New(ish) Short Story: Men are from Mars, Mantraps are from Venus

One of my ongoing background projects is to take the old H-space bestiary shorts I wrote a few years back and beef them up into proper short stories.  The latest is available on Patreon/SubscribeStar.

"Men are from Mars, Mantraps are from Venus" on Patreon.
"Men are from Mars, Mantraps are from Venus" on SubscribeStar.

This is another temporary exclusive.  I'm slowly working through the old H-space bestiary stories.  At some point I'll have enough to start gathering them into ebook collections for Amazon and other places.

This was originally the Venus Mantrap story.  I fleshed out the background to explain how the soldiers got there and also to try and build up the classic "Green Hell" jungle atmosphere.

As with the original, the ending is pretty icky, so watch out for that one.  I do like to push the horror a little bit more with the H-space stories.

In case people are wondering, I don't have a good track record with H-space stories getting accepted on Literotica.  They're usually a little nastier than my regular horror stories and the scarlet imps tend to get a story bounced whenever they show up.  As a result I don't bother posting them there (but do still plan to post other stories).  It's also nice to have some exclusive content I can hold back for patrons/subscribers.  a writer has to eat, so all support gratefully accepted!

Hentai Game Re-Review: Domination Quest 1

Technically, I reviewed this one a while back.  I was in the mood to play a naughty JRPG-type game and remembered the sequel, Domination Quest 2, had come out a month or so ago.  Similar to Monmusu Quest, you can port the old save across, but as that save was many years and a few laptops ago, I decided to play through again rather than try to excavate it from a forgotten hard drive.

Turns out I needed to anyway, as it was only on rereading my original review that I remembered I never completed the first game.  Despite this, and after completing it this time, I don't think I was too far off with what I originally wrote.

I did reach the final boss this time.

The major change is that whatever bugs blighted it before, don't appear to be present now.  I didn't encounter any crashes during my second playthrough.  The other sticking point, and what caused me to abandon my original playthrough in the misty forest area, was the frequency of combat encounters.  That felt like it had been dialled back.  They're still reasonably frequent, but not so frequent that you can barely move without triggering another combat encounter.

Onto the game itself.  Mechanically, it's a turn-based JRPG.  It has the look of a RPGMaker game, but reverse-engineered into Unity.  While this is a little odd, the game does make use of the 3D environments to do some things you wouldn't see in a regular RPGMaker game.

You play as Kuro, who as a dominator has the ability to shrink monster girls down, gobble them up and then recruit them as allies.  Like Pokémon, but weirder and pervier.

Probably best not to ask...

Kuro doesn't have much in the way of fighting power, so you have to rely on a party of monster girls to do it for you.  You have a party of four and a bench of four you can sub in and out.  Along with health bars, the monster girls have stamina bars that are constantly decreasing every turn.  When they run low, they have to 'snack' on Kuro to get their energy back up or get knocked out.  This is where the bulk of the in-combat H-content comes from, as Kuro's allies take a break to blowjob or do some other sex act on him to get their energy levels back up again.

Most of the combat is regular turn-based JRPG, where if you lose you just get a regular GAME OVER scene rather than a sexy Bad End.  There are some elites and boss encounters that are an exception to this.  At some point they'll try and grab Kuro and drain his energy directly, and you have to rely on your allies to hit the opponent enough times to force them to let him go.  As I said in my original review, it's a shame this mechanic isn't used more.

The other areas of H-content are scenes that are unlocked after increasing affection with your allies, and a skinship mechanic where you get carried around by one of your allies in a lewd manner.  That's fun, but the animation does block a good portion of the side of the screen, so might get in the way while exploring a new area.

It feels quite pleasant until your feet start to dissolve...

The story doesn't have too much to it.  It's a standard fantasy setting with humans coexisting with horny monster girls.  Kuro is just about to start his adventuring career when his powerful succubus (dragon?) partner is mind-controlled and snatched by a nefarious group looking to stoke tensions between humans and monsters.  The game is about trying to get her back and breaking the control the enemy demon lord wannabe has over her.

The mechanics are fine.  It's JRPG light with lots of vore themes.  Kuro can't carry weapons and neither does his monster girls, but there's a crafting system where you combine weapons with crystals to boost your party's abilities.  Mostly it's just stat boosts, but some weapons can either defend against or inflict status effects.  It's a nice system, but a little limited.  Adding a chance of instant death to multi-hit attacks was about the most exciting 'combo' I could find.  It would have been nice to have a little more variety here.  I like a bit of greed in my RPGs, so I missed having the usual options to manipulate XP gain, Gold gain, item drop frequency, etc.

