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!

New Short Story - "The Banquet of the Queen of the Goblins"

Finally finished that damn carnivorous plant girl story.  Not sure why the 2nd draft took as long as it did, but it did.

Might as well get the bad news out of the way first.  Yes, it is pay-walled behind my Patreon account.  Sorry, regular readers who don't have access to that.  As with the previous boobie girl story, it will find its way into an ebook collection at some point in the future.

You can find it here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-short-story-26958434

The monster girl was inspired by the carnivorous plant girl from Domination Quest: Kuro and the Naughty Monster Girls.

I did my usual thing when I dip into vore-ish areas to make the monster girl more interested in the sex part rather than the "git in my belly" part, so in that respect she deviates quite a lot from the initial inspiration.

It's another H-space story, although it's more in keeping with my older H-space stories rather than the Stewart Peter Bate stories I experimented with for a while.  At 8,200 words, it is much more like the older stories!

And now onto the more controversial stuff.

This is Patreon pay-walled again, are you ever going to go back to putting stuff up on Literotica for everyone to read?

Right, the problem here is that I'm still chugging along in low gear when it comes to writing.  As much as I don't like or trust the people behind Patreon, it currently is a useful source of income to keep my finances ticking over.  I'm of an old-school mindset when it comes to entertainment.  If people are giving you money, you need to give them something back to make them think it was worth giving you that money.  In this case it's timed exclusives (and some options to name protagonists, etc).

When I set it up, my initial aim was to give patrons something exclusive at least once a month and then anything I produced extra could then go up on Literotica (or here if Literotica found it a little too icky).  As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently stuck in low gear when it comes to productivity.  So far this year I've finished 2 short stories (16K words) and a demo opening section for a possible CYOA game (5K words).  This is obviously not ideal.  The only positive is that I am still chugging along to some extent.

While I am stuck in low gear, my options are limited.  I'd like to get out of low gear, so I can start terrorizing the erotic horror section of Literotica again.  (and also maybe blog a little more frequently than I have been doing of late.)

So, yep, sorry to the readers that can't get on Patreon (or are unwilling to give them money).  I will try and get something done for you at some point.  As for those that can, enjoy... uh... being erotically consumed as my lovely new carnivorous plant girl puts it.

(I'm not entirely sure she's being trustworthy, but her last prey seemed to enjoy himself...)

Introducing "The House of Hellish Harlots"

(x-post from Patreon)

(Update.  Whoops, did not realise the formatting had been completely borked after cut'n'pasting from Patreon.  This is why you always cut'n'paste to Notepad first to remove all the crap MS Word and other places bundles in with text and check your post afterwards.  Sorry for making everyone's eyes bleed with that atrocious formatting snafu.) 

