Really looking forward to this game being finished. There were some visual bugs but nothing game breaking. 5/5 for fun and interesting gameplay, and 5/5 for the sex.
Reviews for "Jessika's Curse"
This is so good, but I keep getting stuck at the chest.. It doesn't let me click on the x
Looks like its gonna be an interesting game. Im curious though if there is anything special or fun that happens if you lose a combat. I couldnt tell since this demo its impossible to lose :D
Ok, so this game has potential, but it also has a lot of flaws as it is now. The best thing this game has going for it is a fairly coherent aesthetic and decent content for an initial release. When the game is functioning well, the combat is pretty decent. This doesn't entirely make up for a number of the issues.
First, combat when out of the lust break state is pretty good, but once you reach that point, everything begins to fall apart. Those familiar with Pokemon know how frustrating it can be to have one of their Pokemon get confused. There is little the player can do but push on with the battle and hope their Pokemon doesn't do too much damage to itself. Lust break feels a lot like that, but with animation scenes slapped over the "It hurt itself in its confusion" event. This wouldn't be too bad, but there seems to be a bug where even if the animation triggers for only one character, even if the other character isn't in lust break state, both characters' turns are voided, essentially skipping one player turn.
Two, the church UI is slightly unintuitive and there isn't a way to revisit the tutorial information, meaning that it is fairly easy to just miss that you need to click and drag the characters, something that runs counter to the way both of the other shops are run. As such, I ended up playing for a decent amount of time starting each dungeon with 99 lust on both characters.
Three, Combat Balance. So you start with vastly greater "points" required to fill the lust meter than it takes to deplete the health meter. Since Lust Break presents an added complication in combat, this makes sense, but the way things play out in combat, it ends up being mostly irrelevant. The mushrooms are ok. They do mostly proportional damage and lust between their two attacks and split their attacks between the two fairly evenly, but the "Gobbo"s are simply unbalanced. They have three attacks, two that target health, one of which can actually do some appreciable damage when it lands, but their lust attack is both overpowered and is used with almost ridiculous frequency. When facing the final fight, it is not un-common for 4 out of 5 of the enemies to use their lust attack. This wouldn't be too bad, but with a damage cap of 19, a single hit can consume nearly a fifth of a character's buffer between one lust state and another.
If any one of these issues were solved, I think that the combat would be far less frustrating, but in combination with each other, they serve to produce a situation where a little carelessness and bad luck can leave a player utterly stuck. Since the only effective ways to reduce lust are either leaving the forest, which only depletes the lust break state to a minimum, and the fountain, which only occurs once per dungeon instance and doesn't seem to guarantee substantial reduction of lust, the characters end up hovering between about 75 to 99 lust between dungeons. During dungeons, they often end up in an almost perpetual lust break state. In combat, this means that frequently they switch targets, use different abilities, or just skip a player turn entirely. Usually at least one character is in a lust break state by the end of the first battle, if not both of them. Ultimately, it often feels like, when you lose, it isn't because you, the player, did something wrong. It feels like you just got unlucky, like the game decided you would lose this time. Given that the gameplay is mostly based around turn based strategy, a genre that is driven by the player making careful decisions about their actions, ham-stringing the player's feeling of agency like that will feel more and more frustrating as the game progresses.
So, obviously, it isn't particularly helpful to just point out flaws and mindlessly demand they be fixed. Hopefully, what follows are a few helpful suggestions to deal with these issues.
One of the major issues is that the animations that are prompted by the lust break are part of your core engagement. The way that the animations are used though makes them more of a punishment for the player. After about the fourth or fifth one, the reaction is no longer, "Great", its, "Damn it, again?!" One way this might be mitigated is if each animation reduced the lust levels of the character that is the focus of the event by some small or moderate amount. This would allow the player to see them as at least a mixed blessing, instead of a pure irritation after having seen the same scene for the seventh time. Another change might be effects that are applied to the monster in the case of scenes between a character and a monster. If the character and the target monster both lost a turn instead of just the player, then it wouldn't be so bad. One thing to consider might be abilities that either unlock at certain lust thresholds or which have slightly altered effects dependent upon lust levels, whether that is simple damage scaling, increased status chance, or something else entirely. This helps to incentivize a more risky play style where the player balances the benefits of having higher levels of lust, as well as the chance for new scenes, and the potential for mistakes to knock out a character or enemies to get lucky and defeat a character. Obviously high-cost items to reduce lust would also offer some flexibility to gameplay. Ultimately, this is a fairly early release, so some issues are inevitable, so I look forward to the improvements and additions later releases will have.
I really like the characters, voice is a really good bonus that gives more soul to it.
Just notice a few stability problems, once during the "boss fight" that leads to a endless combat turn and the other one is at the display of the "chests tutorial", the two panels opened simultaniously and it makes the game stops.
Keep up the good work ! I'll stay avised of the next updates.