This is the twisted musings of the erotic horror author M.E. Hydra. Welcome to his world of dark, twisted, yet fantastically sexy femme fatales. They'll give you pleasures beyond your wildest dreams, and terrors beyond your darkest nightmares...
So I received an email that appeared to be a blatant plug for someone's Patreon. After doing the obvious thing of immediately pressing delete...
"Translating Succubus Prison ~House of Lewd Demons~"
*pause deletion*
...after doing the obvious thing of reading and following the link to their Patreon, I decided to blog about it on the off chance of giving them a boost.
Here is a link to =Together='s Patreon site. They look to be a two-person team working on fan translations of various low-budget hentai games. Currently they're working on a translation for Succubus Prison ~House of Lewd Demons~. You can also find updates on their progress at this thread on ulmf.org.
I had a brief look at Succubus Prison ~House of Lewd Demons~ back here.
It looks like a typical RPG-maker RPG, but is actually more of a puzzle game where you have to escape a house occupied by a trio of succubi before they snu-snu you to death. It's a pretty good game and has some of the best Succubus Bad End H-scenes I've seen in any game. It's also very confusing and difficult to play without translation.
Readers may have noticed I don't blog about Monster Girl H-games as much as I used to. Since upgrading my laptop to Windows 10 I've had a helluva game trying to get any of them to work with the usual AGTH/Translation Aggregator combo I use for machine translation. I was only able to play Succubus Prison at all because I bought it early. Versions over 1.00 don't work with AGTH at all (at least on my machine). So I'm really happy to see someone is taking on an attempt to translate it.
The usual caveats with crowd-funding apply. There are always going to be scammers or idiots that think they can remake Monster Girl Quest as Skyrim with a dev team of one. Even projects with good intentions and sensible objectives can sometimes go awry. So always be careful to manage expectations before putting up your hard-earned cash.
That said, an English version of Succubus Prison would be awesome.
One last thing. Regardless of the form the translated files take, if you play it and like it, please be sure to support Tokinokogiri and buy their game. I'd rather they were happy to see attempts to make their game more accessible to the Western market rather than actively trying to sabotage them over fears of piracy (cough ROBF cough).
A mildly political post. If you're sick to death of these things (and I have mostly been avoiding posting them), feel free to backclick away and come back for the next H-space Monster Girl Bestiary story this weekend.
E3 was last weekend. One of the games that generated some initial buzz was an indie title called The Last Night. Here is its youtube trailer:
It looks very stylish and Blade Runner-esque. There was a lot of buzz about the visual aesthetic.
Then somebody did some digging and discovered that the game dev, Tim Soret, had said some vaguely supportive things about #GamerGate back in 2014. Cue shit show...
This made me think about some of the things I'd written in the past about #GamerGate, #SadPuppies and similar nontroversies. Would I in future also be dragged up to the drum and forced to account for my past comments? Not just comments - I'd even penned a short story depicting a #GamerGate protagonist in a vaguely sympathetic light. The heresy!
Surely, given that #GamerGate was a vicious misogynist campaign to drive women out of gaming (the media says so, so it must be true), I must be ashamed of my past self. That if it ever came to light, I'd have to disavow those past comments.
Okay, so I should address that now for my new readers.
Here it comes.
..
..
My views haven't changed at all.
Written games journalism is still infested with shitty horrible people more interested in student-level politics and stirring up shit rather than writing about computer games. If you want proper games coverage and reviews nowadays you're better off following the twitch streams/youtube channels of people like TotalBiscuit.
SJWs - with their hypocrisy, faulty logic, doxxing, harassment of creators, and other general toxicity - would occupy the position of biggest shitstains on social media if that spot wasn't already taken by ISIS.
My own personal opinion is I don't care what your sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc is. Everyone is equally deserving of respect as a human being.
That said, if you go around harassing people, or try to dictate what creators/artists can or can't create, I'm going to think you're a cunt, dick, ass, knob, penis, duodenum, [insert part of the human anatomy you wish to use as a slur] regardless of your sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc, etc.
Hope that makes things clear.
(and no, I don't want to drive women out of computer gaming)
Name: Sun Lamia Type: Lamia (Slime?) Habitat: Cave Ruins.
Description:
A snake girl with the upper body of an exotic belly dancer. Or a slime girl currently taking the form of a snake girl. Personally, I lead towards the former. While the sun lamia appears to have a soft, gelatinous body, she displays none of the plasticity of form observed in other slime girl HSIOs.
The fluid, or jelly, that makes up her body is clear yellow in colour and radiates both heat and light.
Attack Strategy:
Multiple, and targeting different senses.
At long ranges the sun lamia can release a flash of light from her eyes that can both temporarily blind and stun.