Firstly, apologies for another lengthy period of quietness. I ran into a fairly severe productivity slump on the second draft of the carnivorous plant girl story and had to change things up for a while rather than plowing on at measly couple-of-hundred words a day (it is still being worked on - more on that in a follow-up post). Of the side projects I busied myself with, the one that won the race to have something to show for it was this one. "The House of Hellish Harlots" is a prospective framing device to hold all the Escape the [Succubus/Monster girl] scenarios together. I had vague ideas on how to do this, but nothing really clicked until I got some inspiration from "Rusty Lake Hotel". If you haven't played it, "Rusty Lake Hotel" is a macabre point'n'click puzzle game where you murder five guests in overly complicated ways and serve them up for dinner for the remaining guests. Essentially, it's a framing device for 5 single-room puzzles where you combine various items to "escape" the room (by offing the animal-headed guest). I realized I could make this work for a succubus sex game. A while back I mapped out the beginning scenario for a porn gamebook in a similar vein to the classic Fighting Fantasy gamebook "House of Hell". The idea was to have the player wind up at an isolated brothel where all of the prostitutes are various sexy - but also hungry and dangerous - monster girls. The goal was to survive the night and escape the brothel, with a lot of sexy Bad Ends for failing to do so (in a similar vein to Tokinokogiri's "Succubus Prison"). I decided to write it up in Twine as an intro. It's probably more detailed than it should be (a lot of different ways to basically knock on a door, with some NPCs that may or may not have a future role). I think the concept has potential. The brothel is the framing device with the central hub of a bar within it. You have the madam, other clients and maybe an NPC on the player's side to give helpful advice (probably a barman of not-quite human aspect). The "hookers" represent the individual scenarios. The player has to select a girl, go to her room, then survive her attentions (the CYOA scenario - a puzzle or stats test with a whole bunch of inappropriate and perverted sex acts thrown in). This makes for a fairly straightforward core gameplay loop: -Select monster girl (with the barman giving hints to their nature). -Solve the puzzle (or just let her creatively Bad End you). -Repeat with next girl until the player wins their escape in the morning. From a development perspective this makes life very easy as each encounter is compartmentalized in its own CYOA. Once the framework is in place, I can keep extending the game indefinitely by adding new monster girl encounters. If things really shape up well, I can maybe also start to think about commissioning art and voice acting for the encounters - that is probably a long long way off though! But before we get too excited, the demo at the moment is a very short intro. There is only one Bad End scene and all I've written up so far is the background info leading up until the front door. So don't go in there expecting a full scenario. I've still got a fair bit to do, but I thought I'd post the chunks as and when I finish them. This first demo chunk is currently available for everyone on philome.la: http://philome.la/manyeyedhydra/house-of-hellish-harlots-v001 I thought I'd make it available to everyone to start to get as much feedback as possible. (Although currently it's very short, any suggestions on game mechanics, etc are welcome.) The sexy scenarios will likely be temporarily gated on Patreon and then added to the public version later. This is assuming I'm able to maintain steam on the project. As you may have already noticed, I tend to be a little chaotic and wayward on such things. But I think a modular approach might work better with my natural weaknesses. Rather than create a single large game (which I'd never finish), I'll be creating a lot of individual CYOA scenarios and stitching them together. In theory, I already have two scenarios with Volumpula and the arachne. I suspect they will need a bit of re-jigging. Arachne is too simplistic. Volumpula has too much. Emphasis will purely be on walking out of the door afterwards rather than trying to grab their "trophy" Anyway, this does get me back to doing some sort of text-based game dev stuff again. I'll still be writing regular short stories, but I think I need to be bouncing between both to keep myself from feeling like I've fallen into a rut. As for the carnivorous plant girl story (and other stuff that I've gone quiet on), I'll post on that later this week (hopefully releasing the short story soon after - I have 5.5K words typed up at the moment). Start of the year has been mixed for one reason or another. Thank you to the people sticking by me despite my rather erratic progress at the moment. I'll continue to produce hot succubus/monster girl smut to the best of my ability, even if the output frequency will be a little all over the place. (As a blog bonus - because Patreon is a bit crap with embedding things, here's a bit of the map for the intro - even if you can probably reach the front door in about 4 clicks!)

Build Your Own Sextrap Dungeon

No, we're not talking about BDSM studios.  This is more gamer-y stuff.

(But not this particular gamer-y stuff, which jumped to the top of the list when I did a google search on "Sextrap Dungeon".  I should have expected it really.  "Sextrap Dungeon" is the sort of term that rolls off the tongue nicely, so it's inevitable someone else would have already grabbed it.)

Yesterday I was talking about MachiaVillain, a cute little indie game where you build a murder mansion.  They added succubi, so the perverted little black cells in my brain immediately conjured up a little murder bordello, where the 'guests' get to go out with a bang at the hands (and other parts) of sexy succubi.  It did make me wonder if that concept could work as a nice little hentai game.

The 'build-your-own-Deathtrap-Dungeon' genre has been around in videogames for a while.  Dungeon Keeper was the famous one, and there have been a couple of spiritual successors in recent years in Dungeons and War for the Overworld.

Dungeon Keeper 2's succubus - Dark Mistress.  Likes torturing people.

My main bugbear with these games is they're often bait'n'switches.  You start off laying down traps to squish invading adventuring parties, but then the game usually morphs into a typical RTS around level 3 or 4, and the rest of it is mostly spent doing the usual RTS-y things of harvesting resources, recruiting new units, and then battling opposing dungeon keepers until the map is clear.

This may be down to the realities of what works as basic game design.  Building up a force to take out a rival puts the player in an active role and is easy to grok and calibrate challenge.  Building a dungeon to squish adventurers puts the player in a more passive role and is harder to grok and calibrate challenge.  Dungeon masters with human players have an incentive to keep things 'fair'.  If they constantly kill the party with an inescapable deathtrap in the first room, well pretty soon they're not going to have any players show up to their games.  A human player trying to keep AI heroes from plundering their goodies doesn't have to worry about that.  Kill 'em all in the first room works, but will make for a dull gameplay loop if too easy to pull off.

My thinking is you'd want to allow as much freedom for fiendish design and creativity, but also some sort of challenge element to keep the player from getting bored.  Generally, I think you'd want some kind of additional reward for the player to incentivize building long and elaborate deathtrap dungeons for the heroes to get lost in rather than throwing everything at them in the first room.  How to do that seems tricky, and probably why games like Dungeon Keeper switch to standard RTS gameplay once the initial concept wears out its welcome, as that's a tried and trusted means of maintaining player interest.

Dungeons 3.  I'm pretty sure this game has a succubus, but could I find a decent pic of one, could I bollocks!  (She also likes torturing people)

MachiaVillain sort of has this with bonuses awarded for killing victims according to horror movie rules - kill them when they're alone, kill the virgin last, etc.  But most of the time you just zerg rush the victims as soon as they enter the murder mansion anyway.

So far, I've mostly been talking about regular games, where my real interest is in more... ahem... perverted fare.  The advantage with more perverted fare is it opens up... ahem... rewards that can't be offered in regular boring mainstream games.  After all, where's the fun in filling a deathtrap dungeon with delectable demonesses if you can't catch a peek of them... ahem... dispatching those dastardly dogooders.

This then also opens up further possible gameplay options than just dropping a mountain on the heroes' heads in the first room.  If we have succubi, we need to keep them happy.  Happy horny succubi make lovely porn movies (obviously we edit out the part where the barbarian stud dries up like beef jerky).  Sulky sad succubi rip their victims' hearts out and throw entrails at the camera.

War for the Overworld's succubus.  Bit spiky.  Likes torturing people.

This now implies a rudimentary management sim.  You have a dungeon.  You have various sexy (and deadly) sirens.  You maybe have a black market distributor specialising in... certain types of films.  The player now has aims and goals beyond just bumping off the marauding heroes in as efficient a way as possible.  Maybe there's an audience score that gives gold bonuses.  Maybe the monster girls have certain restrictions - more powerful ones will only take up residence in lower levels.

This creates tension in that you'll want to lure heroes powerful enough to penetrate the dungeon deep enough to reach the more exotic succubi, but not powerful enough to beat them up.  Maybe part of the gameplay will be figuring out ways to weaken the more powerful heroes without breaking them completely, so that your succubus doesn't get bored with too-easily 'dominated' prey.

I can see there being potential here.

However, there is one awkward question - is all this as fun (and as sexy) as the player trying to battle through the dungeon themselves while fending off (and occasionally frequently 'losing' to) various amorous monster girls?

I did blog about a 'hentai Dungeon Keeper' a few years back - Pretty Warrior May Cry.  That was more of a ryona game.  It did have a rather lovely succubus-type unit, but most of the rest of the game was focused on watching orcs, dogs, slimes, even a dragon!, do various unmentionable things to the female adventurers stupid enough to set foot in your dungeon.  Ryona isn't my thing, but it has an audience and meshes well with the Dungeon Keeper concept.

Pretty Warrior May Cry's succubus.  In the middle of torturing... hey, wait a minute.

Would a similar thing appeal to the same sort of audience that enjoyed Monster Girl Quest?  I suspect players would rather the succubi were doing all the sexy snu-snu stuff (minus any angry heart-ripping) to them.  Although this can easily be fixed in-lore with some sort of magical maguffin that allows the player to bodysurf in to experience their succubi's delectable skills firsthand without those awkward 'dried fish' consequences.

You could probably even cater to both audiences by allowing them to mix'n'match which monsters they want to populate their 'sextrap dungeon' with.

Anyway, enough idle musings.  I think something like this could work and hopefully I've given some ideas for anyone wanting to make a succubus/monster girl hentai game that isn't just another RPGMaker clone.

Yes, I'd like to make something like this myself, but I suspect it would be rather difficult to do well, and certainly far beyond my current skill set.  Hence me posting a bunch of ideas here.  If you think you can make it work, feel free to go for it!

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...

Recent Monster Girl Hentai Games

Yesterday (Today?) seemed pretty good on dlsite.com for new releases.  I thought I'd check some of them out.

The Encyclopedia of Tentacles for Boys Vol. 3

This is up to a 3rd volume!!!  We only got 1 of the monster girl one.  And where is Monmusu Quest: Paradox Pt.3?  Goddammit, Japan.

Not much to be said on this that I didn't say before.  The West is pretty fucked up with outrage culture at the moment, making it a risky purchase even for the people solely interested in the femdom aspects of being sucked off by various weird and wonderful things while a sexy, sadistic shop owner watches on.  Outrage is everything.  Context is nothing.  That's how it is nowadays, unfortunately.

(I doubt anyone is going to play this and then go on to throw kids into the giant octopus tank of their local aquarium in the hope of getting a good show if the octopus is feeling particularly frisky that morning.)

Even without the stupid outrage culture fears, it still falls a little outside my own personal turn-ons.  I like monstrous semen suckers, but I also like them to have tits and a pretty face.

Lost Fragments - An Otoko-no-ko is Given Status Effects, Reverse R*ped, and Defeated

I liked the demo enough to pick up the full game.  I've played a couple of games by this circle before.  They like having their monster girls bury the player in various sexy binds and negative status effects.  Fortunately, I was able to get machine translation back up and running for this one, as trying to navigate the combat blind is a little tricky.

Fighting is turn-based RPG-style with a heavy focus on binds and negative status effects.  So much so the player has separate buttons depending on whether the adverse status effect is physical (binds) or mental (increased sensitivity) in nature, and can use either as an additional free action every turn.  The status changes are also visible on the player's sprite on the left of the screen, which is a nice visual cue to show just how much an arachne or slime girl has slimed you up.

