Theoretically, yes. There was even a bugfix related to that recently, though I haven't had the chance to test it yet.
Endovior
Recent community posts
As usual when fighting summoners, you want to target the summoner, not the summons! When you fight a necromancer, you don't want to waste your time and energy beating up every zombie before dealing with their mistress; by the time you manage to deal with one wave, she'll be about ready to call in the next! Same deal with shadowy ghasts, except more so.
As for actually defeating them, magic weapons are important when fighting ghosts! Make sure you have one equipped, or your hit chance will be very bad. Also, this is the sort of enemy that doesn't like to close into melee range, so consider using ranged attacks. Also also, consider taking one of the perks that lets you see the resistances and weaknesses of enemies; some attack types are totally useless against some enemies, and you really don't want to be fighting an enemy with a weapon they're immune to!
If you aren't equipped to deal with ghosts, and shadowy ghasts are starting to spawn and give you trouble, think twice before draining mana from shrines! And if you aren't able to deal with large numbers of shadow enemies backed by multiple types of summoner, consider passing on the quest to fight the Shadow Clan.
Firstly, are you stealing from guarded faction chests or releasing faction prisoners while observed? That'll make even a friendly faction's members attack you, and they really will mean it! If you value your relations with a given faction, don't steal from them or free their prisoners while they're watching! Doing so in secret may also give you a penalty, but it won't be as bad as if you were caught in the act and also had to disable a few guards!
Otherwise, members of neutral or even friendly factions might occasionally have a dominant mood and 'playfully' attack you, chasing you down to tie you up and tease you a little. You have the option to retaliate, but you will face a rep penalty if you capture them; they were just playing, after all. This is especially true if you fight back using lethal damage; no one likes it if you actually murder their girls instead of just tying them up! If you avoid a dominant attacker for a little while they'll give up, and disabling them with your own bindings without capturing them is totally fair and incurs no penalty. That said, the rep penalty isn't very high, so you might consider capturing them anyways for the ransom value.
Note that the flipside of dominant moods is submissive moods. Sometimes, a girl will get that heart over her head and say something like "oh no, I'm out of mana and totally helpless, I sure hope that nobody takes advantage and ties me up, tee hee~". At this point, if you have the bratty subs mode turned on, they'll 'playfully' run away from you, hoping that you'll chase them. Either way, these girls are literally asking for it, and you'll face no penalty for attacking them with tease/bind damage, and if you render them helpless in the process, they'll even drop their inventory as loot! The game knows that they're fair targets, and won't even prompt you before you attack them with suitable weapons, unlike with non-hostile NPCs in any other circumstance; even their fellow faction members won't object... so long as you don't take matters further than bondage and teasing!
If you're having trouble keeping your allies around, one thing any PC can do to revive an ally, even without any skills, is to lock them in a stationary restraint, then unlock them. Swap them repeatedly until they're on the tile of the sarcophagus or the mummy's post, then interact to lock them up, then bump them and choose to pick their restraints. They'll be back to 5 HP, and able to follow you back to the Summit.
Bear in mind that they won't otherwise heal after doing this, so it's not an amazing free heal, and is instead only a stupid trick to 'friendly capture' an ally so they can be transported to the Summit, but that'll still get you some extra Servants that you might've otherwise abandoned to their fate.
There's a new 'cycle' each time you advance to a new floor. Prisoner opinion is increased by having Servants assigned in the dominant roles for the Cuddle Lounge, and Managers make the process even more efficient. But of course, you don't have any Servants to begin with, so if you only do things with captured girls, it's a very slow process. The trick to getting the Summit to work quickly is that, when you finish the first floor, you bring in whichever random people were in your party and you make them into Servants, then kick them out of your party and assign them to the Cuddle Lounge to start training your first new girls.
Bear in mind that Sanctum content is all totally optional and provides minimal gameplay benefit at the moment. Sure, you might be able to get a high-level girl to join your party after enough cuddling, but it's finicky. If you ally with a faction, you can just get miniboss rank girls to join your party directly, skipping most of the need to capture anyone. Aside from that, the recycler can break down unwanted restraints into material for other restraints... but you really won't need the extras if you aren't trying to keep hundreds of prisoners.
It's possible to capture a boss (eg: Fuuka), bring them to the Summit, and 'cuddle' them into liking you. You can then assign them to a staff position, and from there add them to your party.
This is a terrible idea.
Once in your party, Fuuka will betray you the moment you descend the stairs, having her usual pre-battle chat before attacking you, your party members, and your summons. At that point, so far as I can tell, everyone aggroed by Fuuka becomes hostile to Fuuka's current faction (your party), as does anyone who fights back, instantly turning everyone on your team into an enemy of everyone on your team. Basically, this turns the already dangerous situation of entering a new area full of other enemies into a confusing survivor deathmatch in which people who apparently like you (up to and including your summons) are doing their best to bring you down.
It would have seemed more reasonable to me to have Fuuka unable to be captured, or unable to be convinced to like you, or unable to be promoted to a servant position, or unable to be added to your party, or perhaps even unwilling to betray you once successfully recruited (though any other option would've seemed more likely).
Despite all that, having the pre-battle chat again feels sort of buggy, and turning your party members against each other seems like blatant bug territory.
Item sorting QoL is a nice change! It's less of an issue with the Weapon inventory than with the Accessory inventory, but since all Weapons are simply of type "Weapon", sort by Type does nothing there. This could be fixed by adding Weapon subtypes in the same way that there are Accessory subtypes, tagging each item with something like Weapon (Sword), Weapon (Bow), Weapon (Restraint), etc...
Alternatively, since the only thing the player probably cares about in the Weapon inventory is which Weapons can be equipped by the active character, a Separate filter for "Equipable" would conveniently group all the items you're looking for at the start of the list.
I see that there's a new version out! Some notes:
The Rogue's 'Riposte' attack does mediocre damage to give the enemy defensive buffs and counterattacks, which is probably wrong, especially since the enemy counterattacks do nothing.
The Mage's 'Blink' move doesn't seem terribly useful, since the Move command that everyone gets affects all ranks. It probably needs to apply a defensive buff or something?
It's possible to strip the gear off incoming recruits that you don't accept, which is semi-useful when they have nice underwear, but feels exploit-y.
