Hentai Game Look - In the Castle of Succubi

Text, text and yet more text.  That’s the short summary of In the Castle of Succubi.

Like its predecessor, House of Monster Girls, In the Castle of Succubi is less a game and more a visual novel with the occasional choice (usually along the lines of ‘Would you like this particular succubus to bonk your brains out?’).  Also like its predecessor, In the Castle of Succubi is aimed squarely at fans of big breasts.  All of the succubi are blessed with super-ginormous norks and there is an emphasis on paizuri (titwank) scenes.

The plot has you play an adventurer of some description that falls foul of a trap in the demons’ castle.  This puts you at the mercy of a succession of lovely succubi who are all very keen to take good care of you.  Their idea of care seems to involve wrapping their soft mammaries around your dick and rubbing up and down until all that inconvenient tension floods right out.

Much much much rubbing up and down.

There are six succubi in total.  The first part of the visual novel goes through each giving you paizuri in turn.  The second part has some choices and a wider range of sex acts.

Unfortunately, like its predecessor, In the Castle of Succubi has an ungodly amount of text.  This is definitely not shying away from the novel part of visual novel.  Be prepared to do a lot of clicking, and clicking, and clicking, to move to the next juicy big-boobed succubus pic.  In the end I lost patience with trying to follow the machine-translated text and resorted to clicking through like mad just to get to the next scene.  To me it seemed like there was about four times as many lines of description as there needed to be.  I appreciate this is probably an unfair criticism.  If you were to take one of my stories and bung it in a visual novel framework with a couple of naughty pics to illustrate it, I’m sure it would be just as frustrating for a non-English-speaking Japanese person to attempt to read.

No matter how well endowed you are, she's still going to smother it.

One for big boob lovers, although the amount of text to wade through is daunting.

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 3)

This is a look behind the scenes at how the stories of my second collection, A Succubus for Valentine's Day, came to be.  The first part is here.


Venus of the Red Lights

I’ve visited Amsterdam a few times and De Wallatjes (better known as the main red light district) is an evocative location for a horror story.  In fact this idea is a leftover from my days when I tried to write “normal” horror.  Most of the non-supernatural elements of this story are based on firsthand experience or stories I’d heard.


The Soul Worm

I have no idea where the monster girl from this one came from.  They bubble up from the depths of my imagination every so often and I think it’s best not to pry further.

At the end is a blink-and-you’ll miss appearance of a character you’ll see more of in the future.


Foam Shower

This is the follow-up to “Bubble Bath”.  The unusual succubus from that is just as pleasant to share a shower with as she is with sharing a bath.  Sadly, those pleasures are invariably fatal, but we can’t have everything.


A Summer Dance with a Succubus

One of the pleasures of writing is when a story comes together and all of the elements slot neatly into place.  I’d read a few articles about sex workers who provided services to disabled persons who would otherwise not experience the pleasures of sexual intercourse.  This was something I could see my “good” succubus escort character, Nicole, doing.  I also needed a story for a summer-themed contest and one of the things about summer is it’s ephemeral – all summers end to be swallowed by the dark and cold of winter.  Some lives are also tragically short and ephemeral.  But rather than obsess over the coming cold and dark, we enjoy the sunshine and long lazy days while they last.  And life is no different.  That’s how I pictured Terry – proud and defiantly making the best of an unfortunate hand.

This was the first of my stories to place in the Literotica contests and I used the money from that to buy a Kindle from Amazon.  It’s still one of my favourites to this day.


I hope you've enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at how some of my stories came to be.  I'll do the same for A Succubus for Halloween at some point in the future.

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 2)

This is a look behind the scenes at how the stories of my second collection, A Succubus for Valentine's Day, came to be.  The first part is here.


The Spiders of Thomisoidus

I’m not entirely sure where this came from.  Spiders and silk work well with bondage fantasies and a planet full of sexy babes is a classic sci-fi fantasy.  Also the intro allowed me to have fun with a character bemoaning his lot after being suckered into taking a contract on a pleasure world that doesn’t really live up to expectations.  The teasing, stop-start nature of the sex scene was also highly pleasurable to write.