At closer ranges the sun lamia breathes out thick clouds of gas that increase arousal and take away the will to fight. They also have a dance that has a mesmeric effect on onlookers.
All of this is to enable the lamia to get close enough to wrap her coils around her prey. Unlike an Earth constrictor, this is to deny movement rather than oxygen. The sun lamia uses her serpentine body to lock her captive's limbs in such a way they are unable to move or offer any resistance once the effects of her aphrodisiac breath wear off. With her prey immobilised, the sun lamia instigates oral sex with them. At the point of orgasm she sucks out her prey's soul.
(At this point I don't care if my colleagues consider the concept of a soul to be unscientific, or even heretical. Some HSIOs, like the sun lamia, are capable of extracting some kind of animating spark from human beings at the point of sexual climax. We have examined the victims—either dead or in a coma. There isn't a single decent medical reason for them to be in this state.)
Countermeasures:
As there has only been one encounter with this type of HSIO, what follows is conjecture and theory.
Gas masks or nasal filters might negate her breath, assuming the drug compounds present within it are not absorbed through the skin.
Polarised filters might negate her eye flashes. There have been some successes in experimentation versus lesser HSIOs with similar disabling attacks.
My concern is that she almost certainly possesses other offensive capabilities we are as of yet still unaware of. The limited intel we have puts the only individual encountered in a similar power class to some of the higher tier succubi or demon HSIOs.
Also, while her body has been described as being soft, I would expect the sun lamia to have similar regenerative abilities as other high-threat HSIOs.
Threat Level:
High (Medium?).
The only individual encountered appears to have been very old and powerful. It is unknown whether other sun lamia are this dangerous.
Every so often I go through a frenzy of brainstorming game ideas. Unfortunately it rarely amounts to anything as I don't have the requisite skill set to bring these ideas to fruition. However, by posting them here it might inspire someone who does.
One of the things I've been thinking about is a roguelite monster girl H-game with randomly generated dungeons. Fenoxo's Corruption of Champions already does this really well. There is no complex world map here - you head to a location and are presented with a random encounter, some of which open up further locations for exploration. This is a great example of abstract, extensible game design. If Fenoxo (or one of their writers) wants to add further scenarios, all they have to do is create the scenario and then slot it into the list of random encounters for a location. No massive rewrite of the whole game engine required (at least I assume so).
I really like the puzzle H-battles of Monster Girl Quest, but creating a whole Monster Girl Quest is a fuckload of work. I think an approach that could work is to create a more open game framework that can be extended easily with new encounters. Most roguelites/likes function on this principle - the dungeon is randomly generated each run from a series of building blocks.
Why not RNG the encounters like every other JRPG? Now, this is where, for me personally, Monmusu Quest: Paradox is weaker than Monster Girl Quest. JRPGs are a notoriously grindy game genre. The first time you encounter a new enemy is cool; the thirteenth time when you're just trying to run through to the next location, not so. Combat typically devolves to trying to bash the mooks off the screen as fast as possible. This is where Monster Girl Quest could get away with stretching out the fights with all kinds of delicious bondage holds. You only had to fight each monster girl once. If you really liked the fight (and Bad End) you could revisit it in the Monsterpedia.
One of the roguelite elements I think could work is a card-based encounter system. Camel uses a card-based mechanic to abstract dungeon-crawling in his Card Quest series (knowing what abstraction is and when to use it will save a lot of fledgling game designers/developers a ton of pain). I think this could be taken further to give the player some choice over the dungeons they romp in.
Hand of Fate is a good example from the mainstream gaming world. Here is TotalBiscuit's WTF is review of the game, which also gives an overview of the mechanics:
The player starts each quest with an equipment deck and an encounter deck. The dungeon floors are laid out as a random combination from both the player's and dealer's encounter decks. The player starts each run with just basic equipment. During the run they can buy or find better equipment - but only equipment cards that are present in their equipment deck.
I'm a big fan of strategy card games (like Magic: the Gathering) and the concept of tailoring your decks to "beat" the dealer's dungeon sounded very appealing. As it is, Hand of Fate doesn't quite play out like this. They have an interesting way of implementing side quests in that completing certain cards' scenarios will reward the player with a token, and this token unlocks the next card in the quest line at the end of the run. But the strategy element of the player customising their own deck is fairly weak - most of the time you run with the AI's default configuration anyway.
While I was playing around with potential stats for gamebook ideas, the three that seemed to have most potential were strength, agility and willpower. Depending on which the player specialised in, some monster girl encounters would be more or less difficult. As an example I thought up three lamia types - muscular, fast, hypnotic.
Muscular is slow, but if she ever gets her coils around you, you're never breaking out. Agile characters get the advantage as they just dodge her slow attacks.