The devlog suggests that rescue missions have been added, but they didn't seem to come up after I lost a girl. I did randomly encounter a familiar-looking 'slave' with the enemies once, but beating up the rest of the rats didn't free her. She showed 'kidnapped' when I beat her up at the end of the fight, but did not reappear at home, despite empty slots being available.
Dungeon 3 wasn't that big of a deal; it's still quite easy to sneak through most of it. It probably wasn't a good idea, but I couldn't help but equip and try everything I had a free slot for... but that didn't cause too much of a problem. I had an early casualty on the first floor, and restarted. Then Sayaka fell early on the second floor, but with no way back, I pressed on... and proceeded to open all the chests and beat the boss. It probably helped that I was able to clearly identify which enemies were trying to add extra curses, and focused my attention on them whenever they showed up.
The Collar item was probably meant to make sneaking harder, I guess? In Hard Mode, its movement speed reduction is actually pretty excessive. Both surviving party members were collared after the final battle, and it would've been really obnoxious if that'd happened earlier without a good way to mitigate that speed debuff. As per my original run, the title grind remained pretty straightforward with the ability to transfer de-cursed items (the "Curse Remover" also helped!), and it was the XP grind that took longer, thanks to the lingering effects of anti-XP curses.
Dungeon 4 was unpleasant the first time, but you'd made it a little easier for Casual mode since its initial release, as I noted earlier. Not so for Hard Mode! By far the most brutal change felt like locking all the grates; without being able to open up faster routes, my first shot at the boss was Kyouko solo, with just her arms free; everyone else had been mummified and defeated. There was a switch in the boss room just before the boss, but it seemed to do nothing? I also saw the "hilarious joke", and saved just to confirm that it did exactly what I thought it did. Her buff/debuff attack cycle wasn't bad in many of the earlier fights, but was laughably insufficient for the boss.
The level cap here was particularly noticeable, just two levels above where I was exiting Dungeon 3. There were LOTS of pills here, and as predicted I didn't need any of them; I was stuck here long past hitting cap. Hopefully, they'll be useful later.
Once titles started rolling in, I applied gear; Mami got the Greater Tiara, Sayaka got the Lesser Tiara, and Madoka got the obviously-cursed "Queen's Tiara" (being the least-useful mummy, she could at least be an okayish tank with the Slave Collar). Fighting the boss with effectively one and a half characters was hard, but Mami's debuffs and Sayaka's physical damage proved just barely sufficient; Mami beat the boss with 6 HP left (the exact amount of damage the boss had been doing to her with each hit). With no paths backwards opened by defeating the boss, it's a good thing that everyone had gotten their titles by that point; I would've hated to have to do all that again!
With my Casual Mode playthrough complete, on to Hard Mode!
Dungeon 1 was trickier, possibly just because of the level cap? At first my girls were basically doing no damage because they were weak noobs, then they were doing basically no damage because of the shame and nudity debuffs. There was allegedly 'no shortcut', but I still found it straightforward to sneak through to the boss, probably because I'm forgetting a handy shortcut that appeared in Casual mode. No, the problem was getting to the boss and then being able to deal any significant damage. I tried putting the Rags on Madoka (oops no, that was the cursed version), and so went with Sayaka instead, hoping to scale Sharpen while everyone else threw down debuffs; that didn't work, because of the defence buff the boss's minion uses; four sharpens later she was dealing like 4 damage a hit, which was not enough for that level of effort. Instead, it wound up being Kyouko with Fire Spear for the win; between Flaunt and Ribbon Tie, she could get 8 a hit from rotation 3, and wouldn't be stunned thanks to wearing the Rags. Not an easy win (she was last girl standing with only a few HP), but still a win.
With Madoka being in the cursed gown, she wasn't able to get enough Shame or Grovel for titles. Fortunately, the gown was removed on reentry, so I was able to use dungeon items to purge her Shamelessness and grind out the titles. 20 fights later, she'd been maxed out, and I could face the boss to get that last title. Those title stats will be a lot more important in this run, for sure!
Dungeon 2 was a significant pain even in Casual; in Hard Mode, with no way of escaping from corsets and heels, it was worse. Beyond a little bit of initial sneaking around to grab boxes before getting too debuffed, there really wasn't anything to do but to grind the first fight repeatedly until everyone learned how to deal with it. When everyone in the party is that debuffed and limited to a single weak random strike, you have to take the fight you can win. Once you're finished with the posture grind, there's not much threat left in the dungeon, but it really was quite a grind. The boss's posture checks are hard enough to occasionally catch out even fully-trained girls, but assuming you've done all the training before facing them, they're still not much of a threat once debuffed. With foreknowledge, there wasn't anything hard here, just a tedious grind to reach that conclusion.
I did notice that the boss lever was moved, so that you can't open the easy way to the boss before beating them, but it hardly mattered; you're almost certainly not making it across the room to get there in the first place until all your girls are fully-trained. Without any access to Happy Pills, I had a bit more difficulty getting Madoka to max Selfworth once I'd moved on to title grinding, since she'd apparently gone negative at some point. It wasn't a huge deal, though; she was barely into positives by the time I had my second girl maxed.
Quick clarification, since the version number didn't change; I've been on bonus 1.0 this whole time, but didn't manage to get to the last two dungeons before the public release, since it took about 19 hours to get through everything from start to finish. You said last week that there'd be new content additions on Friday, did you just mean the public release of 1.0? Or is there a new version of the bonus file that I should grab for bugfixes and rebalancing?
Had some time free to finish up, so last post for the Casual Mode playthrough!
Dungeon 15 was shockingly easy. Sure, Dungeon 14 felt too easy for how seriously I took it, but Dungeon 15 honestly felt like I could've beaten it with my team from two dungeons ago. I had revives and tons of healing items, and I hardly needed them; I didn't so much as break out the Orange/Red liquids for full heals before defeating the boss. Of course, part of this might be stat accumulation from this being an all-titles run? Gradual move replacement wasn't much of a downgrade in many cases, and the ability to swap movesets made it feasible to replace moves without it being a big deal. The level design was reasonably straightforward with chests in predictable locations, and many of the enemies came in singletons... which could often be defeated two at a time, using the overlapping glitch I reported earlier (the barn is a case where this feels intentional; just walk straight up the center line and you only need to fight half as many battles. Between the pills and easy fights, I capped out quickly here, well before everyone was trained, partway through my first run (and found more pills after that to save for later!).