As for the themes, it's a Kokage no Izumi game.  This circle likes giantesses, vore, and crude humour.  As I said in the original review, if you like your monster girls on the giant side and with heapings of vore, this is perfect for you.  If those elements leave you cold, there is enough 'regular' monster girl content to make it worth a glance, but it is a little deeper into its chosen fetish zone than something like Monmusu Quest.

Giant farting fairies are pretty much a staple of this circle's work.

In all, it's about 10 hours of reasonable JRPG, with 28 or so sexy(ish) monster girls to have fun with.

As I said in the original review, one of the monster girls (the carnivorous plant girl) gave me inspiration for a short story ("The Banquet of the Queen of the Goblins"), and if I can get a short story out of a hentai game, I consider it a win.  Hopefully, I'll find something that gets the creative juices flowing in the sequel.

Harlot Art - The Madam

Here is some lovely harlot art, or in this case NPC art.  After having art commissioned of Mademoiselle Vête Piège, Atlantis27 commissioned Thraeh for another character - this time The Madam of the House herself.

For more of Thraeh's work, check out their DeviantArt here:
https://www.deviantart.com/thraeh

I must admit, The Madam is one of the characters I have problems with visualising.  She's supposed to be at once both very old and doddering, while at the same time still looking quite hot and very fuckable.  That generally sends my imagination haywire.  Although, in theory, if she was a character in a movie or anime, the way to show that would be to have an early-thirtysomething (and attractive actress) play her with the mannerisms of a far older person.

I think the art does a good job of depicting that.  Old hairstyle and decadent courtesan dress, young face.  And, in the lingerie pose - a very voluptuous and sexy body.

Thanks for having this commissioned, Atlantis27.

And as for The Madam getting a proper scene in the House, that's something I still haven't finalised.  She could just as easily show up as an extra NPC encounter, the queen of one of the factions, or even the final 'boss' the player has to survive in order to escape the House.  I haven't decided yet.

House of Hellish Harlots v0.040

There was a v0.039 put out at the start of March.  Somehow, in all the usual PR posts I do across the internet to promote a new release, I forgot to update my own blog.  Never mind.

If you didn't check it out at the time, v0.039 added 3 new harlots: Negralima-V, N-Carnizadalama, and Cerastesia.

v0.040 just adds the one new harlot: Hati Krim.  She's a blue-skinned alien (-looking) babe that specialises in erotic cream massage.

Around this time I was experimenting with Tweego to restructure the project into separate modules to stop the main Twine Editor lagging to death through the size of the project.  I'm glad to say those experiments appear to have worked, so that's one potential future roadblock removed.

You can play the public version of House of Hellish Harlots here:
https://houseofhellishharlots.com/

As always, if you like what you see, you can support the project (and me) on Patreon or SubscribeStar.

The private version is a couple of releases ahead.  Yesterday they received v0.043, which adds two new harlots - the jellyfish girl, Cyane, and the fleshpot pitcher plant girl, Lagona Voluptes.

I have a few more harlots queued up, but I'm about to spend a couple of months writing short stories for a new collection, so those are in the bank to give me material to release over that period.

New(ish) Short Story for Patrons: A Comfy Pink Cushionblob

I've just put out a new(ish) H-space monster girl story for Patreon and SubscribeStar.

One of my current ongoing projects is to take the old H-space Bestiary shorts (you can find them on here if you go back far enough) and spruce them up into "proper" short stories.  This is the "Pink Cushionblob" story.  In this case the new part might apply more than the ish part.  The original was the 3rd in the H-space Bestiary series and barely 1,500 words.  The new one is three times that.  I've bumped up the background lore and aspects of (this) Bate's character.  I also extended the sex scene.

The original was originally in the low priority bucket.  The first few Bestiary shorts don't give me a lot to work with and I'd used a pink cushionblob slime girl already in the Volumpula CYOA.  (And a story I've had stuck in progress for a long while also features one.)

It was a little fiddly to update, almost being a complete rewrite.

Yes, it is currently paywalled on Patreon/SubscribeStar.  Writer have to pay bills.

I've updated a few of these now, with more on the way, so there is a decent chance they will be collected together into a themed ebook collection at some point.

Anyway, new(ish) story "A Comfy Pink Cushionblob".

You can find it here on Patreon.

And here on SubscribeStar.

Harlot Art - Mademoiselle Vête Piège

Here is some more lovely harlot art, this time of the lovely, refined and not at all dangerous (*ahem*) Mademoiselle Vête Piège.

This is courtesy of my patron, Atlantis 27, who commissioned artist Thraeh for the pieces and was kind enough to let me share them here.

More of Thraeh's work can be found on DeviantArt here:

https://www.deviantart.com/thraeh 

I like the contrast between her sophisticated clothed look and coquettish naked look on the bed.  And remember the rules with Vête Piège - on top of the bed, not in-between the sheets!

Hentai Game Review: Mage Kanade's Futanari Dungeon Quest

I've reviewed a fair few Dieselmine H-games over the years, most prominently the Violated Hero series.  They were always light on gameplay and usually pretty good on art.  Nowadays they seem to be in a really weird place.  They probably have one of the most gifted smut artists/animators around, L Buffer, working for them, but don't really seem to know what to do with him.

Unlike its predecessor, A Lose Hero in the Castle of the Succubi, which was pretty much a glorified gallery where you walked from H-scene to H-scene, Mage Kanade's Futanari Dungeon Quest is technically a game, just about.  You have an attack button, a dodge button, and have to navigate fights and timed puzzles.

I'm not into futa, so originally didn't have much interest in this.  Then I saw some clips floating around on porn sites and was lured in.  What can I say, I have a weakness for sexy squishy slime girls.

They got me.  They knew my weakness...

The one area I'm sort of okay with futa is futa protagonists having their 'weak point' targeted by sexy (and importantly, non-futa) succubi and monster girls.  And in this, the protagonist is pretty much functionally a dude with how the various monster girls treat them.  I suspect the only reason they made the protagonist a futa is to double up on the ryona audience by showing a sexy chick with big tits getting slimed.

That's one of the features of the game.  There is a large panel on the right that shows the negative statuses currently affecting the protagonist.

I played this untranslated, so I'm not 100% on the plot.  A sexy female wizard chases a succubus to some ruins.  After entering she gets tricked and hit by some magic that gives her a cock.  Then she has to navigate her way past various erotic traps and monster girls that are bent on wanking her into a stupor.

Not the boooooobs!

The game is quite inventive on that, to be fair.  The first level has you trying to avoid gas and boob traps while fighting off disembodied wank hands and paizuri tits.  The second is full of lascivious slime.  The game gets across the theme of an erotic trap dungeon fairly well and the boss fights are pretty good.  By the 4th level it starts to become obvious the devs are running out of steam.  The traps and timed puzzles go away and are replaced with lazy battles versus hordes of horny bunny girls.  The 5th is a replay of the boss fights, but with the 'lead' succubus of the level involved directly.

As with a lot of Dieselmine games, there is a lack of ambition.  The early levels and boss fights are pretty good, but it's very short and feels more like a demo or proof of concept.

Art is variable.  The L Buffer animations are excellent as always.  I was less impressed with Bad End H-scenes.  The art on those was a little too cartoony and the proportions on some of the succubi ended up looking weirdly grotesque rather than sexy.

Sorry luv, you're just not my type.

As with most of the recent Dieselmine succubus and monster girl games, it's pretty much a showcase gallery for L Buffer's talents.  Those are good as always, but the whole thing is probably a little on the pricy side for what you get.  It's a shame Dieselmine can't seem to put those talents to better use.  Other devs would salivate at the prospect of having this sprite work in their games.

(If I could get a artist/animator as good as this to provide some graphics for The House of Hellish Harlots...)

The erotic traps are interesting, at least for the early levels.  I'm currently brainstorming a SexDungeon project for #Dungeon23 over on Patreon (and SubscribeStar).  This has given me a few ideas for things to work in, like the Boob "Wall of Death".  Mage Kanade's Futanari Dungeon Quest is maybe a little expensive for what it is, but it's fun and given me a few ideas, so checking it out was not a complete waste.

Beware the "Wall of Boob"...

Milking Farm is probably still the peak of the L Buffer/Dieselmine era, even if that also only had rudimentary run 'n' hide gameplay.