Fast is... well... fast. But she's slender enough that her coils can be struggled out of. Strength characters get the advantage here.
And finally Willpower character gets the advantage vs Hypnotic Lamia. She's slow and weak, so she relies on hypnotising her opponent with sexy dancing so they don't resist her as she has her fun with them.
Coming back to a card system of dungeon layout. The player has some control over the encounters. If they have a low-Agility character they would want to customise their encounter deck so it didn't contain the Muscular Lamia that would likely be Bad End the moment they encountered her.
Or, and this is where it becomes really important for a monster girl sex game, the scenario of being dominated and squeezed in the coils of a powerful, sexy snake queen might be a major turn-on for that particular player, and they want her in the deck for the fun times when she shows up (and losing in these games is part of the fun anyway).
The reverse is also true. If the player is squicked out by vore, they'll want those nopey Eater monster girls banished as far away from their deck of encounters as possible. I think that's also a good thing for any H-game that's going to cover a very broad base of fetishes.
I think this concept could work really well. It's also really extensible. Dream up a new cool monster girl concept? Create a scenario card for her and into the game she goes without changing anything else.
Main problem is getting that framework right. And this is where I always screw up by making things too complex. I really want to make the fights more interesting than player hits monster for 5 damage, monster hits player back for 4 damage, repeat until someone reaches 0 hit points. I think Monster Girl Quest really got it right with the various bind and status attacks. Unfortunately, taking that too far can end up getting a little out of hand - like I did with this Arachne scenario I plotted out for a potential GameBook idea.
So I dunno.
Figuring out the player character stat line is important.
Figuring out what rewards/unlocks the player earns after each run is important.
Figuring out how the fights work is really really important.
I think the fighting is the key part. If I'm running mainly text-based to start, the other scenarios are multi-choice questions and stats tests wrapped up in sexy descriptive fluff. The fight encounters determine the mechanics. Is it sex-on-sex battlefuck, normal-on-sex like MGQ, or full-on puzzles with the player character trying to work out how to get to the next room without being caught and snu-snued to Bad End?
Figure that out and I suspect the rest starts to drop into place.
Description:
A kind of shellfish woman. The woman part is humanoid above the waist, but far too alien to ever be mistaken for human. Their eyes are octopoidal—yellow, with vertical barbell-shaped pupils. They have long fleshy tubes in place of hair. They have a nose, but it seems purely cosmetic. Respiration is carried out through three breathing holes located on either side of their neck, just below their pointed ears.
Below the waist their body merges into a complex knot of thick rubbery tubes. Some tubes terminate in bioluminescent light sacs that light up the inside of the shell. Others terminate in strange structures that resemble part of a human face—just the mouth and jaws, the rest of the head is absent. The interrogatrix shell uses these false mouths to drive her captives into a state of sensual ecstasy.
The interrogatrix shell's body is housed within a shell large enough to contain both her and an adult human male. Currently we do not know what the outer shell looks like as none have been found or observed in the wild. It is even possible the interrogatrix shell is some kind of mimic.
Attack Strategy:
The HSIOs use interrogatrix shells to extract information and secrets from their enemies. Once a person is placed within her shell, the interrogatrix wraps her soft body around them to hold them immobile. Interrogatrix shells appear able to produce various complex drugs that have a variety of effects on human physiology, including increased sexual arousal, euphoric feelings of bliss, and a heightened susceptibility to suggestion. These drugs are administered through both mouth-to-mouth contact with one of the interrogatrix shell's false mouths, and as an aerosol exhaled by other mouths. The closed confines of the shell enable rapid build-up of the drug in the air.
The interrogatrix also uses her false mouths to stimulate her captive's erogenous zones by licking or sucking on them. Once the captive is sufficiently aroused the interrogatrix shell straddles their body with her upper female half and initiates sexual intercourse. Sex in this case is used to break the will of her captive through overwhelming sensual ecstasy rather than for procreation. The orgasms are amplified to the point that even strong-willed persons are enslaved by the pleasure. From this point onwards her captive will do whatever and reveal whatever the interrogatrix shell asks them. As we have never recovered anyone enslaved by an interrogatrix shell, it is unknown whether or not this enslavement of will is reversible.
Countermeasures:
Don't get caught by one…?
Really, I'm not sure what's expected here.
We know next to nothing about this HSIO.
When I was commissioned to carry out these studies it was with the assumption I'd be documenting the various flora and fauna of H-space. At this point I think it would be a grave mistake to regard the HSIOs as just alien flora and fauna. This is an opposing enemy force. The various HSIOs are its weapons and should be documented as such.
Threat Level:
Unknown.
I think we have to assume that any person captured and handed to an interrogatrix shell will reveal everything they know. God help us if they ever get hold of one of our critical command or research personnel.
