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.

A long time ago, in a Usenet newsgroup far, far away, in response to a post on “Top Ten Reasons Magic is Better than Sex”, I wrote:

• Magic requires no foreplay; you can just grab a partner and start playing.
• you can switch opponents as often as you like, and no one will mind.
• brutally beating your partner is okay.
• Protection really works.
• Magic comes with a rulebook.
• parents don’t go crazy when they catch their children playing Magic with the neighbor’s kid.
• you don’t feel insecure if you have a little deck.
• you can play Magic while eating a sandwich.
• any number of people can play in a game of Magic, and everyone gets a turn.
• if your deck just isn’t working, you can blame it on the shuffle.
• Tom Wylie is easier to understand than Doctor Ruth.
• when you pay for Magic, you’re guaranteed of a good time.
• you can always get your partner to play Magic with you in public.
• you can shuffle your deck as much as you want.
• your partner can shuffle your deck, too.
• when you buy Magic, you know it’s fresh from the factory.
• when you get tired of a deck, you can make a better one.
• your neighbors won’t mind if you watch them play Magic.
• it’s okay to play Magic with your sister.
• you don’t need a battery-powered shuffler, but it’s easier than using your hands.
• you don’t have to tell your current partner about everyone you’ve ever played with.
• if you quit playing Magic and sell all of your cards, you can probably afford sex.

(I dug this out because I found the old “recently-spotted” link where someone had translated them all into Spanish. Link was still good, to my surprise.)

(from the NSFW game HuniePop)

Shamus didn’t precisely recommend HuniePop, but he did say that the Bejeweled-ish gameplay was far superior to the original and most of its clones, and that he felt quite uncomfortable with the dating-sim elements, particularly the “overnight date” where you play a twitch version of the puzzle to “score” with the young ladies. So, to be more precise, he did recommend it, but only to pervs who like anime-style cheesecake and hilarous simulated moaning with their match-3 puzzles.

The gameplay is engaging, and it’s completely free of the fetishes it would have if it were a real Japanese dating sim. Meet girls, impress them with your Mad Match-3 Skilz, admire the naughty pictures they send you, and giggle at the noises the voice actresses make as your score goes up and down in the twitch puzzles. There is an easy-to-apply “adult” patch if you buy it on Steam (create a file with the correct name), but all it does is unlock a few pictures that are more detailed and less appealing.

The art and voice acting are mostly quite pleasant in the dating-sim component, making the girls quite appealing. The unlockable characters are pretty easy to get, and include alien bounty hunter Celeste, catgirl Momo, and love-fairy Kyu. Once you’ve collected the whole set (pokémon joke omitted…), there’s one final secret character, and then an “unlimited” mode.

There are two major drawbacks: it only saves when you leave an area (so you can’t upgrade your stats and buy/sell things, then exit), and the Mac version stores your save file in the cache folder, which can get wiped if you upgrade the OS. This is apparently a common problem with games built on the Unity engine. So, be sure to save the contents of this directory frequently: ~/Library/Caches/unity.HuniePot.HuniePop

The pirates you’re hunting can be three systems away from the planet where you got the mission, not two. And it appears their location is pre-generated and they don’t move, so if you never enter the correct system, you’ll never find them. This also means that if you load up on bounty missions, the odds that you’ll run into multiple pirate fleets simultaneously goes way up. When that happens in a system that already has a high chance of random pirates, like Shaula, even a fleet of Shield Beetles can be overwhelmed unless you draw them far, far away from the planet and the incoming hyperspace routes. (pro tip: the “hold position” key can be applied to single ships by selecting them, not just your entire fleet)

[Mac version 0.9.6, based on a small Perl script that does a crude scan of the save file; haven’t figured out how they mark missions as completed yet, though]

The game is free, fun, and desperately in need of a nicely-designed PDF with all the obscure keyboard shortcuts (scattered documentation here, here, and here). You can also get it on Steam for convenience (no DRM applied, because GPLv3).

It’s moddable, replayable, and regularly updated, and doesn’t chew up a lot of resources when paused, so you can easily hop in for a few quick turns while waiting for other tasks to complete. It auto-saves every time you land, and it’s quite stable.

