I've played the game start to finish and I have some feedback. Because this is such an early alpha, I'm going to refrain from rating or wholly reviewing it.
The controls are- ... they're painful, man. I can't put it to you lightly for fear of you not fixing it. Specifically: combat is difficult for all the wrong reasons. Running and jumping is fine. But when it comes to fighting the enemies, which is something you must do since they hold keys, it's frustratingly bad. Here's why:
- You can attack an enemy before they grab you, but if you do this too close, they succeed in grabbing you even if you successfully attack them. It should probably be made harder for enemies to grab you, or at least for their range to be shorter, as I can't tell you how agitating it is to score a great hit on an enemy only for them to completely ignore it. (Note: sometimes, enemy still takes damage)
- The stun time on a released enemy is just too long. It should be about half of what it is; it really breaks any tension combat has when I can just rebuke a grappling foe only to watch them take a half-hour nap in front of me. Alternatively- make it possible to attack stunned enemies?
- I couldn't get the bow to work. I'm not sure if there's a trick to it, if it's bugged, but I tried it in both weapon slots and it never took. I assumed it just wasn't finished yet.
I think the game could be a fun platformer if you give us more to fight with than just the sword, do something about the enemy i-frames when stunned (either shorten or make stunned enemies vulnerable) and did something about the awkward enemy grapple range.
I believe you were already aware of the difficulty in dodging enemies, so you gave them the huge stun time and gave us tons of apples, but these seem like short-term fixes. If you could, say, shorten enemy range and make it so that if they're hit at all their grapple is cancelled, then you could do things like make enemies faster and give them a shorter recovery time; these changes, if properly accommodated, would definitely make the gameplay much more engaging and a lot less frustrating / boring.
That's it for my practical advice. If you want some feedback on the story and scenes... the animations are surprisingly good and they're a strength you should capitalize on, though I understand that's costly to do. It's for that reason I advise you diversify your content. When designing an area, think: "Have I covered this fetish or sex act already?" and perhaps consider doing a different scene. There were no less than three vanilla scenes, and the art was good, but was I interested in them...? No, I didn't care to repeat any of them, but I was impressed by the animation work. This builds into what I have to say next:
It's porn. Porn doesn't do great on story, usually. But it can- and when it does- the results can be really potent. All of the sex scenes besides the two along the main quest with Zulu (probably got the name wrong, sorry) seem really out of the blue. The most interesting one was Thomas with the victim's mom, and here's why: there actually was a reason for it. We knew his odd, aloof demeanor about his fiance being kidnapped was definitely strange. But when we saw him having an affair with Ms. Lara, then it made sense in a way that was actually pretty convincing. So, here, you succeeded in:
- Typing multiple story-events together.
- Making sense of character interactions.
- Rounding-off Thomas' character so he's understandable.
... But every other scene, really, seemed kind of out-of-nowhere. The doctor getting raped didn't make a lot of sense to me- for example, I didn't understand how the intruder knew about the drug being involved when he's all the way on the other side of town. I didn't really care to see Milva with the guard- it really felt irrelevant when I had already completed the main quest and all. You could do with repeating what you did for Thomas, in that there's a build-up between these scenes that give a bit more plausibility as to why your characters are having sex. This does engage the reader, which only makes your already good sex-animations much more appreciable.
As for the monsters and generic sex- I liked that you made losing a bad-end, and it's indeed that quality that makes a playthrough intense. You should not scrap this. However: I felt absolutely no temptation to lose. The monsters weren't well-drawn, no offense, and moreover they were all the same thing: naked demon men. Big green or little red, your choice- they're not much different. It's something of a sin to not make imaginative characters when you're designing monsters: they're monsters! They can be anything!
When you're making monsters, don't think of generic dicks-out porn beasts, but try thinking this: what monsters aroused you the most? What were your wildest fantasies? Personally, I like alraunes either with dicks / tentacles or driders prowling for victims to lay eggs in, but without going on too much I think as a whole your monster cast needs much richer content- probably moreso than your NPCs. There should be something about them that interests me, something they are capable of that I want to see happen to Maya, beyond just a plain floppy dick on a generic monster.
I hope you do not take my feedback too harshly and consider some of what I've advised.
