Wednesday, April 19, 2023

New(ish) Short Story: Men are from Mars, Mantraps are from Venus

One of my ongoing background projects is to take the old H-space bestiary shorts I wrote a few years back and beef them up into proper short stories.  The latest is available on Patreon/SubscribeStar.

"Men are from Mars, Mantraps are from Venus" on Patreon.
"Men are from Mars, Mantraps are from Venus" on SubscribeStar.

This is another temporary exclusive.  I'm slowly working through the old H-space bestiary stories.  At some point I'll have enough to start gathering them into ebook collections for Amazon and other places.

This was originally the Venus Mantrap story.  I fleshed out the background to explain how the soldiers got there and also to try and build up the classic "Green Hell" jungle atmosphere.

As with the original, the ending is pretty icky, so watch out for that one.  I do like to push the horror a little bit more with the H-space stories.

In case people are wondering, I don't have a good track record with H-space stories getting accepted on Literotica.  They're usually a little nastier than my regular horror stories and the scarlet imps tend to get a story bounced whenever they show up.  As a result I don't bother posting them there (but do still plan to post other stories).  It's also nice to have some exclusive content I can hold back for patrons/subscribers.  a writer has to eat, so all support gratefully accepted!

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Hentai Game Re-Review: Domination Quest 1


Technically, I reviewed this one a while back.  I was in the mood to play a naughty JRPG-type game and remembered the sequel, Domination Quest 2, had come out a month or so ago.  Similar to Monmusu Quest, you can port the old save across, but as that save was many years and a few laptops ago, I decided to play through again rather than try to excavate it from a forgotten hard drive.

Turns out I needed to anyway, as it was only on rereading my original review that I remembered I never completed the first game.  Despite this, and after completing it this time, I don't think I was too far off with what I originally wrote.


I did reach the final boss this time.

The major change is that whatever bugs blighted it before, don't appear to be present now.  I didn't encounter any crashes during my second playthrough.  The other sticking point, and what caused me to abandon my original playthrough in the misty forest area, was the frequency of combat encounters.  That felt like it had been dialled back.  They're still reasonably frequent, but not so frequent that you can barely move without triggering another combat encounter.

Onto the game itself.  Mechanically, it's a turn-based JRPG.  It has the look of a RPGMaker game, but reverse-engineered into Unity.  While this is a little odd, the game does make use of the 3D environments to do some things you wouldn't see in a regular RPGMaker game.

You play as Kuro, who as a dominator has the ability to shrink monster girls down, gobble them up and then recruit them as allies.  Like Pokémon, but weirder and pervier.


Probably best not to ask...

Kuro doesn't have much in the way of fighting power, so you have to rely on a party of monster girls to do it for you.  You have a party of four and a bench of four you can sub in and out.  Along with health bars, the monster girls have stamina bars that are constantly decreasing every turn.  When they run low, they have to 'snack' on Kuro to get their energy back up or get knocked out.  This is where the bulk of the in-combat H-content comes from, as Kuro's allies take a break to blowjob or do some other sex act on him to get their energy levels back up again.

Most of the combat is regular turn-based JRPG, where if you lose you just get a regular GAME OVER scene rather than a sexy Bad End.  There are some elites and boss encounters that are an exception to this.  At some point they'll try and grab Kuro and drain his energy directly, and you have to rely on your allies to hit the opponent enough times to force them to let him go.  As I said in my original review, it's a shame this mechanic isn't used more.

The other areas of H-content are scenes that are unlocked after increasing affection with your allies, and a skinship mechanic where you get carried around by one of your allies in a lewd manner.  That's fun, but the animation does block a good portion of the side of the screen, so might get in the way while exploring a new area.


It feels quite pleasant until your feet start to dissolve...

The story doesn't have too much to it.  It's a standard fantasy setting with humans coexisting with horny monster girls.  Kuro is just about to start his adventuring career when his powerful succubus (dragon?) partner is mind-controlled and snatched by a nefarious group looking to stoke tensions between humans and monsters.  The game is about trying to get her back and breaking the control the enemy demon lord wannabe has over her.

