in the end i felt disappointed.

Part of said disappointment is probably due to the main Gimmick of constant
"Resetting" which completely kills any attachment to the characters, tension or fear of consequences.



On the" Psychological/Horror" matter, despite the contents of the game, at no point i ever felt either scared for either myself nor for the characters.


SInce i feel it very hard to explain why i felt that way about Slay the Princess, i would like to give you an example by comparison using another Horror VN i've played and enjoyed in the past called "The Letter".

During my playthrough of the Letter i felt constantly intrigued by both the well written development of both the characters and the plot, the game as an excellent sound design and art direction that makes it very easy for the game to manipulate your emotions, Happy, sad, scared, glad, are emotions that get constantly swapped between each others while you're playing, the writing is really good and the atmosphere is great thanks to a combination of Sound design, good writing and Voice acting.

It's a game that really knows how to manipulate your mood and state of mind, ups and downs happy and terrified are very important contrasting elements for any Horror/Psychological/Thriller/Mystery story.

Thanks to this, even if i ended up only finishing one route for this game i actually felt satisfied ( in the moment, despite it being a bad ending) and Hyped about replaying for other endings and routes in the future.


Unfortunately, i couldn't feel the same way about Slay the Princess, the game is definitely not bad, but it felt kind of disappointing for me, i ultimately really didn't get anything i wanted/expected from this experience, no Tension, Horror, no attachment to any characters and i wasn't blown away by the atmosphere,VA, soundtrack, plot or characters.

I'm definitely conflicted while writing this review cause i can definitely see the people that made this put their love into their creation, but at the same time i cannot ignore my own feelings and hide how i actually felt about the game in the end, unfulfilled/disappointed.


Tl;dr: An interesting albeit ultimately unfulfilling/disappointing experience, not really what i was expecting.

If you are still really curious about the game, i would advise you'd give it a shot once it goes as low as 5 euros ( on sale)

Might have been "Too Horny" to become mainstream-famous whenever the game originally came out on console, but in today's Modern Hypersensitive, all-censoring climate it absolutely felt like a breath of fresh air.

The matchmaking in this game is pure CBT.

After " Winning too much" the system is set up to feed you unfavourable matches in an automated and well intended effort to keep you on a looping rollercoaster so you're forced to grind on a 50/50 win rate for the sake of inflating the playerbase count ( if you reach your desired rank you're more likely to stop playing) and it's a proven fact that alot of players that WANT to like the game and are put in this frustrating position are more likely to buy Battle passes and skins in an effort not to quit the game.


Blizzard most likely hired a professional team of unscrupulous Psychologist to come up with these predatory business tactics ( that do work btw) to suck every last penny out of their own plòayerbase..


I'm sure the Overwatch 2 team was summoned from the depths of hell by Bobby and it shows.

Remember when you were little kid and you were forced to travel for hours so would put on your earphones, look outside your parent's car window and imagine a character running on the side of the road dodging and slashing through all the obstacles in their way in time with the beat?

It's a pretty good "Horror" ( the game it's written as horror but it's overall ends up more beautiful than scary) VN, the characters are nice, the artstyle is really good, the story, soundtrack and puzzles are good and i'd would honestly love if they'd gave it an anime adaptation... then why i still ended up not recommending this game?


One simple reason, Greed.

Aside from the fact that the game is absurdly overpriced if compared to other more effort intensive made games, i've noticed that the game was probably split into 2 different games just for the sake of more money.


Why am i thinking/saying this?

Very simple, after finishing the Red Riding Hood chapter the game ends abruptly with no resolution, it kind of feels like they planned to sell all the missing spirit chapters as DLCs, which would already have been an extremely,scummy move considering the already exorbitant pricing on the main game, but they apparently decided to scrap this idea and make a whole another game to make EVEN MORE money by releasing Spirit Hunter NG instead.


But why am i so sure this is the case? well, 2 simple facts point to this being the case:


-The fact that the game abruptly ends halfway through leaving you with a sense of unfulfillment.


- After the Sixth spirit the game still has 6 more open spaces in your Spirit Archive, clearly suggesting that they indeed planned to finish this game either though paid DLC or free updates, but late in developement they most likely decided not deliver on that and make another game using those missing ghosts as material to make more money instead.

In every single game i've ever played since i've been alive, completion has meant that no free spaces can be left open.


The only occurrence of this making sense would be if they'd planned to upldate the game through paid dlc or updates ( which is not the case)


Leaving 6 spaces "mysteriously" open and releasing a new game ( ironically called: NG) that accidentally happens to offer six more ghosts is nothing but suspicious.