When I found the boss, I defeated it in exactly one move cycle; open by debuffing special defence (with Ribbon Tie) and murder with existing single-target specials. With its low HP and meager defences, there are individual monsters from previous dungeons who felt scarier than this boss; I didn't even need to bother debuffing its offensive abilities like with most bosses. Its actual attack was unimpressive, and even the scary debuff wasn't all that scary. Getting everyone fully-trained took more effort, of course, but the all-pet team beat the boss just as easily; debuff regular defence (with Moo and Tail Whip), and quickly kill with Backwards Kick and Crunch. Given the availability of multiple attack debuffs and stacking attack buffs in the pet moves, this boss could've been MUCH more difficult.
Thematically, this was definitely a hit with me. The transformation dialogue really helped sell the theme here; it definitely added a lot to this dungeon! I also really appreciated the infinite section for helping train the titles, since 1000 steps would be a lot if I needed to make them in more confined space. The semi-repeated level layout reminded me of Dungeon 10, in a good way; much like with hypnosis, repetition felt exactly on-theme for a dungeon based on training. The only downside was the enemies, which didn't feel different enough despite their cute costumes.
A couple minor bugs... Kitten's "Purr" move wasn't usable for some reason; whenever I ordered a girl to activate it, it instead selected the most-recently-successfully-used move by that girl and did nothing. Also, it's a minor graphical issue, but when fully-transformed, Pig has a skin-toned bald head from behind, instead of the pink pig hood.
Dungeon 16 was, of course, just a boss rush. The first two forms actually felt like serious bosses (unlike the 15 boss), but serious boss tactics worked just fine, and I beat the first two forms with no losses. I nearly ran into trouble with the final form of the boss, but just being able to have Madoka Inner Focus repeatedly and use Holy Shot when she could was plenty, especially since Mami and Kyouko got their debuffs in before going down. The post-boss dialogue felt a little anticlimactic, especially with the absence of a final cutscene. I was expecting something like Homura apologizing to the group and explaining what the whole game was about (sort of a less-private post-14 scene; Homura obviously has some explaining to do about why she's repeatedly been sending the girls into fetish dungeons), but instead there was just nothing, which was a little disappointing.
Another quick sidenote; Invoke Hypnosis II has an image glitch, in that bare arms are visible outside the straitjacket. Not a huge deal, but it bothered me a bit.
And... that's it, I guess? You'd mentioned previously that there'd be an update out around now for bugfixes and adding new content to Hard Mode, is that still planned with the Itch demonetization thing?
Quick follow up, having gone back into Dungeon 14 as suggested...
The fact that all Amputation/Piercing progress is removed on reset made it a little more difficult to get the title; I was able to clear every mob in the dungeon from start to finish without using any limb-restoring item, or any girl losing all her limbs. In the process of clearing the dungeon, I found out that this is the place where the Revives were hidden! I've wanted these for a long time... but unless I missed something earlier, this is the first place where they've appeared. Certainly better late than never! I'd have been quite happy with an item that merely brought girls up from 0 to 1 HP, and these include full HP restoration for free, which is quite good. On the subject of healing items, I will note that the distribution of healing power is kind of weird, given health values; I've got 4 Red Liquids that heal 500 HP, 7 Orange Liquids that heal 200 HP... and Mami, my highest-HP girl, only has 151 HP. I don't really need potions quite this powerful... but the plentiful full heals do come in handy when I'm doing higher-attrition things.
Having made it to the boss with a completely pierced and limbless party, I decided to see if it was possible to beat the boss with the maximum handicap. The answer was yes... but it relied on quite a bit of luck, since if Madoka got chained up or knocked out, that's the fight. It took five tries for team nugget to beat the boss, but it was just barely possible. In hindsight, that's a challenge that would've been slightly easier if I'd ground to the level cap before trying it, but I was out of healing items, and didn't want to have to restart and regrind amputation to try for it. With the boss cleared a second time, I returned to the dungeon a third time to grind to cap... which took much less time than any of the rest of that, since the mobs here aren't especially dangerous to an able-bodied team.
That wasn't my experience with Dungeon 13 (as discussed above)... though it's certainly not guaranteed that players would have the foresight to keep a hard-hitting party member free of drugs. Still, there's plenty of powerful debuffs unlocked by this point, and a solo boss that only does one type of damage isn't THAT scary, especially if you save in advance and retool for debuffing the damage type they deal (and with multiple debuff-all techniques unlocked by now, I came prepared without needing to scum the fight).
Dungeon 13 missed my fetishes, but was thankfully straightforward; much like Dungeon 11, this one was short and sweet. Treasures weren't hidden, and the enemies weren't that dangerous... in fact, they spent most of their time handing out neat stat buffs! Of course, there's a drawback in all this; the boss wipes out all those drug-related buffs, leaving scary debuffs in their place. But I had the foresight to gag Sayaka the moment I found a gag, so she was fine... and Parry Stance into Conturbatio, with the rest of the party throwing debuffs from their withdrawal, made for a handy win without much trouble. I actually cleared this one in one shot, opening all the chests and defeating the boss without needing to heal up with Kyuubi... which was critical, because as I found out after seeing him, full healing also resets your current drug value! If I'd somehow lost anyone at any point, this would've been a much trickier dungeon. Also, if I hadn't guessed correctly on keeping Sayaka gagged for much of the dungeon, and ungagging her for the boss, I'd also have had a much rougher time.
Grinding the titles was initially a pain; it requires wandering around at max alcohol/nicotine values for 200 steps, which seemed tricky, when every combat action decreases both values! Then it became clear that, with four bottles and four cigarettes scattered across the dungeon, the correct way to get those titles was to have one girl take all the drugs, then stumble back and forth in Kyuubi's room for 200 steps, then reset and repeat. This worked, but it was exactly no fun; it would've been nicer for the titles to be related to hitting max drug values and/or walking around with max addiction values. The majority of my time in the dungeon was spent grinding to XP cap after having done everything else.