Delivery Special Soap

This is another story to indulge my fetish for soapland-style mat play.  It’s heavily influenced by Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Wicked City (anyone who’s seen the anime will know the scene).  I was starting to think about how my story universe worked and how the various monster girl demons interacted with each other.  As the demons are operating under a kind of masquerade, it made sense for them to have rules to prevent the sort of overt conflict that would attract the attention of the human authorities.  It also made sense that Inari would know how to work these rules to her advantage and by including a reference to her I could also hint at a larger story taking place beneath these short stories.


Knight vs. Succubus

This story has an interesting tale behind it.  I was asked by a developer working on a succubus game to write a story that would help publicise the finished game (sadly, I don’t think it was ever finished).  My first attempt was this story, which was rejected for being too dark.  I liked the story and then had an idea for another loosely connected series of “X vs Succubus”.  The connection is largely restricted to the title.  This is a much darker tale than the tongue-in-cheek “Slayer vs Succubus”.  It’s also one of the few times I’ve felt guilty about offing the protagonist.


Interrocution

I think the initial idea was a cocky criminal bound to a chair and at the mercy of a succubus.  I like blending gritty mob tropes with supernatural elements.  The story is also a fitting introduction to Koontz’s right hand “man” – Physalia.  She’s a much colder and fearsome succubus.  As Koontz’s enforcer she’s definitely not to be messed with.

The title is a mashup of interrogation and execution.


Crushed Between Her Breasts

This story came about through an impromptu challenge contest on the Literotica forums.  The theme was revenge stories if I remember correctly.  I had the idea of a chauvinistic IT manager annoying one of his female workers to the point where they seek external help to teach him a lesson.

Oddly, the double team of Eryx and Eunectis are also part of my recurring roster of characters, although readers wouldn’t know it as those stories are still waiting to be published.  Nancy’s debt is still outstanding . . .


I'll post the last part on the remaining stories tomorrow.

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 1)

This is another post where I go over where some of my stories come from.  Last time up I went through my first collection, A Succubus for Christmas.  This time I'll run through A Succubus for Valentine's Day.

There might be a few spoilers for people that haven't already read the stories.


A Succubus for Valentine’s Day

When it comes to Valentine’s Day I’m a bit of a black-hearted curmudgeon.  Most of the stories I’ve entered into Literotica’s Valentine’s Day contests have been anti-Valentine’s Day tales of some description.  It was while trying to think of an entrant I hit upon the idea of re-using the nameless succubus from “A Succubus for Christmas”.  This then became an idea for a (semi) regular series featuring her, the succubus tablet and various themed days.  In this story she’s playing a similar role to before – the evil genie that gives her poor victim what they think they want . . . until they actually get it.

I did get some comments misinterpreting Kurtzberg as a ‘nice guy’.  Admittedly, I did set the story up to present him in a sympathetic light, and maybe fool the reader into thinking this might be one of those romcoms where the unfortunate slob ends up with the pretty girl after all.  Then the story takes a turn into murkier territory until it culminates in what I hope is a gut punch of an ending (as every good anti-Valentine’s Day story should have).  Kurtzberg is unfortunate and deserves some sympathy, but his actions take him far beyond the realm of nice.

Observant readers will have noticed the version in the collection, A Succubus for Valentine’s Day, differs from the version online.  When I first started out I used to seek feedback on the Literotica forums.  For this story someone made the suggestion that the ending would be nastier if Kurtzberg was left alive to let the horror of what he’d done sink in.  It was such a good suggestion I rewrote the ending to incorporate it.


Initial Infiltration

Aside from the usual asshole victims, a regular target of mine is the naive.  GRRM has it right with A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones for TV watchers).  When one of his characters makes a poor choice politically, he doesn’t step in to bail them out.