Tl;dr: They Split the game in 2 separate games instead of finishing Death Mark ( as they should have) to make more money despite already making the main game absurdly overpriced, even if i bought this game on a 60% sale, and i enjoyed most of the experience but i just cannot support this kind of marketing behavior, therefore i've decided not to buy the Ng " Sequel".

If you still feel like purchasing the game despite this ,then i advise you to definitely wait for a generous sale, the game is well done, but it's truly a shame that it's unfinished and grossly overpriced.

Very interesting Design/themes, but the game it's completely unplayable, stutters randomly, there are tons of misplaced invisible walls that Alice can get stuck on floating, the game often stutters and crashes all together for no apparent reason other than due to the fact of it being a really crappy Pc port, the game has no achievements, card or badges.

It's really a shame, The design of the world and characters would absolutely have won me over, but actually playing the game in these conditions completely turned off any enjoyment i could have with this.

It's even more of a shame that i had to wait years to be able to play this and it had to turn out this way too.

There are mods to fix these technical problems, but they require you to crack the game, having to go on that route just to be able to even play a legally bought game ( plus taking a risk by downloading and applying a crack from a random website or potentially risk steam's wrath) it's just nonsense.

The game is also really short, so i'd just watch a gameplay of it if i were you, save your money for something else that's actually playable and properly optimized for the platform.

The true Madness i experienced here is trying to run the game smoothly.

Not only getting forcefully removed from immersion every 10 or so minutes due to crappy technical game design or faulty porting is just a terrible experience, but it's even more discouraging if you consider that the game autosaves after certain checkpoints, so it's very likely for the game to crash right while you're at the end of a lengthy platforming section or in the middle of the action.

TL;DR The original game might have been good, but this is just a Horrible port, too many hoops to jump through to even make the game decently playable, Refounded.

This review was a long time coming from me, i kept postponing cause i was fairly immersed into the game and i also wanted to be sure to have enough ground/time to properly express my feelings/opinions on it.


So, here we go:



Pros


❤️ Very atmospheric


❤️ Has A cool cast of interesting/diverse original characters ( npcs & bosses) and even some interesting mechanics tied to some of their questlines.


❤️ Beautiful music/ambiance


❤️Quite the array of memorable/original boss design ( although it has a a couple of lazy recolors in the dlcs)


❤️ Nice Va


❤️ Best and interesting selection of cool armor sets in the DS Saga, (thematic diversity is key)



❤️ Tons of Build Variety


❤️ Has tons of Replayability



❤️ Lots of cool/different kind of weapons and has the best pyromancies in the saga ( Gotta love Warmth )



❤️ Best Pvp in the saga, still fairly active to this day ( although check cons) you can make work alot of different builds/combinations.



❤️ Does not Shy from trying being different/innovative, It has some DS 1 fanservice but it does not feel too overbearing ( it's not a fanservice fiesta like DS3) sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but it's indeed a breath of fresh air from the usual formula.



❤️Experiments alot with covenants and has alot of cool mechanics.



❤️ Amazing Lore/Silent Storytelling tries to actually explain curse/reconnect to DS1 while also trying to put its own spin on it without fanservicing too much ( Dark souls 3) but at the same time, it shows that it's still quite mindful of the source material and, here and there, tries also to pay homage to it, opening alot of new possibilities to this entry in the series while also not tarnishing it's predecessor's glory.


❤️ Graphically and spacially limited ( compared to Ds1 and DS3 not everything is thightly connected and some zones/ backgrounds are loaded in separatedly, some vistas in the distance might also be "pre rendered" cardboards) but, still manages to have your classic Shorcut p0rn the DS saga is famous for and it still looks pretty ( graphically) good to this day.


❤️ I have the most hours played in this than all of the other games of the series (combined) and i'm still playing it to this day.





Cons


💔 In 2020 Pvp is still quite fun & alive but Arenas ( like Blood & Blues) are plagued by hackers which furtherly lowers in-world invasions ( this happens due to the absence of cracked red eyes due to them being heavily tied to the Blood covenant arena, ofc there are other ways to "manually" farm these effectively, but most players that want to just " jump in and have fun" will end up neglecting these methods completely and won't make the effort, i do not blame them btw) though, it has to be said that this anomaly actually pushed people to play all the other pvp covenants more than it originally happened in the game's glory days ( Bell Tower and Rat covenant are mostly clean from hackers, you get chunks early to upgrade your weapons to +10 and tails and other cool rewards + you are summoned for free, so you can just jump in and have fun without having to manually farm orbs from mobs), still, this is just a player adjustment in an effort to avoid the hacker plague that's ruining pvp, before it was a less of a problem cause there was just more people playing so hackers where like an occasional teardrop in a sea of good normal players, but since playerbase has shrank from the game's release, now it has become and actual issue, Arenas Like the bloods are completely unplayable due to hackers, which is sad cause if you need stuff like an early chaos fireball pyromancy or Wotg in your first playthough ( since they both require a lot of Arena wins/mileage) thanks to hackers, they became quite hard/impossible to get now.