Dungeon 14 was way too easy. In fact, I'd say it was my easiest dungeon experience yet. After previous dungeons, and having heard the warnings, I was prepared for it to be substantially more brutal and punishing... but it seemed obvious, going into it, that the obviously correct decision was the tanking strategy (so that I didn't take permanent debuffs on anyone I needed to be able to fight). The dungeon didn't live up to the level of precautions I took; there were plenty of cures available for amputation and piercings, and Mami was the only one who ever took any damage (poor Mami, though).
Still, the place was seriously a breeze. I'd rearranged my party to ensure that Sayaka would come in right after Mami's Taunt with Guardian Stance, and I'd further have them layer on extra Defence buffs after that, and it mostly didn't even seem important to be that careful, since Kyouko and Madoka could quickly slaughter every enemy group in a move or two anyway, so long as they hadn't been injured. By using all the recovery items on the only one who needed them, by the time I got to the boss, Mami hadn't even lost an arm (which I only realized the importance of after the boss fight, since she'd have lost all her moves if she'd lost all her limbs before that). I noticed a few branching paths at different points, and wasn't super-diligent about totally exploring all those paths on my 'first run', so it's possible I picked a lucky route and got to the boss in good time. It certainly helped that many fights were avoidable, and the simple layout reduced confusion.
Unfortunately, this dungeon hardlocks players out of proceeding further to title grind; the backside of the boss door leads back to the boss room, and no other exit from the boss room exists, so after beating the boss, you must immediately end the dungeon. Having overwritten my save without thinking about it after beating the boss, that was it. Given how unusually generous this dungeon was with pre-boss fetish removal items, I'm certain I could repeat the performance in an all-titles run, but I would've had to have known that before entering the boss room. Had that been my only save, that would be that; as-is, I can't proceed without loading a pre-Dungeon 14 save. This feels like a game-breaking design flaw; every other dungeon in the game lets you keep grinding after the boss. It's a nice trick for the boss door to be cursed and force a confrontation, but if so, there really needs to be an extra path from the boss room to the starting room unlocked after beating the boss. The thematics of the dungeon were definitely a hit with me, but the unexpected hardlock limited my ability to engage with them (hopefully that gets patched soon!).
Given the ease at which I beat the dungeon, I want to say that this dungeon would be much better if most/all of the recovery items were after the boss. That might mean putting cursed items in some of the chests instead of useful ones. Instead of super-abundant healing, the thought that comes to mind are prosthetics that can be applied to girls at various levels of Amputation/Piercing, offering a variety of potential tradeoffs in exchange for their 'help'... or maybe just straightforwardly making a bad situation worse for fun, curses be like that. Alternatively, staples from previous dungeons like gags and blindfolds might show up to add additional helplessness for no good reason.
EDIT: Also, before I forget, it seemed strange that there was a max-amputation title but not a max-piercing title; this continues a trend where the later dungeons seem much stingier with titles than the earlier dungeons.
Having gone back for the Dungeon 12 title grind, and now being reasonably confident that I've found all the items (though I did check against the map posted on the devblog), final thoughts. The dungeon layout isn't that awful, it's just a bunch of cramped tunnels, made more confusing to navigate by blockages and staircase transitions. Unfortunately, it's less-detailed than some of the other dungeons; the terrain is unusually featureless, lacking the decoration and variations that give life to other layouts, which makes the cramped confines a little harder to navigate because every detail is a landmark that makes the passage more memorable. Surely there's spiderwebs, or eggsacks, or piles of dirt, or anything else at all that can be used to 'beautify' the dungeon, selling the theme better and breaking up the monotony with more detail? The cramped confines made for a lot of bad places to have enemies, and they often were in those bad places, becoming impossible to sneak by, which (combined with the combat stuff), made this a more frustrating experience than it needed to be.
Also, it took me a while to wrap my head around what was going on with the combat. Early in the dungeon, the girls really hate being impregnated with spider eggs (understandably!), and this gives them huge debuffs to both offensive stats, which compound as their bellies swell with eggs. Meanwhile, the strength of the enemies jumped up significantly from the previous two dungeons, both of which were less dangerous environments. This meant that previously-effective strategies of mass-debuffing enemy defences and hammering area attacks was generally ineffective, and I found myself struggling through brutal combats with dangerous enemies who easily had enough time to take out an unlucky girl over the course of a typical fight. I didn't have much luck attempting tanking strategies (in hindsight, they would've worked much better if I'd started off tanking, instead of waiting until everyone was pregnant!), and single-target debuffs often felt ineffective, given the larger enemy groups, made larger by newborn spawn. Even so, it felt that debuffs really were the way to go here; delay and disarm the less-concerning enemies while striking down single targets with powerful attacks from buffed attackers, instead of spreading ineffective AoEs. It also would've helped if I'd noticed the difference between eggers and webbers prior to defeating the boss, and in particular noticed how dangerous the ranged attacks from the webbers were, and how disinclined they were to do anything but use that ranged attack once any one girl was webbed. Meanwhile, while struggling with the combat and hesitant to add even more enemies to already-fraught battles, I missed the obvious intended solution. At max addiction, the girls get a ridiculously-huge damage buff from being pregnant, and become incredibly powerful. A more optimal way of playing this would've been to grind the fetish content first... a more defensive setup, prolonging fights as much as possible, resetting as needed, and Laying Eggs as soon as possible, even if it means losing fights.
Still... easily my least favourite Dungeon as it stands. I could see that changing if the dungeon was beautified a little, and the enemy move range expanded with more interesting and thematic possibilities. If the correct way to play this is supposed to be taking your time and dealing with it, it'd be nicer if the enemies wanted to take their time as well, fighting the girls with poison and debuffs and prepared defences and a sexier multi-step immobilize-and-impregnate routine instead of mostly just using scary direct attacks. As-is, repeated forced battles at a high initial threat level, chaining into compounding hits to my ability to respond to that, put me on the backfoot immediately and spoiled my enjoyment of a dungeon that wasn't actually as bad as it initially felt.
