Hentai Game Review: Shrift 2

The first Shrift was one of those games I always felt I should have reviewed, but never got around to it.  It's a good game and one I'd probably recommend, but I still haven't finished it, so I didn't feel qualified to write a proper review of it.  It's fairly hard, for a H-game, and the idiosyncratic approach to saving meant I kept getting stuck at various points and putting the game down.

Now to the sequel, Shrift 2, which is thankfully much easier and overall feels like a much more polished game.  This one I did complete... sort of.

First up, let's get some important things out of the way.

Shadow cowgirl

Okay, let's go right to the art style.  It's idiosyncratic.  Personally, I think it's improved from the previous game, but it will be a barrier for some people, especially if you prefer your porn games to have graphics similar to the lifelike 3D models of the many adult games on Steam.  Personally I think it's the animations and how the characters move with the sex combat that makes it work, but that won't hold for everyone.  I'd recommend giving the free demo a look to see if it works.  You'll know fairly quickly whether it hits the spot or not.

The next is how the game handles saving.  As with the first game, which (I think) was influenced by Undertale, there is meta-weirdness going on.  Unlike typical RPGs, you can't just rewind to a previous save point.  Whatever you put the player character through will be preserved between save states.  I found this out the hard way after letting the character get comprehensively sex-drained, loading a previous save and then finding out the character still had all the levels lost and a pile of negative status ailments from his 'fun times'.  At the time I didn't know how to recover from that and was forced to start again.  Thankfully, after getting more familiar with the game, this isn't that much of a problem.  Levels are easy to regain and most ailments go away with a good night's sleep.  The hotel the main monster girls end up in also gives you the opportunity to re-experience the sexy times without having to go back to a previous save, but I think the game could benefit from a similar monsterpedia re-fight option (at the relevant power level) the original Monmusu Quest has.  That's mainly because I like being legitimately surprised and beaten by the monster girls' sexy moves rather than taking the begging option to experience them.

She's about to give you a very big slurp

The last is that the game isn't complete yet.  You get part one, with parts two and three (and maybe more) coming later as free (I think) updates.  This was how it worked with the original Shrift and the dev did deliver on that, so they probably will again.  As it is, the game still has plenty of content for a H-game, so don't let that hold you back from diving in right away.  There's about 7-8 hours here, probably more if you want to grind up to unlocking all the H scenes.

With those caveats out of the way, let's get onto the game proper.

I played this one using Textractor for machine translation and was able to stumble to the 'end' after looking some things up on the ULMF forum.

The setup is you're an apprentice priest tasked with clearing out demons.  You pick up a sexy shadow girl companion early on and then find out you have a weird symbol on your hand that allows you pick up more demon girl companions after you defeat them.  There is also plenty of other glitchy weirdness going on that hints of larger revelations later.  I have a feeling this might be linked to the original Shrift as some sort of prequel, but bear in mind I'm going off machine translation, so my understanding is fairly sketchy at best.

Standard RPGmaker Church

The game world consists of a town hub with various locations to visit.  More are opened up later (including a hotel to house your growing harem of demon girl companions).  The locations are divided between your typical shops, dungeons (of which there are 3), and quest locations needing to be visited to advance the overall plot.  The plot is advanced through main quests (mostly) given out by the nun character in the church.  There are also various side quests which can be given out by the nun or NPCs in the game world.  Some are the typical recurring 'fetch X of thing' side quests while others unlock additional demon girl companions.  There is also a day/night cycle with the player character moving it along with each place they visit.

Town Hub

Rather than typical RPG-maker navigation, the dungeons are rendered in classic 'blobber' style as pseudo-3D mazes with wandering monsters (similar to the original Dungeon Master if you're really really old).  Unlike the previous game, the majority of these monsters are regular RPG combat encounters with no H-content.  Normally I don't like this in H-games, but it doesn't get in the way too much.  If you do get level-drained to 1, it's fairly easy to blast through one of the dungeons and get right back up to around 20 or so again.  There is a grind element, but it's not as bad as other games.

In a dungeon

Then there is the sexy H-content fights or 'temptation battles'.  The game solves the habitual realism problems of how to have sexy combat when one side is fighting with regular weapons by having your main offensive move be 'praying'.  This is based on a Faith stat, which also doubles up as HP.  You also (later) have access to magic attacks.  There's a nice balancing act going on here.  The regular faith attacks are based upon how much faith (or HP) you have.  In contrast, magic attacks do damage based on how low your faith is.  Because this is a sexy combat H-game, you also have a lust bar.  Let that get too high and you'll be rendered helpless while your opponent has 'fun' with you.

I don't think this is going to be a 'clean' fight

The mechanics deserve special mention as I think the Shrift 2 dev might have solved one of the main issues with this type of game, especially when the succubi and monster girls have level-drain moves.  Because it's a H-game, you want the monster girls to do sexy things to you.  But if you let the monster girls do sexy things to you, you end up losing progress to Game Overs and losing levels that have to be ground back up again.  With Shrift 2, getting drained is also a form of character progression.  The demon girls are slotted in as interchangeable companions and they aid you during fights with special moves.  They are levelled up by... ahem... sucking levels out of you.  Getting drained also generates SP (sacrifice points), which are then used to unlock skills and passive abilities on a separate skill tree.  It's an interesting approach.  The game is currently easy enough (after my experiences with the first game and knowing I was going to be fumbling with machine translation, I pussied out and picked EASY difficulty) that I found I didn't really have to use the skill tree much, but there are definitely some ideas there I've filed away for future reference.  I definitely wouldn't mind playing around with some of these concepts for a succubus H-game.

A lizard girl's best attempt to look human (while fucking your brains out)

Now for the all-important H-content.  I found 8 separate monster girls and 2 'squeezing' monsters (non-human monster monsters that have sex attacks).  Going back to that idiosyncratic word again, Shrift 2 is very idiosyncratic with the monster designs.  Maybe more so than games like Monmusu Quest, where the monster girls nearly always had recognisably human faces and tits no matter how weird and monstrous the rest of them was.  Shrift 2 has a broad range, probably too broad for most people.  As with the first game, I found the monsters to be a mix of ones I really liked and hit the spot, and others I noped away from as fast as possible.  There's a bit of furry in there.  Scaly too.  And whatever the moth girl counts as.  As long as you find a couple you like, they have such a range of H-scenes you'll probably find enough content to make the game enjoyable even if you find some of the others boner killers.

(Personally, I really liked the shadow girl and siren.)

The last fight with the siren also deserves special mention.  Up until then the fights are mostly typical HRPG battles.  The siren fight brings in more Undertale-style elements with mini-game segments where the player's soul has to dodge hearts thrown at it.  Very creative and well-implemented and I hope we see more like that in future instalments.

Right from the h... humongous boobs

The game also has compatibility support for a sex toy (Vorze A10 Piston SA, I think), where it will 'squeeze' you in time to the on-screen action.  I can't comment on that as I don't own that particular toy, but it sounds a fun idea.

(No Hydra, do not entertain ideas of letting one of your succubi have access to that.)

Overall, if you can handle the various idiosyncrasies, it's worth a look.

I'll post a rough guide on how to play sometime next week if there's interest.

Monster Girl/Succubus H-games on my Radar

As I've stated before, I haven't played many of late because of problems with getting Machine Translation to work on my computer.  (I could solve all this by actually learning to read Japanese, but unfortunately I'm English, and we're congenitally awful at picking up other languages).

Thankfully for us gaijin slobs, other solutions are starting to appear.  DLSite has been posting some products with English translation (of varying degrees of quality) and other talented folks have made or are making English translations of juicy succubus smut games.

Domination Quest ~ Kuro and the Naughty Monster Girls

AKA the brand new one, as it came out yesterday (the day before?).

It's from the same people that created Demon Angel Sakura.  This time they've gone for traditional RPG rather than a platformer.  Bizarrely, rather than use something like RPG Maker, they appear to have tried to build something like RPG Maker in Unity, which might just be the most Japanese Game Dev thing ever.

Given that it's from Kokage no Izumi, the people that made Demon Angel Sakura, I'm guessing it's going to be weird and end up frequently crossing the line between erotic and WTF! a lot.  In theory it's your typical Gotta Get 'Em All monster girl harem game, but the way the main character picks up new waifus is by shrinking them down and gobbling them up with a tail mouth coming out of his butt.

So, basic Demon Angel Sakura weirdness then.

I would caution against picking it up just yet.  It looks like the creator rushed the game out a little too soon and it's extremely bug infested.  I hit a game-breaking bug within the first half hour where I couldn't continue down a path because the game kept putting the character sprite on the exit point of the new screen, promptly looping the player right back to where they'd just come from.  I've seen comments that this can be avoided if you hit the right spot on the screen, but I haven't found it yet.  The same people have also reported encountering lots of crashing problems later in the game.

I have it and it looks interesting enough that I will write about it once the current broken stuff is fixed.  For now I'd advise staying clear until a patch or two has dropped.


Drain Dungeon

While checking back to see if Domination Quest had been patched, I noticed the English version of Drain Dungeon sitting in my DLSite game library.  This surprised me as I don't remember buying it.  I think what might have happened is DLSite gave me the English translation as a freebie as I already owned the original.

This is an old one.  2016, I think.  You stomp down an abstracted dungeon and then spurt all your accumulated levels inside a trio of succubi on the way out.  I think I played it a little a while back.  Now, with the English version I can give the whole game a thorough...

Actually, scratch that.  I must be getting senile as well as old and fat.  I already wrote a full review of this back here, including delving all the way down the final (and hot!) succubus boss.  The fact I can't remember this is probably not a good endorsement for the game.

Oh well, it might be fun to have a playthrough where this time I actually know what all the items do.  (And have all that delicious draining done in English-text Bad Ends.)


Shrift

Ignore the art style.  A lot of people have been impressed with this game, and I think with good reason.  It might be the best implementation of femdom battle fuck mechanics around.  The creator has given a lot of attention to the various binds and status effects to make the player horny and helpless before the monster girls moves on to the snu snu.  The art style is... idiosyncratic... but they do make good use of puppeting to animate the scenes.  It ends up being a lot more sexier than I expected.

This level of detail on the battles combined with an artist like Setouchi or Shiki would be my dream monster girl H-game combo, I think.

There is a workable English translation patch for the game.  I haven't managed to delve too deep into it yet.  The game also has a bit of Undertale's quirk to it.  The obvious influence is in the separate genocide and pacifist routes, but it also seems to be doing similar funky meta stuff with saved games.  This makes going back to redo various "fights" difficult as the character isn't there anymore.  My last run sort of petered out because I managed to get myself trapped in a fight versus the doll girl that was virtually unwinnable with the equipment I had.

I'm tempted to run at this again and give it the full let's play treatment.


Lust Grimm

Another game that has been recommended to me multiple times in the comments.  I was iffy on the demo.  The art style looked delightful, but the Bad Ends seemed short.

A lot of this was because I was playing with no English.  Translation team =Together= are working on a full translation of this (They've already translated Succubus Prison).  I have played the translated demo and can definitely appreciate the game a little more.  As with Succubus Rhapsody, there's a lot of sexiness in the text of the battles.  Now I'm eager to play the full thing when the complete translation is done.


Because of my translation issues I haven't been keeping as close an eye on interesting H-games as I'd like. Domination Quest is new, but both Lust Grimm and Shrift have been out for a while (although Shrift is using a chapter release model, with the fourth and final chapter not out yet).  If you've spotted any other juicy succubus games, let me know in the comments.

I am tempted to run another let's play type thing again (but maybe not as detailed as the Paradox series).  I'm nervous of doing them because of time that could be spent writing, but I also don't like leaving the blog empty for too long when I'm working on longer projects.  Having something at the forefront that's quick and easy to put out might make for an appropriate screen for those times when I want to be working on larger-scale project in the background.  I don't like the regular update posts.  They're great when things are running smoothly, but end up doom-spiraling my mood pretty quickly when I fall behind.  I think I might have to learn the time-honoured corporate strategy of keeping shtum until I can properly wow people with a new thing.

(For instance, it would have been far better if I'd not told people about the boob monster story and just released it when it was done, rather than fucking up the time estimations, again!, and have people wondering where the fuck is this story and why is it so goddamned late?)