💔 it has some texture clipping here and there, but it's not as frequent as you'd imagine.


💔 Although it has some epic bosses and arena designs ( Looking Glass knight, Sir Alonne, Fume Knight for example) some of the dlcs ones are just shameless unfun buffed recolors ( Silver Ornstein, Blue Smelter, Lud & Zallen are some examples)

💔 The Sotfs upgrade actually messed up some cool textures in the game for example, they somehow ruined Ornifex's amazing ass ( probably due to poor texture scaling) and they sneakly added a blur to the binoculars so, hopefully you won't be able to notice, they also patched the air walking bug so you can't take a peek to Nashandra's nethers anymore.


Final Consideration/verdict


Dark Souls II is my most played game in the saga for a reason ( I've also played the original physical copy from when it came out, so my total playtime it's far more than 600 hours) It has alot of memorable characters and bosses, it's atmospheric, has the best pvp in the saga, you can experiment alot of build combinations/weapons/sets and, most importantly, it does not shy from being " different".

Sure, Dark souls 3 is full of amazing ds1 references and it's basically just a big nostalgia boner, but it didn't actually try to do anything new or innovative to ADD something to the series.

I'm also aware that some new mechanics were removed from it due to time constraints, but even while taking them in full account, it would still have lacked that " something" special that keeps Drawing me back to Dark souls 2, year after year.

I think a quote from the opening cinematic describes that feeling quite perfectly:


" Long ago in a walled off land, far to the north, a great King built a great Kingdom i believe they called it Drangleic, perhaps you're familiar, no, how could you be.

But one day, you will stand before its decrepit gate, without really knowing why.



Like a Moth Drawn to the flame."



Deeply Recommended.

Ultimate Pokemon Killer.

Made me actually feel ashamed of wasting money on pokemon games.


Yes, it's that good.


I've actually always liked Digimon a little more than pokemon, ( i used to watch the cartoon every morning before going to school i still have my digimon cards from since when i was little) the problem is, for some reason, japan didn't bothered pushing them alot oversea until now ( maybe cause pokemon had more success by being a simpler " little baby preschool time" franchise and Digimons are more adultish/complex lean towards more adult themes so they sold less? Perhaps? tbch though,don't get me wrong, jokes aside i actually love both franchises almost equally, i just think it's a shame they didn't have a good chance to have a clean competition in the west giving us little to no franchise variety).

I'm glad that this is changing now and we're getting good stuff like this too.

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DISCLAMER: the In dept-review that i made about the game was too long for steam's puny 8000 available characters so i've just moved and posted my actual full review on my curator's group, the one you're about to read down here only includes the bare essentials, If you are interested in a more exhaustive/ informative and meme-filled review please follow this link Here V
In Depth Review

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Pros ❤️


❤️ The Gameplay: Just like this review's ( purposeful) lack of intro, LE throws you right way into the dungeon whitout any premise or compliments, you started the game by creating your Succubi avatar, you distribute your starting skill points and... *bam* you're in this place now.

Your objective it's pretty simple, explore, fight, ♥♥♥♥ ,or both, and reach ( hopefully) the end of the dungeon.

Exploration is done exclusively by Dungeon map left clicking ( the cubic shape and layout reminded me, in some way, Darkest Dungeon's) the map is covered by the classic fog of war, advancing through rooms can result in 5 possible outcomes:

- Fight an enemy/champions

- Find a Treasure Room

- Find a resting place/raise a campfire

- Find the Merchant

- Random Event

Once you are able to finish most of the rooms in the area ( or just find the boss one) you'll be given the opportunity to fight the area's boss to either lose and restart the climb ( or the descent) or simply win and advance to the next area.


❤️ The Combat System: it's a fusion between playing a card game and the classic Jrpg strategic turn based combat, it's kinda a fusion between the two it could be easily described as " Make the best of what you have".


❤️ The Animation : To be honest, the animation got me kind of torn between liking it very much and not, from a positive standpoint, there is no doubt in my mind that your succubi's Ahegaos are very sensual and well made, the intercourse on itself though tend to lack in consistency, some are well animated other seems a bit stiff ( i'll cover this topic a bit better later)


❤️ The Soundtrack: there aren't many tracks, but the ones that it had i enjoyed.