There has been cultural pressure to move Science Fiction away from blasting the Other on sight to presenting stories where the only correct response is to attempt to resolve conflicts through discussion and understanding.  Personally I don’t like simple black and white certitudes.  When the motives of the Other are completely unknown, which approach is correct can only be ascertained with the benefit of hindsight.  In another story, another universe, Donaldson would have been the perfect protagonist to prevent inter-dimensional war.  Sadly for him, this is not that story and hell-space is not that universe.


Succubus Summoning 101

This story eventually ended up being the first chapter of the novel of the same name.  It was originally meant to be a short story about student warlocks making incorrect (and fatal) assumptions about which bits of succubi are dangerous to stick your cock in.  On the surface there is a twisted sense to the logic.  Succubi pervert the role of sexual intercourse to create new life by using it to take life.  Anal sex can’t create new life; therefore under the same logic succubi can’t use it to drain life.  Of course it doesn’t work out that way.

I neglected to kill Phil at the end of the story and since then he’s stubbornly just about managed to stay alive despite my best efforts.

The main reason I put the story in the collection was to protect myself from plagiarism.  Someone had already tried to pass off the Succubus Summoning 101 series as their own on another website.  Amazon’s kindle store was rife with plagiarists mining story sites like Literotica for material to rip off.  Having the original Succubus Summoning 101 story in here would give me some protection against that kind of shit while I was working on the ebook version.


Puffed Up

This is another superhero deconstruction story in the vein of “Squeezed”.  Sexy villainesses have always been a feature of comics even if they rarely get to fully show their stuff (generally speaking, the hero has to survive otherwise that’s the end of the comic book).  This story is a none-too subtle dig at the counterproductive aspects of the war on drugs in our own universe.  Reading it years later I think I might have been a little too cynical with the ending.

I stopped included the superhero stories in later collections because they didn’t fit in with the shared universe elements that were starting to emerge in the series as a whole.  I do have some ideas for other sexy super-villainesses.  At some point I might assemble them into a themed collection.


I'll go through the remaining stories over the next couple of days.

Hentai Game Look - Succubus Nests

This is a Look rather than a Review because it’s for games I bought but didn’t get into for one reason or another.  This isn’t necessarily the game’s fault, which is why I don’t feel comfortable describing these as reviews for products I’ve only really skimmed the surface of.

Succubus Nests suckered me with the trial.  And the title.

Admittedly I probably suckered myself by making a hasty purchase without fully checking it out.  Either way it didn’t end up being the game I thought it would be.

The protagonists are three “magical” girls with specialities in gun, sword and magic cards respectively.  They’re trying to fight off the malign influence of a succubus and purify locations on an island.

When it comes to porn games my preference is for male player characters being sexually dominated by hot monster girls.  I’m also okay with the player character being female so long as the hot, sexy monster girls get plenty of opportunity to do their thang.  What doesn’t work for me is seeing hapless female player characters getting stripped and buggered by ugly male demons and non-anthro critters.

(As an aside, I should make it clear I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people making their porn games follow these lines.  Fantasy is fantasy.  Be extremely wary of the people that try to argue otherwise, even if the target of their ire is something you personally find distasteful.  Give them that and they’ll come back for something you enjoy.  Sadly, given recent news, opposing these censorious, holier-than-thou types is more important than ever.)

Back to Succubus Nests.  The gameplay involves selecting a one- or two-person party and sending them off to purify an area.  There’s a screen focused on each party member where you can observe them walking, fighting, or having sexy snu-snu done to them without their consent.  The girls handle the encounters fairly autonomously.  The only player input is to order them to escape or fire off their special attacks.  At the start the girls flatten their opponents without much problem.  As they progress deeper into the area being purified their stamina drops and they become more susceptible to their opponents’ attacks.  At first it’s restraint, but if you don’t yank them out of there it becomes molestation followed by full-blown rape until the hapless lasses end up catatonic.

My guess is there is a strategy to figure out for when to hit certain “nests” and which of the three girls to bring on the mission (they have strengths and weaknesses vs. different monsters).  I never played long enough to figure it out and I found the fact that most of the game runs autonomously a little annoying.

