WARNING: as published on Steam, Sakura Dungeon is NSFW. As augmented by the free patch, the art includes hardcore porn. It’s also on sale for $12 as part of the Steam Summer Sale, along with all the other Sakura games (all NSFW, but only about half with explicit patches).

Developer Winged Cloud is a bit of an oddball, since their only web presence is a Patreon, and everyone who used to publish their games broke up with them a while back, so there are a lot of dead links out there.

Sakura Dungeon is apparently their most ambitious title, with a full RPG dungeon-crawler layered over the standard dating-sim kinetic novel core common to their other titles. The PoV character is a fox-spirit (female) trying to take over a dungeon full of monsters (female), with the reluctant help of an adventuring knight (female). Naturally, all of them are young, busty, and cute as buttons.

(via, apparently from a pre-release copy, since the names are incorrect)

The dungeon is a strict grid, with only a few different images for each floor type. The puzzles are pretty simple and occasionally tedious, the loot is unimpressive, and the combat is straightforward turn-based point-and-click.

So why play? Because the characters are fun, the story is shallow but engaging, the girls are gorgeous, and the combat is full of Most Common Special Attacks that blow their clothing off. And not being a Japanese title, there’s no loli, no oddly-specific fetishes, and the closest it gets to non-consensual sex is “aw, c’mon, it’ll be fun”.

Why did I buy it in the first place? Because I kept seeing this picture around the net and finally found out where it came from:

NSFW

Update

I apologize for misusing genre jargon above. I’ve tended to lump all of these sorts of games together as “dating sims”, but while that may be their most visible manifestation, it refers to a set of relationship-building mechanics that are not present in all such games, and is orthogonal to the distinction between “visual novels” (where the player has choices with consequences, the old choose-your-own-adventure paperback) and “kinetic novels” (where there’s only one narrative thread, what we used to call “novels”). Most of the Winged Cloud games are kinetic novels where your choices boil down to “watch them fuck” or “don’t watch them fuck right now”.

There’s only one narrative thread in Sakura Dungeon, and you can only fail to achieve it by losing fights in the dungeon, not by making choices in the narrative. There’s no point in the story where the PoV character can choose between “take over the dungeon” and “perpetual orgy in this town full of sexy girls who worship me”. There’s also no stable management or relationship manipulation, like a raise-the-princess game or dating sim; if you catch a monster girl, she will join the party, and any improvement to her fighting ability is determined by using magic items with predictable effects (“raise agility”, “increase fire resistance”, “learn shockwave”). Who’s in your party affects only your combat ability in the RPG and some one-liners in key fights (with a few exceptions where a character is required to unlock a cutscene).

So that makes it a kinetic novel where progress is gated by an RPG/MCSA dungeon crawl, with unlockable “watch them fuck” cutscenes.

Amusing note: I’ve been playing around with the popular Ren’Py engine, swiping art assets from Sakura Dungeon to “kineticize” my old Hero meets Villain story. It ends up being about four minutes long, which makes a useful comparison to how much story is in a Winged Cloud game that takes 2-3 hours to play.

Update 2

Thanks to unrpyc and some quick regexing, it looks like there are roughly 138,000 words of text in Sakura Dungeon, making it a good-sized novel. Selecting a few at random turns up such literary gems as:

• “I like it when people lick me all over…”
• “If you apply magic to it correctly, it can hold its shape yet remain fluid…”
• “I care not what I whip, only that I am whipping.”
• “We cannot let that panda roam freely.”
• As we step into the room, we find that we’re surrounded on all sides.
• “Sorry, but I really want to see you in a maid outfit.”
• “Oh… You’re one of those…”
• The chocolate absorbs some of your mana and replenishes itself.
• “That rabbit is going to learn a painful lesson.”
• I can only imagine having so much attention from so many cute, luscious women…
• “Please come back later if you would like to use our services.”
• “It’s not a real tail.”
• “I wonder what sort of things they have on-board for stimulation!”
• As it slides into me, my body shudders from the sensation.
• “Can we cuddle, at least?”
• “We should do this again sometime!”
• “Please don’t go wandering off by your-”

And how could I forget:

• In the popsicle goes again.

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