Dungeon 11 was more comical than sexy, but that's alright; it was short and sweet, a series of not-too-confusing passages going right by a large number of guarded treasure rooms. The positioning of things meant that you could easily see where you'd gotten the treasure and where you hadn't, and there weren't too many enemies that you had to fight to continue down the path (as opposed to having to fight in order to get loot, but it was possible to stealthily grab loot in many cases as well). Slowly replacing all of the party's moves with Haigure would've been more annoying if it weren't for getting Inner Strength last dungeon, and the late addition of Inner Focus was also welcome. The boss was vulnerable to magical debuffs and single-target special damage the first time... and after a second trip around to clear out a passageway I'd missed and Haigure the girls, I found that the boss was also quite manageable with the all-Haigure party, focusing Haigure buffs on Madoka to up her offensive and defensive stats while she soloed the boss with single-target Haigure. Not my favourite in either mechanics or theme, but with the excellent level design, I had nothing to complain about here.
Ugh, Dungeon 12. It was like the evil opposite of Dungeon 11; everything I liked about 11 was wrong in 12. The ero-theme was there, but wasn't presented in a very exciting way; it was like the enemies were shooting pregnancy darts instead of doing anything more erotic. This was one part "the characters automatically get pregnant in one hit" and one part "the impregnation graphic was only on screen for about a frame". If the process was more of a multi-step thing, like web-then-impreg, that'd also help. Actually birthing new enemies at the end was a neat touch, though there didn't seem to be a reaction from having done that?
As for the level design, it was an horrid twisted maze with little room to avoid enemies, lots of unavoidable fights to simply progress down the paths, and the fights were fairly brutal slugfests with real danger of casualties at all points... and of course, that same nasty path back to reset if I did take any losses. All the enemies seemed to be the same (barring the newborns), so there was no interesting variety here; just a grim slog through a cramped maze. That's very thematic for an insect nest, but it wasn't enjoyable to struggle through.
The boss, strangely, was totally anticlimactic. I'd actually lost Madoka earlier, and (unusually) decided to stumble on anyway because I'd rather die than find my way back through the mess... but somehow, I managed to get to the boss without taking another loss, so I figured I'd try it out and see what it did to prepare for a more serious return. Except Kyouko had just learned Bloodletting in the fight before the boss... and she basically soloed the boss with repeated uses of it, while Sayaka and Mami contributed a debuff each before dying / spending the rest of the fight webbed.
There may still be treasures hidden in the dungeon, and I still have to go back to get the titles on three of my girls. This is the first dungeon where I find that I don't want to, though; I'm just not having fun with this one at all. Fortunately, there's only a title for max belly size here, not max addiction, so it probably won't take too much more time to clear it... assuming that I haven't missed any items, which is a lot harder to check for here. I feel like I want a checklist for per-dungeon items, or a magical detector that tells me how much loot is still present. Probably won't go back to this one today, though; I'm going to take a break.
Hmm, so it is; reloading my post-boss save, no one is wearing straitjackets, and my inventory is full of a complete set of non-cursed straightjackets of varying strictness (everyone also has two copies of the sleep-related suggestibility traits, for some reason?). I don't remember seeing that in-play, so there may be some funkiness with save/load going on... but I'll remember to try and take the straightjackets off for my Hard Mode playthrough.
Dungeon 9 was definitely too easy. Having had a number of special attacks unlock late into Dungeon 8, but be useless due to that dungeon's meta, I tried them out here, and following up Mami's Ribbon Tie with Firewind and Lovely Barrage (and later Gun Volley and Heartfelt Barrage) made short work of most opposition. I managed to defeat the boss at party level 35 (Kyouko had just made 36), having only lost one girl at any point, and after encountering exactly zero fetish events... not counting failed bikini thefts or the boss's tentacle grab attack. Nothing even managed to land a parasite on a girl until well after defeating the boss, so the rate on that probably needs a boost; it would've been a lot harder dungeon if I was getting stat and XP debuffs prior to defeating the boss and hitting the level cap, instead of the other way around. Of course, as a beach episode... it's kind of on-theme for it to be easy? This tickles a vague thought I've had for a while; one of the major factors in how hard a dungeon is seems to be how easy it is to avoid the fights. Forced encounters with large groups of enemies to pass chokepoints makes for difficult dungeons, but more open terrain and enemy patterns that make it easier to sneak past makes dungeons quite a bit easier. That's not the only factor that matters, but it's a big one.
It'd be a QoL improvement if the mermaids were visually removed from the fight after running away, like the bombs and the tentacles are after doing their attacks. Speaking of the bombs, they didn't really seem to add much to the dungeon? They weren't dangerous enough to need to defuse (although having Mami start the encounter with String Up on a bomb mostly negated its threat), and they didn't add any fetish aspect to the dungeon. In grinding out the titles, I eventually became unhappy to see the mermaids, since they became straight up physical attackers with nothing to steal (it didn't help that they often disguised themselves as tentacles on the map)... but the bombs were never fun to encounter, especially since they often came in roadblock singletons. Considering the previous dungeon's more interesting mechanics... maybe the bombs could blow up on *one* girl, covering her with pheromones and giving her a lingering debuff that makes the other enemies more likely to target her with their more dangerous techniques?
As a final note; I decided to give the boss a second try with a fully stripped and parasitized party, just before leaving the dungeon, and it put up a real beast of a fight! Even going in with the usual full debuff stack against its attacks, the stuns from the parasites and the boss's own tentacles made it very close. If the many tentacles I fought in the process of exploring the island, flipping the switches, and opening all the chests had used their parasitic attacks more frequently than never pre-boss, I'd have had a much harder time of things.
Dungeon 10 is probably my new favourite, thematically speaking. The relentless focus of all the enemies in lowering Resistance made them comparatively gentle, and there was plenty of extra medicine drops to ensure that I could easily recover from any lost HP. Instead, it was just quickly making my way through enemies to switches and chests, while on a slippery downward slope that made their techniques more and more effective. Special Attack aoe spam remained the obvious way to go here, given the many, many forced four-enemy fights; it worked out just as well as it did in the previous Dungeon, but this one was just a lot longer. The repetitive nature of the rooms was thematically on-point, giving me real "have I been here already this time?" thoughts when checking everything. For some reason, Mami consistently picked up a lot of Suggestibility despite not being the taunt-tank; I wound up using nearly every Brain Rewirer on her to fend off the debuffs. The re-use of the grovel animation felt a little off, here; seeing the girls suddenly without all that hypno gear when they knelt was incongruous. I didn't actually lose anyone before confronting the boss, and felt that my party was still in good shape when I did face it, level-capped and ready to go. The group straightjacketing was unexpected, but I'd weakened it enough while I still had moves available to pull off a win anyway.
Interestingly, the straightjackets stayed on after the boss fight, though I couldn't find an item or trait to explain why. Though hot, this rather interfered with my ability to do anything else in the dungeon after the boss fight. Fortunately, I had plenty of Brain Melters on hand to get the title stats, and the enemies' Strip commands still had mechanical effect while straightjacketed, even if they didn't have visual effect, so I was able to get all the titles without having to reload a save. Still, if anywhere at all in the entire game needed a post-boss item to remove a fetish effect, it's this one, given the way the jackets prevent most of the other enemy commands from working correctly; it'd have been nice to have had a chance to play around with the enemies and their hypnotic commands while grinding the titles instead of just getting the right numbers down and leaving. Unusually, this boss didn't unlock an easy path to the exit after being defeated, so I needed to defeat it again in order to leave, with the whole party bound in straightjackets and unable to fight properly. Madoka's Inner Strength came in handy, allowing a narrow win anyway... but it was a very strange fight.
As a sidenote, in this dungeon, Mami learned Breaking Shot, which I'd hoped would be a good status effect. It was not. Using it on a single enemy and seeing the word stun flash by them twice in quick succession before they attacked felt particularly unfun; like they hadn't been stunned at all and the game had lied to me. Yes, I get that it'd be too effective against bosses and such (I tried it on the boss out of curiosity, and it did the same thing); but it's very genre-standard for bosses to be immune to the cheesy spells, and it'd help in making singleton fights less annoying. Since there weren't any normal enemies dangerous enough to be worth locking down, it felt like a worthless addition.
Dungeon 7 remains a pretty neat dungeon. Much like Dungeon 2, it's the sort of dungeon where once you're fully trained in the fetish, the fights are a breeze, but it's a fair bit of work to get there. Fortunately, the infinite grinding area makes that straightforward... though I explored first to make sure I didn't miss any chests while blindfolded, since it'd be a pain to look for them otherwise. The quick access paths made navigation delightfully straightforwards, once I got the hang of switching between a trained horse for transport and an unblinded girl for vision. The thing where you can freely swap cursed gear for higher level cursed gear came in handy when I found the loot chest! Once fully equipped, it was quite straightforward to max out the titles, though even then, the boss required a bit of thought and loadout reworking to deal with. Thematically, my favorite dungeon so far, and definitely improved from my first testing.
Dungeon 8 gets me into completely new territory, and was another mechanically interesting dungeon. Given the targeting of enemy moves, tanking was unreliable, and often counterproductive; there are a number of dangerous enemy moves that you don't want focused on a vulnerable target! At the same time, the severe and progressive nerfs to offensive power from the dungeon's effects forced another change in strategy. I found special attacks to be rather unreliable, and fell back on an all normal attack party. With my stats so debuffed, I found it quite workable to stack defence debuffs on the enemies and offence buffs on the girls, which gave enough of a swing to do some real damage. This included use of Madoka's Careful Aim - Quickshot combo; quite viable if she protects herself with Glitterdust first, but that's pretty slow to set up and unreliable in targeting. Fortunately, the final boss only did one type of damage, and I managed to get the necessary debuffs stacked on my second attempt... though my own team was also pretty helpless by that point, rendering the fight quite the slapfight. Fetish-wise, the humiliation aspect of this one landed better than I'd expected going in; a few more lines of dialogue for relevant events would make this even better. I also noticed the abundance of liquids rewarded by the dungeon. This felt very generous (even though I had to jump through some hoops to collect them all), but also like a bit of a missed opportunity; in a dungeon focused on the bladder mechanic, I'd expected to find drinkable liquids that interacted with that value. Instead, the obvious cursed bait was a chest full of more baby gear... which was funny, but nothing I didn't wind up accumulating from the dungeon anyways, and didn't even help with the title acquisition. The post-boss loot was also disappointing; four stacks of dungeon fetish removal is usually overkill after beating the boss, especially since it's usually more desirable to get a fetish-increasing item at this point, to help fill in title requirements for the luckier girls.
Dungeon 5 was mechanically the most interesting dungeon so far, with the chastity and plug effects forcing a different strategy. Special attacks were often rendered pretty worthless, but regular attacks could be boosted significantly by not being in chastity and not being aroused. Also, all the enemies used regular attacks, which made a tank strategy viable. Focus fire was really bad in earlier dungeons... but by now, Mami has Taunt and Ribbon Guard, and the rest of the party could spend the first round dropping physical defence buffs on her or physical damage debuffs on enemies. Of course, the boss defied this meta by exclusively using special attacks, but I could've easily retooled for that if I wasn't able to win on the first attempt. Getting there was a bit of a grind as I wanted to be sure to check all the doors for loot, but no big deal.
Dungeon 6, which I skipped in my earlier testing, was not my thing fetish-wise, though the gag was admittedly a nice touch. Aside from that, I noticed that Fat seems to be able to go above 100, despite the display capping at 100. Excessively fat girls might claim to be losing Fat every turn, but not actually going below 100, even if protected by a Taunt tank for a longish fight. The problem here is that the Insult attack scales on Fat... and though I don't have access to the raw data, it seems to keep scaling based on Fat beyond 100. So when I tried using a Collar of Confidence to make Mami the designated tank again throughout the dungeon, it worked quite well for a while... but eventually the broccoli enemies became able to one-shot her from nigh-full HP straight to zero through six stacks of Special Defence Up. Fortunately, the Fat Dissolver reduces Fat to an absolute value, which offered a solution; I didn't have further troubles after dissolving away the excess fat. I do note that the game structure led me to expect a chest or two between the boss and the exit, which was not here this time. With only a single, easily-granted title, which everyone had by the time I found and defeated the boss, there wasn't really much else to do... but the absence felt notable anyways, and got me to waste time on a longer search to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious.
(I'd ask about save storage and deletion of saves, since I'm running out at this point, but I understand that's already on the to-do list for next week)
Assuming you caught my edit regarding Dungeon 3...
Dungeon 4 felt about right, honestly. The extra bondage moves from normal enemies helped sell the theme in a way that wasn't there when I first played. It'd have been slightly nicer if there was an item that increased Mummification at the end, to help earn the title (four pairs of scissors was honestly overkill, given how what all you still need by that point is titles), but it wasn't that much of a grind. The cursed slave collar was a cute addition, but would've been nicer with an associated dialogue line.
With 1.0 out to donors, I'm replaying the whole thing from start to finish, with a fresh save. Will start on Easy and do a Hard Mode playthrough later. I just finished Dungeon 2, but I noticed a major UI bug in need of attention: in the settings menu, the Casual/Hard toggle is visible on top of all the settings, overlapping everything. It blocks the view of everything else and doesn't seem to be removable, which makes it very hard to change settings.
EDIT: this only applies after starting a new game. When loading an existing file, the toggle screen is no longer present in settings.
A more minor bug; if you somehow manage to aggro two groups of enemies at once (easy to do in the first fight of Dungeon 2, if timed correctly), you only fight one of them, but defeat both.
Balance-wise, in Dungeon 1, the shame effects seemed to randomly stop partway through? Characters who got stripped early got their Shamelessness up to a medium-high level and then just... didn't seem to get any more Shame or Shamelessness, and didn't qualify for half the titles. Notably, Sayaka shot straight up to 93 Shamelessness and just stopped; she didn't even qualify for Deep Shame, and I'm not sure if she ever had more than 30 Shame. I don't remember this happening the first time I played it, so some rebalancing since then seems to have broken the dungeon? I get that the post-boss items were intended to help fix this, and it was indeed possible to start gaining Shame again after removing Shamelessness, but I just wound up cheating in the appropriate stats afterwards, since the grind started to feel tedious way before I was anywhere near done with getting titles.
In Dungeon 2, the enemy AI is unusually good at focusing fire on your girls, taking them out rather quickly and forcing a retreat. Given the lack of revive items, this made for a lot of tedious restarts. Being able to revive even one girl would've made a big difference here; it's a very frustrating feeling to have a stack of unused healing items, three girls on full HP, and one girl at zero, and needing to go back again. This was such an issue, I never actually made it across the room without someone fainting until I'd hit the level cap and gotten the party mostly skilled up.
EDIT: In contrast, Dungeon 3 was far too easy. I was able to open all the boxes and defeat the boss without losing a single girl. It took notably longer to grind up enough cursed jewelry to get everyone fully outfitted, of course. The Nose Ring and Clit Piercing did serious work in keeping Sayaka and Kyouko held back, requiring some extra grinding to get them up to cap, but it wasn't nearly as annoying as the focus fire in Dungeon 2.
While playing, I kept saves before entering each dungeon, so I was able to go back and try dungeon 3 with an appropriate save. The animal-themed moves are neat, and definitely help flavour the playthough, while the other cursed items are now inconvenient enough to actually care about instead of completely ignorable. The stuns from the Choker seemed to proc more frequently than I'd have expected, and the Blinders were annoying enough to make it worth swapping up my team order to deal with the vision issue (this is a good thing, provided that everyone isn't blind).
Moved right on to dungeon 7 after that (with my latest save), skipping 6. It was... probably much too easy, actually? Everything here gives stat boosts instead of penalties, but instead of it being the case that you needed to get use the fetish mechanics and get mostly-trained to easily handle the boss, I explored around, opened a few boxes, found my way to the boss, and defeated them like two levels below cap, while most of my party was less than half-equipped with pony gear, despite a couple of hand-me-downs.
Moving on to maxing out the titles here was a real chore. I had to go considerably out of my way to get loaded up with pony gear (I basically loaded my group up with defense buffs and offense debuffs, applied them all, then sat around waiting to get kitted out), and getting to max grace actually required me to abuse oats and resets (after beating the map and getting fully kitted out with everyone, I had a combined total of 30 grace across the party). Then, actually getting the titles just required... lots and lots of walking. Which, okay, sure; thematic, but the implementation wasn't great. I think an infinitely-repeating area like in dungeon 3 would work well here; a pony training area with a nice long road whose end becomes its beginning (letting you walk in a straight line as long as you need to), and passive enemy groups off to the side, positioned so that they won't bother you if you're walking the line like a good pony, but you can fight them repeatedly for training and gear if you like. It might also help to have *some* pony gear just lying around in chests, to help get everyone fully equipped; there's a lot of items required across four characters, so every little bit helps.
Note that I didn't even run into the blinders/blindfold until I'd beaten the boss and sat down to grind out full pony gear, so I didn't get to experience the maze-like passages while impaired. Having missed that experience was probably for the best, I'd have found trying to explore while blindfolded rather annoying; it might be worthwhile to put in an item somewhere that removes eye-encumbering items from one person, in case anyone else is similarly bothered by the conflict between exploration and completionism.
Became aware of this from your post on 4chan looking for feedback. I just played through the first five dungeons (on 0.6), and wound up writing more than would fit there, so posting here instead.
Starting with mechanical notes...
I didn't figure out that healing items were reusable until the second dungeon; it would've saved me some time if that'd been made more clear. That said, especially in later dungeons, I often found myself wishing there was a revive item; sometimes enemies randomly focus down one of your characters quickly, and it's annoying having to reset despite having plenty of other healing items because there's no other way to get them back up.
Generally, it felt like there weren't enough healing items to casually clear floors, so it was always important to be strategic about which fights I took. At the same time, though, that lack of healing items inspired me to completionist exploration; I wanted to be very careful to check everywhere for chests to make sure that I wasn't missing any healing items. This was more irritating on the more confusing dungeons; worst offender was the mummification dungeon, whose 3D maze layout made it a lot harder to figure out where I'd finished checking and where I still needed to go.