Bondage in the woods with your friendly neighbourhood spider-woman

The most common encounter in the trial version are Arachne spider women that try and bind up the player in silk.  This, the title and the presence of a succubus in the cut scene made me think this was going to be a girl vs monster girl game.  Sadly, this isn’t the case.  In the full game the only monster girls I saw were the arachne and a futa succubus.  The other encounters consisted of ugly male demons and non-anthro critters such as maggots, slimes, scorpions, electric jellyfish and even dogs.  Standard ryona (female characters having their clothes ripped off before being abused) fare in other words.

This mission did not go well.

With the little windows onto the action, Succubus Nests reminded me of Pretty Warrior May Cry – another game featuring unmentionable things done to pretty female warriors.  That game had interesting enough mechanics and enough OTT humour to hold my attention even if most of the sexual content wasn’t to my taste.  Succubus Nests fell short for me.

I can’t really say if it’s a good or a bad game, only that it didn’t appeal to me personally.

(As I said with Pretty Warrior May Cry - would really love to see a sexy monster girl version with similar animated sex scenes.)

Hentai Geme Review: Pendulum

Blimmin’ ‘eck, this is ‘ard (Disclaimer: Hydra skipped the golden era of Mario and Sonic games and is consequentially not very good at 2D platformers).

Pendulum is a 2D monster girl hentai platformer with pixel sex scenes along the same lines as Eroico and Monsters ‘n Girls.  The gameplay is straightforward.  You start at the bottom of a themed tower and jump your way up to the top and next level.  Getting in your way is an assortment of monster girls that slow you down by performing sex acts on you.  Slow up too much and you both get a dunk in nice hot lava.

The towers are procedurally generated from what I can tell, in that the positions of the platforms and monster girls vary each time you play the game.  This makes some runs easier and some very difficult depending on where things are positioned.  The difficulty ramps up considerably as the checkpoints get further apart.  The first two levels seemed straightforward (there are five in total), the third had me pulling out my teeth, and - after just about crawling through the third - the fourth ruthlessly pummelled my battered body into the dirt.  Thankfully, the developer(s) included a full save with the game, so even if you’re as inept as me you can still see all the content.

Gameplay-wise it’s pretty good.  The main character handles well and it all feels very fluid – and retro in a good way – as you bounce your way to the top.  Where it falls short is the hentai part.  It does have sex bits, but the crudeness of the sprites and tone leans more towards saucy humour than actual hawtness.  This is a pretty bad failing for a sex game, which is unfortunate as I quite liked the idiosyncrasies of the art design.

Not a bad little game, but possibly a little too quirky for its own good.

Musings on the Let's Plays and Hentai Game Reviews

I’m going to make a few changes to the Let’s Plays and how I blog about monster girl games.  Initially the detailed playthroughs of monster girl hentai games seemed a good way to generate material for this blog.  While they’re fun and give me an incentive to actually play all the way through a game, they do take up time that might be better spent on writing my own original fiction.

Also, the entertainment of the playthrough is dependent on how interesting the game is.  To be honest, DramaraQuest V didn’t give me a lot to work with other than an excuse to post pictures of semi-naked anime monster girls (not that bad of a thing, admittedly!).  I suspect there was also a lack of interest out there judging by the tail off in hits and number of comments.

This doesn’t mean I won’t be doing any more Let’s Plays.  I’m just going to be a little choosy with the games I do.  The other thing I want to do is get the reviews out faster.  Currently I tack them onto the end of the playthroughs as a more permanent summary of my thoughts on the game.  What I’ll aim to do is to switch it around and put the review out first so they’ll be a better resource for readers wondering whether they should purchase the game or not.  If I find the game sufficiently interesting/sexy/batshit crazy, or you out there want to see more of it, I’ll start a Let’s Play and go through in more detail.

If I really like the game I’ll probably throw Jackson into it for the shits and giggles.  It’s about time I got his adventures restarted again.

And yes, I will give Mon-musu Quest: Paradox the full Let’s Play treatment when it comes out (Ilias help me!).  That one will almost certainly be interesting/sexy/batshit craxy enough to merit a more detailed look.