Recent reviews by Kujar3

We get plenty of "simulator" games on the market. And this could be just one of many but it stands out in the crowd a bit more than the others and does a lot of things right, even in its early access state.
A lot of these games are "just a shop, but now with different items" in one way or another. Managing stock, upgrading your place to have more space, setting prices, maning the register... It's all here too, on its own like this, it wouldn't be anything much special unless you liked the theme, but it plays into this theme of "trading cards" a lot more and that's what makes it so great.

So what do you get here?
Besides the obvious and expected, the thing that got me the most hooked on this game is opening the packs of cards you're selling yourself. If you, at any point felt like maybe grabbing that pack of MTG cards or Pokemon cards, or maybe you're already a hobbyist collector or maybe going big time already, this game just kind of scratches that itch very well. Each pack you open there's a chance to get that big hit, the chase cards, you get your collection binders, every pull you know right away what market value the card has and then later, you can sell those cards for profit or more recently also trade them with your customers, you can buy individual cards from customers too and slowly work towards having the full set!
And there's a lot to collect, each card essentially has 12 variants and two sets of them which makes the total to 24, ranging from the base card to the full art foil version increasing in rarity with each step. And then you have the "secret rares" in the form of "Ghost cards" where the foil version of those are the most expensive cards in the game. It's the whole shabang of card collecting except it doesn'tcost you any money here. You'll be entertained for many hours just with this system alone if this is your cup of coffee.
You can also set up play tables in your shop where customers will come in and play, generating some passive income, they will also use different accessories depending on which license you already unlocked, you'll spot them using the play mats you're selling, the deck boxes or sit there with a comic book as well, it's a nice detail and really makes the game feel alive.

At first you're very busy in your shop, you have to keeps shelves nice and restocked while taking care of the line of people waiting for checkout, if you're selling single cards that's another shelf to keep an eye on, but as you get employees to take care of some of this for you, you'll start having more time for other things, like opening packs! Early game I found myself just opening a whole box of boosters after closing time, later on I would open as much as I could through the whole day as the shop ran itself, now with the addition of customer trading, you can't quite fully focus on just pack opening anymore, unless you want to ignore that mechanic but that'd be a bit of a waste and at least you have something else to do as well.

And there's more coming! Orginizing proper tournaments, card grading and even playable TCG, it's all planned and pretty exciting, even if the TCG turns out to be nothing special, it could be another thing to get yourself lost in, adding more value for what you pay for. This is a solo dev endeavor and what's already here is impressive, I am looking forward to the future of this title.

Now not everything is sunshine and rainbows and as this is still Early Access, things will improve but they ares till worth mentioning because this is what you get if you buy the game now.
No store decorations are a bit of a bummer, even just posters would at least allow for some personalisation, but you get absolutely nothing, no pots with flowers, no posters, no extra lights.
The store feels small sometimes, you want to add more playtables but there's nowhere to fit them, gotta find the space for those tables to sell singles on too, want to add a second checkout but where do I even place it, storage racks? As you get to the stage of having every shop expansion open, you can make do just fine but even then I feel like I could make use of more space. I am hoping that there will be a shop expansion later on or even a second floor.
Early game progresses very fast and if you want to keep everythig stocked so you don't see customers complayning "where's XYZ" you will just not be able to, you can't make money fast enough to unlock everything right away.
There's not that much to do in late-game now, the shop runs itself, at the end of the day you buy missing stock and during the day you're opening card packs and trading with people who want to trade. WIth the addition of trading there's at least a little more now and you get new cards more often so this part of the game already improved but there could still be a bit more.
Late game is also not quite finished yet, there's an achievement to get store level 100, but the EXP requirement post I want to say 60 or 70 is starting to get quite high. Higher level items grant you more EXP if you sell them but you run out of those by level 65~ you essentially have everything unlocked besides some comic books and figures and it becomes a slog. More is coming in future update but if you're gunning for 100% completion now, prepare a lot of hours, I am at 83 hours in and level 72 and it will only get slower from here.

In conclusion
Very well themed sim game and the title plays into it really well bringing some exciting and fun mechanics into the mix, early game is a blast, you're very busy running the shop and opening card packs is exciting but towards the late game, it becomes a bit of a slog and the only thing keeping you running is chasing cards for collection and at that point it becomes more of a "TCG collector simulator" and if it was just that, the game would be quite lacking.
What you get now as a whole package is quite solid and a lot of fun with the future of the game looking quite good, you will not regret grabbing this if you are even a little bit interested in TCG as a whole. Many things can also be solved with mods if you feel like playing around with that, I play the game free of mods so the review is from this perspective.

Inflate your achievement count for just 1€ 10/10

I knew what I was getting into way before purchasing this game, I played this on mobile before, really having it running on an emulator most of the time but stopped playing when the news broke out that it would eventually find its way as a proper PC port on Steam.

