Showing posts with label regular games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label regular games. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Non-Hentai Game Look - Iratus: Lord of the Dead

Wait.  Non-Hentai?  What kind of heresy is this?

Iratus, a very angry necromancer

There is a point to it.  Honest.

Technically, Iratus has monster girls.  No succubi, as your forces are drawn from the necromantic section of the classic fantasy bestiary rather than the demonic, but you can recruit female monsters such as vampires, banshees (even ghouls) to your teams.  The developers are Russian, so they're still allowed to put boobs on their female characters.

The easiest way to describe it is – Darkest Dungeon, but where you get to play the monsters.

Combat might look familiar if you've played Darkest Dungeon, but does play a little differently

You play Iratus, the titular Lord of the Dead.  After being released from long imprisonment, he embarks on a journey to conquer the surface world.  The basic economy is body parts.  You craft your minions out of body parts and get more by slaying the various hapless miners, dwarves and high-fantasy D&D parties stupid enough to stand in your way.

Unlike Darkest Dungeon, there is a clear fail state.  Body parts are limited.  Lose too many minions and you will run out of body parts to craft more and will have to restart.  It is also very easy to lose minions as – just like Darkest Dungeon – the combat is fairly brutal and unforgiving.  Your minions are very squishy and while you don't have to worry about sanity (this is a reverse Darkest Dungeon, so you get to drive your enemies insane instead, although this isn't always a good thing…), there isn't a Death's Door mechanic, so enemy crits have a nasty habit of killing minions out of nowhere.

As with Darkest Dungeon you have a home base to update and combat consists of 4 rows of your team battling 4 rows of their team, where position is important and dictates what attacks can and can't be used.  Despite the similarities, it plays differently enough to be its own thing.

Combat is interesting.  You can choose to either kill your enemies with direct damage or spook them hard enough until their hearts burst from stress.  The direct damage is split between melee and magical, with both having different resistances.  How the resistances work is also interesting.  Defence comes in either armour resistance, which reduces incoming damage, or blocks/wards, which completely nullifies a hit at the cost of losing a block/ward (unless it's a crit).  This brings an extra tactical component.  Big, single-hit attacks are good versus armour resistance, but bad against block/wards.  On the other hand, smaller multi-hit attacks are great for chewing through wards, but can be countered by decent armour resistance as each individual hit doesn't do a lot of damage.

Overall, despite looking a lot like Darkest Dungeon, combat plays a little differently.  Enemies are a lot tankier, so it's difficult to nuke out a single target on the first turn.  Also, because of the block/ward system, AoE attacks hitting multiple targets are viable, whereas in Darkest Dungeon they tended to be pretty bad.

Exploration is a little similar to Slay the Spire

Currently Iratus is still in Early Access, so it's incomplete and there are a few balance problems.  The devs do seem to be responding to feedback and making good updates.  I like the change to show the whole enemy group when next to it rather than just a single unit.  It's a game where you need to form teams to counter various different parties and that tactical element is missing if there's no real way to predict what you might face.

It's definitely worth a look, especially if you're a fan of the original Darkest Dungeon.  The devs seem to have taken that for inspiration and then iterated upon it to make a game that is different enough to stand on its own.  Which is pretty much the history of videogames in a nutshell.

Okay, so why are you talking about it, Hydra?

With Iratus and another game, Vambrace: Cold Soul, it looks like Darkest Dungeon was successful enough to spawn a new subtype of turn-based RPGs.  And that usually gets me thinking as to whether that blueprint could work for a sexy monster girl game.

This time I thought I might as well put some of the ideas I have in a more public place.  Rather than write them down in a notebook, forget them, lose the notebook, yadda yadda.

So, I'll make that a little mini-series this week (or next) - my thoughts on how to make a Darkest Dungeon-esque hentai game.  As with most of these ideas, I'm aware I don't have the technical chops to pull them off, but it might inspire someone that does, and we'd all love to see more sexy monster girl games made!

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Succubi in Mainstream Games: MachiaVillain

Okay, in this case, by mainstream I mean the sort of non-hentai responsible games you might find on GOG or Steam.

(Yes, I do play those from time to time, to keep the mind ticking over while working on various writing projects.  Darkest Dungeon, yeah!)

MachiaVillain is... what... a Murder Mansion creator sim.  You take control of a bunch of brainless horror-movie minions (psychos, zombies, skeletons, etc) and task them with building a spooky mansion out in the wilds.  Then you lure unsuspecting victims to it to steal their cash and keep your minions well-fed with the victims' brains, blood and body parts.


I picked it up a while back because I liked the concept and off-kilter art style.  I didn't really get into it back then.

Then I saw recently they'd added an update (and hopefully a ton of bug fixes!) that included a new monster type - succubus.

Yes, I'm a simple fella.  I check out most games with succubi in them.

So, I gave it a second look (as well as finding a guide to figure out what I'm supposed to do!).  It's a more mainstream game, so don't expect too much smexy from the succubi (I think indie non-H game devs get publicly drawn and quartered on Twitter if they make their succubi too sexy nowadays).

MachiaVillain's array of succubi 

The game is fun.  It's also a bit weird and wibbly with the bugs.  Heads of victims sometimes randomly fly off to the other side of the map.  Sometimes all the walls vanish when you reload.  At least the devs keep to the initial concept.  The one thing that bugged me about the original Dungeon Keeper was the bait-and-switch into another bog-standard RTS slugfest of keeper vs keeper after the first couple of missions.

MachiaVillain could do with... something, though, although I'm not sure what that something is.  Some sort of end-state victory to aim for, maybe.  You do get attacked by escalating bands of heroes ranging from meddling (and easily eaten) kids to quite tough squads of holy templars, but the game does start to run out of steam once the murder mansion is built and up and running.  The beauty of indie games like this is often the devs keep chipping away and adding improvements, so maybe they'll find the solution to that particular puzzle.

I can't, in good conscience, recommend the game as a gem, but I did get some hours enjoyment creating a little bordello of blood staffed almost exclusively with succubi.  Victims would visit and one-by-one be shunted off into hidden rooms, where a waiting succubus would lovingly take "care" of them.

The Bordello from Hell (unfinished)...

Hmm, there might be a story idea there...