(The player character's odd appearance is explained in-game.  You play a male gamer transported to a game world with only female character models (for both the NPCs and monsters), hence the feminine appearance.  (The main character is quite relieved to find all his other... ahem... faculties are fully intact.  The monster girls he encounters are arguably even more delighted about it!))

During combat, the monster girls also have an additional 'absorption' move they can use when the player is naked.  This switches the display to a H-scene and a sub-game where the player has to mouse-over various pink hearts to break out.

Without machine translation, this would be a hard pass, but now I have something that appears to work (more on that in a future post), the game seems like good sexy fun.  Mind you, I am a sucker for being tied up by an amorous arachne, or slimed by a sexy slime girl, so this is hitting all the right spots for me.  I'll try and get around to posting a full review at some point in the future.

Daydreamer - Memories of a Succubus & Angel & Hero/Bunny

This looks like another of those strange games that looks like an RPGMaker type RPG, then ditches all the stats for simple action.  In this case you run around firing magic bolts at succubi.

The plot seems to be set just after the hero has defeated the main demon king.  Somehow this has opened the way for succubi to invade and they steal power by attacking people through dream states created from their memories.

There's not much revealed in the demo apart from a tutorial section with an angel assigned as a guide.  The guide angel seems far too lewd in how eager she is to give the hero a big sloppy blowjob, so I imagine there's some kind of plot twist lurking there.

The demo doesn't show much more than the angel scene.  Which is a pretty good scene.  The other art on the store page also looks okay.  I suspect this might be one of those games that consists of nice H-scenes strung together by some very rudimentary and forgettable action game mechanics.

I'm on the fence on this one, but I wouldn't be surprised if I pick it up at some point.  The promotional artwork teases some nice slime girl scenes and I do love being erotically glooped by a sexy slime girl.

Succubus Battles

This one came out a couple of days earlier.  The thread on ULMF calls it Succubus Senki, which I'm guessing is a more literal translation of the title.

I'm not sure what to make of this one.  It looks a more tactical-style RPG.  I saw it described as being like Advance Wars, but I never played that series.  Which is unfortunate, as some knowledge of this type of game might have helped me try to work out what the hell was going on in the demo.

You have a hero and two support guys.  You move them to attack a skeleton dude with a couple of (regular) slimes in tow.  Then a bunch of succubi show up, and your dudes... uh... lose.  Then there's a reasonably pleasant animated paizuri scene of you being drained by a succubus afterwards.  Given how easily the succubi wiped my party, I figured this was the typical auto-loss scenario to kick off a campaign.

Wrong.  The succubus dry-fishes the hero with her big bouncing boobs and it's Game Over.

Turns out you can't attack the succubi directly.  That causes your dude to suicide masturbate instead.  Instead, you have to stand next to them and rely on your character's counter attacks to win the battle.

I saw enough to be interested, but also enough to scared by the complexity.  I think this might be fun to play, but probably needs some basic translation of the interface beforehand.  I'll probably wait to see if one of the lovely volunteer translation teams out there thinks the game is good enough to work on before diving in.

Hentai Game Look: Monster Girl Dreams

I've definitely been off reservation, so to speak, if it's taken me this long to find out about this one:

This is Monster Girl Dreams.  It's a (mostly) text-based battlefucker with sexy succubi and monster girls.  It's still in development.  Some of the characters have art sprites, but for the later encounters you currently have to make do with text descriptions only.

I like it because it's very close to what I'd do if organised and focused enough to make a monster girl hentai game.  The combat is reminiscent of the original Monster Girl Quest, but with the restraint status expanded into a number of sex stances the player needs to struggle out of before their arousal hits max (or not, if you just want to enjoy yourself).

And those monster girls have a lot of sexy tricks.  My favourite is probably the succubus kunoichi encountered in the mountain stage.  She has a lot of different ways to erotically drain your energy and different Bad Ends depending on whether she depletes your final point of spirit (which she will) with her mouth, tits or pussy.  A fun encounter and well-written as well.

This optional alraune boss at the end of the first stage also has a lot of different moves and is rather enjoyable to fight lose to.

The game is fairly lighthearted in comparison to Monster Girl Quest.  You don't need to worry about some of the nastier Bad End consequences as the main character is equipped with a magic teleport stone to yoink them out of danger before the shrivelled-up mummy stage of succubus draining.

It's still very early in development, but I've liked what I've seen so far.  The free demo can be obtained from the developer's (Threshold?) Patreon and they update their progress on their blog here.

Fairly promising.  I look forward to seeing how this one progresses.

(I also need to pull my thumb out of my ass and get back to working on my own text-based hentai game stuff!)