Debuff effects often felt a lot stronger than buff effects. Mami's Ribbon Tie made such an amazing combination with Madoka's Lovely Barrage that I rearranged the party to put them in first and second, which remained a great opener against large enemy groups until the hardier enemies in the fifth dungeon became tough enough to ignore most of that damage. Similarly, in boss fights, it almost always seemed like the right call to debuff a boss instead of buffing one character, since the boss would be doing its thing every turn, and messing with its ability to do that was always fantastic. It helped that later debuffs often combined with attacks, so it didn't even feel like I was wasting a turn to put the debuff down.
Unfortunately, many buffs often felt questionably-useful. I eventually found Parry Stance necessary in the fifth dungeon, to enable attack-focused characters with attack debuffs to contribute much at all, but it wasn't exciting; I'd hoped for counterattacks when I read the name, and was disappointed when that wasn't the case. Guardian Stance was a big enough swing that I did wind up using it often, especially since my Sayaka lagged far behind the party on offensive moves; the fact that it applied such a big buff to the target without stacking its debuff on Sayaka made it feel worth her time. The idea of Madoka's Glitterdust was neat, being a unique effect instead of another stat mod, but in practice it often felt like I'd rather do something else, and I eventually traded it out. I was quite happy with Kyouko's Spearchain in most circumstances, combining decent damage with a decent defensive buff always felt like a reasonable move. I would've liked to see more buff combos like that, or AoE buffs.
As a map explorer, I was generally disappointed by the lack of equipment, up until the Cursed Loot dungeon. Then I was disappointed again by the way you didn't get to take any of the good stuff with you afterwards.
Mechanics aside, talking about fetish content...
Enemy art was generally uninspiring. This is an HRPG, adding naughty enemy sprites would go a long way towards selling the mood.
The first dungeon was mostly kinda boring. The characters got stripped naked pretty quickly... and that was basically it, aside from the grovelling from the boss's attack. Unless something is going to take advantage of their nudity, being mostly naked is actually more interesting than being completely naked. Instead of the bulky and boring rags, I'd have liked to see an item that restored just their underwear, since seeing them desperately try to preserve the last shreds of their modesty would've been more interesting than them just being totally naked with no way to solve it.
The second dungeon was much better supported, with the many items in the first room to apply or remove the corsets and heels. Instead of just having them quickly forced into the highest heels and tightest corsets, I'd actively cut away any items that were too debilitating, and instead try to keep everyone wearing gear that they were just slightly uncomfortable with to maximize both training and combat power. It was a neat concept, and didn't wear out its welcome, since the enemies were effectively helpless against fully-trained characters.
As a cursed item enjoyer, the third dungeon was incredibly disappointing. There could've been a lot more done with the items in question (see literally any of /d/'s cursed item threads for ideas), and instead it was just minor stat debuffs. Combine this with not even being able to keep any of the actually-good equipment for later, and I wound up not enjoying this one as much as I thought I would. That said, I see you're already on this one and going in a petplay-focused direction; I look forward to seeing what comes of that.
The fourth dungeon was mostly just a long boring slog. Without any other interesting things happening to the characters when they're wrapped up, it was just... kinda silly? The bondage sarcophagus move used by the final boss was a little neat, but mostly this place involved wandering around a maze searching it for loot while heavily debuffed. The lack of interesting ways to respond to the progressing mummification other than collect the items that let you opt out of it, and general lack of things that exploit your bound state made this easily my least favorite dungeon.
The fifth dungeon had some neat concepts, but felt underdeveloped. Sure, I managed to find the stuff to shrink futa cocks and break out of chastity early on, but the debuffs didn't feel significant enough to force me to use it, and the training duration to get the titles was long enough that by the time I was ready to consider breaking out, I was basically just stalling before the boss fight. Worse consequences for being maximum horny and unable to masturbate while having the biggest dick crammed into the tiniest cage would've sold this harder. I also would've appreciated larger / growing plugs and an anal training progression instead of just waiting for a long time while plugged; 1000 steps was so much that I wound up walking back and forth in a long hallway for a while to get it done.
I didn't play the sixth dungeon, since it was the last dungeon when I played, and feeding and weight gain isn't my thing (even if the weight is only going to tits and ass).
Generally, I was a little disappointed at the lack of lasting fetish-related consequences to the dungeons besides the titles. For example, it'd be amazing if completing training in corsets and heels unlocked alternative outfits that, or if some piercings from the cursed dungeon could be worn afterwards (either case probably being sidegrades instead of upgrades, allowing more customization of the party). That said, I understand that there's only so much art you can make, and there are possible inclusions that'd make later expansions more complicated.
Resets ought to give a prestige currency that can be spent on prestige upgrades, instead of being a one reset per upgrade thing. Later in the game, your ability to gain prestige currency greatly outstrips your ability to spend it, so you get stuck in a reset loop.
Also, as mentioned, data softening is an anti-upgrade. It doesn't help you do anything except prestige faster, and down that road, you ultimately hit a point where your progression is hard-capped by the maximum rate that new blocks appear. It'd be worthwhile if it reduced the strength of blocks without reducing their reward; as-is, it's so bad that taking more than a couple of levels of it requires you to reset your game.
I seem to be having the same issue that RobotLord10 was.
On Windows 10; tried with the standard, Java, and win32 zip files; none worked. Nothing happens at all after double-clicking the exe (or the Java executable). Attempting to run from the command prompt, as suggested, returns no message whatsoever.
I also attempted to install it through the itch app (both standard and win32). When launching through that, clicking the launch button, and the 'play now' button in itch's mini-launcher, I briefly see 'running' in place of the launch button... for less than a second. Then it goes back to showing the launch button, as though nothing had happened.
Itch didn't return an error message during this process, and no log files were apparently generated in the unzipped mewnbase directories. However, the view logs function in itch did give me some errors; have a pastebin of the log: http://pastebin.com/j8Yeg2ye
Hope that helps!
EDIT: Nevermind, figured it out, and got the game to run. As the log file implied, it was a driver issue. The short version was that I needed to update my graphics driver. The long version is that I needed to do that because Windows 10 likes to randomly and silently downgrade your graphics driver during its update process... and the way it does that incidentally disables NVIDIA's own driver update app. This is an ongoing, and recurring Windows 10 issue, though I may have figured out how to stop it from doing that, this time.
That said, it'd have helped me troubleshoot if your game were able to notice the driver issue and give me an error message upfront, instead of dying quietly.