The mechanics are fine.  It's JRPG light with lots of vore themes.  Kuro can't carry weapons and neither does his monster girls, but there's a crafting system where you combine weapons with crystals to boost your party's abilities.  Mostly it's just stat boosts, but some weapons can either defend against or inflict status effects.  It's a nice system, but a little limited.  Adding a chance of instant death to multi-hit attacks was about the most exciting 'combo' I could find.  It would have been nice to have a little more variety here.  I like a bit of greed in my RPGs, so I missed having the usual options to manipulate XP gain, Gold gain, item drop frequency, etc.

As for the themes, it's a Kokage no Izumi game.  This circle likes giantesses, vore, and crude humour.  As I said in the original review, if you like your monster girls on the giant side and with heapings of vore, this is perfect for you.  If those elements leave you cold, there is enough 'regular' monster girl content to make it worth a glance, but it is a little deeper into its chosen fetish zone than something like Monmusu Quest.


Giant farting fairies are pretty much a staple of this circle's work.

In all, it's about 10 hours of reasonable JRPG, with 28 or so sexy(ish) monster girls to have fun with.

As I said in the original review, one of the monster girls (the carnivorous plant girl) gave me inspiration for a short story ("The Banquet of the Queen of the Goblins"), and if I can get a short story out of a hentai game, I consider it a win.  Hopefully, I'll find something that gets the creative juices flowing in the sequel.


Tuesday, April 04, 2023

Harlot Art - The Madam

Here is some lovely harlot art, or in this case NPC art.  After having art commissioned of Mademoiselle Vête Piège, Atlantis27 commissioned Thraeh for another character - this time The Madam of the House herself.



For more of Thraeh's work, check out their DeviantArt here:
https://www.deviantart.com/thraeh

I must admit, The Madam is one of the characters I have problems with visualising.  She's supposed to be at once both very old and doddering, while at the same time still looking quite hot and very fuckable.  That generally sends my imagination haywire.  Although, in theory, if she was a character in a movie or anime, the way to show that would be to have an early-thirtysomething (and attractive actress) play her with the mannerisms of a far older person.

I think the art does a good job of depicting that.  Old hairstyle and decadent courtesan dress, young face.  And, in the lingerie pose - a very voluptuous and sexy body.

Thanks for having this commissioned, Atlantis27.

And as for The Madam getting a proper scene in the House, that's something I still haven't finalised.  She could just as easily show up as an extra NPC encounter, the queen of one of the factions, or even the final 'boss' the player has to survive in order to escape the House.  I haven't decided yet.




Saturday, April 01, 2023

House of Hellish Harlots v0.040

There was a v0.039 put out at the start of March.  Somehow, in all the usual PR posts I do across the internet to promote a new release, I forgot to update my own blog.  Never mind.

If you didn't check it out at the time, v0.039 added 3 new harlots: Negralima-V, N-Carnizadalama, and Cerastesia.

v0.040 just adds the one new harlot: Hati Krim.  She's a blue-skinned alien (-looking) babe that specialises in erotic cream massage.

Around this time I was experimenting with Tweego to restructure the project into separate modules to stop the main Twine Editor lagging to death through the size of the project.  I'm glad to say those experiments appear to have worked, so that's one potential future roadblock removed.

You can play the public version of House of Hellish Harlots here:
https://houseofhellishharlots.com/

As always, if you like what you see, you can support the project (and me) on Patreon or SubscribeStar.

The private version is a couple of releases ahead.  Yesterday they received v0.043, which adds two new harlots - the jellyfish girl, Cyane, and the fleshpot pitcher plant girl, Lagona Voluptes.

I have a few more harlots queued up, but I'm about to spend a couple of months writing short stories for a new collection, so those are in the bank to give me material to release over that period.