❤️ Difficulty: don't get me wrong, the game it's not hard ( i've completed all the currently available content in one 4 hour sitting), i would define it more like " deceptively easy".

❤️ Relatively cheap: For what you are currently getting the game's price feels pretty fair, not too pricy but also not too cheap, i would give it a go ( I've asked the dev and he said it's gonna raise the price by $2 for the full release )

❤️ Passionate and Active Developer: Flametorch seems very passionate about its work and very he's very active and he seems motivated to fix all of the game's known issues and deliver the best version LA that he possibly can ( He actually told me himself that he had to postpone the original full release date because he wanted to add more to the game).




Alright, enough with the praise, it's time to be negative.



Cons 💔

💔 No Storymode: To be completely honest, i was a bit disappointed by the lack of a storymode, it's true that i didn't expect nothing to complex either, but i did at least expect " Something" other than the basic store page introduction.


💔 The Animation: While the game shows a remarkable Ahegao repertoire, it just feels a bit stiff and unnatural in some other places, in some scenes i could almost feel the " strings" getting pulled in a "low tier MMD animation" kind of way.

💔Poor sound design: Some moans are poorly recorded and, in some scenes, tend to repeat back to back and gave me a severe case of " 2000 newgrounds MAF games flashbacks".

💔 Mediocre 3D modeling: Again, while the ahegaos feel quite nice, all the rest of the body lacks form variety and feels a bit stiff and clunky plus her vagina is poorly modeled/animated and it just straight up looks like it's made of Play-dough and some facial color looks a bit " smudged" in some areas .

💔 Very lacking customization: Can't make your succubus Thicc ( big negative for me), can't change costume, can't select voice type, you can only change eye color and iris shape, costume colors and breasts size, although very limited imho.
I've talked with flametorch about this and he said that he's planning to implement a couple of more costumes, but that's about it for customization.

💔 Deck and artifacts are temporary: in LA you only truly get a feel of progression through levels and skill tree, because both the deck and the artifacts reset on deaths, this effectively robs the player from the fun of collecting/creating/keeping a specifc deck ( which is the main appeal of card games to begin with), same thing with artifacts, i didn't enjoy building my deck and artifacts just for them to be ripped out from my cold dead hands or reset in every sucessive run of the game.


💔 Kinda feels like this could be a Smarphone game: i couldn't find any defining feature that would make me think this game would onlywork/have to be on pc, matter of fact, playing this game actually made me think that this could easily be ported to smarphones.

💔 Unfinished: the game currently has an hefty amount of bugs, event text cutoffs, low performance issues and loading screen crashes ( nothing unexpected though, after all, we're talking about an unfinished early access.

It has to be mentioned, though that this game is periodically getting fixes and updates ( as it should).

The dev is also pretty vocal and open about people's feedback & fixing his game, so, if he's able to keeps this rythm, it should come out polished and primed in the full release.

Even then, i still feel like i have to mention this to inform you guys to about the actual current state of the game.

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Verdict



Last Evil has been a pleasant surprise for me, it's clearly not finished and in some aspect limited, but in the end, the game it's definitely fun, i literally finished the Early access version in one single 4 hour sitting that left me with the compelling need for more.

The game, even in the current state, was able to show enough promise to keep me interested and waiting for the full release.

Flametorch is also quite friendly,vocal and listen/takes to heart people's bug reports/feedback & suggestions.


That makes me very hopeful for a more polished/complete full release, which is apparenly scheduled around May.

Dev says: "before June at the latest."

I've also talked with Flametorch about his plans for the full release and he told me that "most ingame-systems that will be included in the full release have already been applied but he plans to add some more in the near future" the full release will also feature:

- More dresses/costumes for the succubus

- 3 ingame cinematic story-related videos

- Hard mode.


In the end though, only time will tell.

Despite all the praise i've given this game i would still advise you to wait for the full release, or alternatively, wait of a sales to come by and get it then, sadly, even if i feel like i want to trust Flametorch i still just can't help but feel like i that i shouldn't put too much trust on unfinished early access games and neither should you.....but, if after reading this review you feel the compelling urge to play right away i'd say go for it, the dev seems wholesome enough to be trusted and he looks like he cares alot of user's feedback/bettering his game, so it should be actually safe to invest, worst case scenario, your losses would definitely amount more to a broken heart than a broken wallet


(i'll be sure to update this and the in-depth review once the game it's fully released).