Speaking of free games on Steam, the ancient MMO Anarchy Online showed up there recently. They’ve been trying to get me to come back for about 15 years, and this time I decided to give it a shot. I managed a successful password reset on my old account and created a new character (the old ones were still there but marked “inactive”), and got the dubious pleasure of remembering what it was like before MMOs settled on some basic user interface conventions. I could adjust to the low-res models and textures, but the controls are another story.

After nearly 500 hours with the original Skyrim, I can’t really take the new Special Edition seriously; nice-looking, but been-there-done-that. I’m playing at the default difficulty level and not even bothering to level up. This means that dynamically-leveled opponents are trivial to kill, but it also means that there are plenty of monsters that can one-shot me. I had to run like hell to dodge the frost troll on the way to High Hrothgar, I stumbled across a skooma den filled with vampires and got my ass handed to me, and the less said about blood dragons, the better.

When I realized that a few lucky loot drops meant I could afford a house, I decided I needed to adopt a child. Specifically, Dorthe, the daughter of Riverwood’s blacksmith. So I became a werewolf, killed and ate her parents, assassinated the woman who ran the orphanage, and convinced her replacement that I’d be an excellent parent.

I think we’ll be very happy together.

The new 64-bit HD re-release of Skyrim for Windows is mostly a side-effect of updating the game to work on the PS4 and Xbox One. If you already own the game and all DLC on Steam, it’s free. Yesterday, the Spoiler Warning crew had an impromptu streaming session to show off how glitchy and unstable it was.

After skimming through their video, I gave it a shot, and my experience was completely different. The only two visual issues we had in common were excessively dark shadows outdoors (much worse for them) and a distant non-animated section of a river (which is apparently an initialization problem, because I later saw much more of the same river from a greater distance (up by Bleak Falls Barrow), and it was all flowing).

Josh is the bug whisperer, so it’s no surprise that he got crashes from attempting simple actions, but it was rock solid for me. And where he had terrible frame-rate pretty much everywhere, it was quite smooth for me at 1920x1280. The one potential explanation he mentioned is that he hadn’t updated his graphics drivers in a few months, whereas I did that a few days ago, but since this is the same engine as Fallout 4, that shouldn’t explain all of the problems he saw, and the forums are full of crash reports as well.

So, if you can get it for free through Steam, and you don’t mind playing the vanilla game with just the official DLC and no mods for a while (most importantly, without SkyUI!), then it’s a prettier Skyrim. Not as dramatically so as console players will see, but a definite visual upgrade. The “depth of field” effect that devs think is so cool is stupid, though; until games have eye-tracking, they have no idea what part of the scene I’m actually looking at.

In other news, there was a very small, unexplained patch to No Man’s Sky. The ~50 people who are still playing can’t figure out what it was supposed to accomplish, and no one’s heard from the developers in months.

Also, Civ 6 desperately needs some serious patching, for performance, balance, unit/city management, and fun. Between the intimately-close placement of opposing civs, zerg-rush AI, raging barbarians who upgrade their military faster than you can (I had barbarian anti-tank units show up while I was still trying to acquire the resources to create musketmen), and build times that obsolete your units before you even finish building them, you don’t have time to explore the game’s features. Your strategies are severely constrained, and they didn’t even bother to let you save preferred starting conditions; if you carefully set up the parameters for a game and get a terrible starting location, you’ll have to re-select each and every parameter to start over. And even “huge” worlds are tiny; the world feels like a county.

The AI is very sensitive to victory conditions, too. If, for instance, you want to focus on learning how all the military units work, and don’t want to spontaneously lose because of religion or culture, the AI will be laser-focused on a military victory, and zerg you even harder. Resource-starved? Don’t set the game to abundant resources, or the AI will… zerg you even harder.

There are also some really annoying bugs. If you research a military technology that obsoletes a unit, but you don’t have the resource to build the newly-unlocked unit, then you can’t build either. And at least twice, I unlocked a unit before unlocking the ability to see its required resource on the map.

Tokimune does not rhyme with “Sailor Moon”. I’m sorry that the people who hired you for the Civilization 6 voiceovers didn’t provide a pronunciation guide for all the foreign words and names.

I wouldn’t mind so much, except that the load time is just long enough that I have to hear “tokimoon” every time I start the game.

Also, epic troll: