A very earnest attempt that commits a few too many faux pas.
Realistically, this game is in the mid 3s/5, which gives me discretion about whether I want to rate it a 3 or a 4. I debated about it for a long time. There's a lot of reasons to bump it up. The game is genuine in attempting to create a unique and memorable VN. The developer appears to have their shit together; updates are fairly meaty, and they come out with good regularity. You always want to reward a developer who is clearly focused on the project. On the other hand, the developer seems to only like very high ratings, even against those that give earnest feedback.
Ultimately, I decided to rate it a 3 based on the game as it is now, and not the promise that it clearly demonstrates. It's very possible that the finished product will bump higher, but as it is right now (chapter 10), there's just a few too many amateurish flaws that keep me from rounding up.
Visually the game is... okay. It's a Honey Select game with decent attention to detail. The backdrops used are simply adequate, which works stylistically because the models aren't particularly detailed either. The game clearly is going for an anime-ish aesthetic and vague 2.5 dimension modeling, which it achieves without much fanfare.
There's a reasonable amount of animations, which are appreciated. But ultimately the game starts to feel too samey. All the interiors look alike. All the 'suspenseful' and 'horror' (airquotes for emphasis) elements kind of blend together. The game reuses a lot of the same aesthetics. Evidently, the only way to make a scene scary is by showing rustic interiors with the gamma turned all the way down and weird, often out-of-place fog.
The game even pokes fun at itself about all the fog, but these tongue-in-cheek meta lampshading comments rarely have the effect that the developers think they do. Just because you're aware that you overuse an element does not make it acceptable to do so. However, I do have to give kudos for the developer for being willing to experiment with the visuals. There's an attention paid to lighting and composition, and scenes are often framed and blocked fairly creatively instead of just having straight shots with the subject in the center of the screen. The potential is there, once they iron out the growing pains.
The girls aren't bad. And ultimately that's where the praise stops. They're not offensively one-note, but most of the time they're pretty tropey. The game also has a bad habit of introducing all of them all at once. You meet like a dozen girls at the ninja village, they introduce themselves by their belt and race, and... that's about it. Some of them are ultimately backburnered until you interact with them again. For instance, I had no idea who Centuria was because it's been so long between her initial introduction and when you actually share meaningful scenes with her.
Most of the girls—and like most games in this genre, your vast, vast majority of scenes are shared with exclusively women—behave like silly anime tropes more than actual characters. You rarely have any kind of deep conversations. You get the occasional backstory infodump, some oversized anime reactions, the lustdrunk 'courtship' scenes, and then mostly a bunch of damsel-in-distress scenes.
I will say it's a bit problematic that, of all the main girls you interact with, you haven't really rounded the bases with any of them. You do get to sleep with various girls (Fransisca, Nixie, Claire, Margot, Tresha), but for the most part these are minor one-of characters that are cast aside as soon as you're done with them. All while the major characters—Seira and the ninja village girls—are essentially drip-fed and Patreon-baited as bad as any game out there.
This is troubling because it seems to imply that the girls have no value once the MC is allowed to put their dick in them. It's almost like the developer views them solely as prizes to be conquered, and once that happens they're written out of the story. Combined with the tropey, anime-style writing makes the girls feel especially shallow. The slow burn especially doesn't make sense considering the MC is a literal incubus who makes people want to sleep with him through dark magic and his comically large penis.
As a note to the developer, you can have the MC sleep with one of the main girls fairly early and still have development after the fact. In fact, that can open different vectors of character and relationship development. Treating them like they're prizes that you have to win piece-meal (via kissing, touching, blowjobs, etc) is both formulaic and patronizing.
Some of the 'horror' elements are quite good, if a bit derivative. The problem is the game's insistence and overreliance on jump scares. The game could have achieved the exact same effect by having an airhorn suddenly blaring.
The problem with these jump scares is that they're largely misused. The developer inserts them when they're already trying for a spooky atmosphere (low light, overused 'fog', creepy music). That's often the last place you should have a jump scare. The reader is already inherently vigilant while navigating these scenes. All a jump scare does in those moments is offer a cheap startle.
The real, optimal use of a jump scare is to add or release tension to a scene that is ambiguous, on the cusp of being scary. It's essentially used to erode your trust in the scene or the reality of the situation, which in turn makes you more invested in the paranoia of the moment. It's best when sparingly used as a tone shift. For instance, most of the jump scares in Alien involve the cat. All the scenes involving the alien are usually set up well in advance and not sprung suddenly. The horror is already built into the cinematography, sounds, and scenic tension. You feel stalked, because you are, not because you're on the lookout for the next sudden blare.
When the developer is already trying their hardest to make the environment spoopy, jump scares just feel cheap. You're expecting something to jump out at you, and the only scare is the loud noise or sudden flash. Let the horror simmer on its own.
The actual horror elements of the game feel watered down because everyone behaves like the biggest idiot. You just have people "losing" each other despite clearly understanding that they shouldn't. How do trained ninjas have that happen to them all the time? Why wouldn't they maintain touch or visual? Why aren't they constantly communicating to make sure they're still there? Why aren't they doing any of a dozen different methods to make sure they don't get separated and picked off? At some point you don't care about the horror elements because the characters are simply too stupid to live. Kind of like how you don't care when the Slut or the Token dies in b-reel horror slop because they wandered off.
The worst part is that the game doesn't need to dumb down anyone at all. It's a high fantasy game involving mythological creatures, demons, and literal gods. You have complete freedom to make the enemies OP af. Instead, apparently the only way to make anything appropriately horrific is by dumbing down the characters until they're total idiots who bumble into stupid situations. And then they get out of them because the MC is himself a deus ex machina Gary Stu with ridiculous divine powers.
The combination of the most-specialest-MC-ever and the horror elements don't really mesh. Horror works because it puts the character at the mercy of things that are darker, greater, and more powerful than the characters. There's that helpless feeling that no matter what you do, even if you make good choices, there's still that chance you meet a gruesome fate. There's almost none of that here. The MC seems to randomly get power-ups purely at plot convenience. The only reason there's any tension to begin with is because everyone behaves like a headless moron, and the developer has conditioned you to expect a blaring jump scare around every corner. Let good horror elements simmer and breathe. That's the key.
Finally, when reviewing a porn game, it's impossible to forget the lewd scenes. Here, the H scenes are generally acceptable, though most of them are fairly short and relatively bland. The girls inevitably just ahegao all over the place after some generic dicking, which is at least somewhat consistent with how the MC is an incubus, but it would feel a lot better if they were more earned or had more variety. They're decent for the power fantasy but lacking in real eroticism. There's just a little bit missing in the build-up or foreplay, and the violent tone shifts after the climax don't help either.
Ultimately, it just feels like the game is missing something. It has a great foundation, but everything comes in a little under-seasoned or half-baked. The dev needs that final 10% of missing polish.