What can you expect? Glorified screen saver really, as far as idle games go, this one takes it to the next level, your inputs are very minimal and progress is super slow. Leveling up doesn't feel impactful level from level, you just see gradual slow improvements. You find the best place for your current power level to grind at and your inputs for the next XX hours will just be selling stuff from your full inventory bag and distributing skill points in your skill tree. That's about it, the rest is a mindless grind the game takes care of by itself. Which to me is not a bad thing, I love mindlessly grinding, even when it requires my full focus. This just takes that satisfaction of slowly pushing limits into an idle experience. What could be a turnoff for some is that there's 0 actual offline progress, if you close the game, you won't earn a single EXP point until you turn it back on and have the game actually running. I don't think the devs will budge on this, this was discussed all the time on their Discord already way back in the early days when this was just a mobile game.

The art is really good, it's all hand drawn and there's some story sprinkled around here too to follow, just nothing to really write home about.
Game is not going to provide you with a thrilling experience, it's the definition of a slow burn but if you like the idea of something running in the background as you're working on something else on your PC, this will be it. Don't go into it expecting much, if you plan to actively play something, even cookie clicker will provide you with more action, look at Idle Slayer instead where active play means a lot. This is really more of a set it and forget it kind of experience. And I like it a lot.

One game took off like a storm, surprising with its simple yet addictive gameplay, making waves for its absurdly low price and paving the way for other developers to try and take a swing at this action rogulike genre defining game that was Vampire Survivors. Many games came out since, each trying something different, varying in many aspects.
Here comes Holocure, just in case you thought Vampire Survivors was too expensive, how does free, with no strings attached sound?

A passion project
That's how you can label this game. Developers will turn down any way to support this project just to keep it away from unnecessary expectations and have this be purely made out of appreciation and passion for the entertainment company the game borrows from in every aspect - Hololive. For those unfamiliar, Hololive is a v-tuber company, easily the largest one, playing heavily into the "idol" scene with each talent in the group having at least one original song. They host live performances that sell out theaters and while being based in Japan, they made waves across the globe, now having multiple generations of English and Indonesian talents. You can always catch multiple of them live, streaming on youtube, playing games, singing karaoke or getting up to anything standard streamers get up to really. The game is full to the brim with references that add to the enjoyement of it for those who are "in the know" but don't detract from enjoyement for those who just want to play a fun game without having to study every detail. It is very much a game made by the fans, for the fans but even if you are not interested about what's behind this game, you can still very well enjoy the whole thing.

How does it play
In essence, you can say this is a "twin stick shooter" and you wouldn't be far from the truth. Hoards of enemies spawn from every corner of the map and your job is to not die, defeat them, collect experience, upgrade your arsenal and hopefully survive till the end.
Every level up gives you a choice of 4 upgrades, these can be weapons, items or passive skills. Once you level up a compatible pair of two weapons to their max level, you can combine them, making a super weapon.
Along the way you'll be confronted by bosses and two big bosses at minute 10 and 20.
May not sound like a lot on paper but it's really addicting, fast paced and really just heaps of fun to play.

All the variety
There are so many characters to unlock and chose from, each playing differently, each of them having their own special passive skills and a different starting weapon. There are so many possible builds not only from the weapons you chose but also the stickers you collect, which give you random bonuses and do different things to alter your gameplay a little. There's a playstyle for anyone in here, it's really astonishing what they were able to jam into this game so far and we're not even finished. There are still so many characters missing in the roster and new hololive generations are being introduced pretty much yearly in each division. Even if there's so much now, there's still a whole lot more to look forward to.

Difficulty
This is without a doubt one of the less difficult games of this type to get into and play. If you have some experience with these in the past, you may be left wanting for something, that will kick your butt more. But there are plenty of challenges to look forward to. Later stages can definitely be overwhelming and if you want to spice things up, there are "downgrades" to activate to make it feel really unforgiving. Don't like having 6 weapons? Makes the game too easy? That's fine, you can reduce that all the way to just having your starter weapon. Feel like strenghtening the enemies a bit? Sure, they got you. Feeling like the various ugrades you collected/unlocked for your characters are making the game into a snoozefest? Disable them. You can really make this as easy or as hard as you want.
Competing on endless mode with proper leaderboards will definitely have you sweating as you approach minute 30 and try to hold out for as long as possible before the inevitable death comes.
So while the game can appear to be on the easier side to start with, it isn't afraid to throw punches if you let it. Still expect a way more relaxing type of this game with Holocure.

The extras
With the steam release came Holohouse. Fancy fishing? Comes in the form of a sort of rhythm game and makes grinding for coins very relaxing and stress free. This place also allows you to cook some food which will give you a buff on your next game. How about decorating your own house? Yeah that's here too. It's really a place to relax and people who enjoy games like animal crossing or the like where there are no stakes, no stress, just wind down and enjoy life a little. This area will be expanded in the future, there's a teased casino at the bottom of this map.

Conclusion
Lovely artstyle, catchy music, pretty much a must play for any Hololive enjoyer and something worth a look for anyone who enjoys these types of games. It's free, nothing to lose except for countless of hours you'll spend in this game. This is really a solid experience that I wouldn't mind paying for or even supporting on the side if it was an option. Alas, all I can really do is spread the word as the best reward the devs seem to need is people enjoying what they created.
Give this a spin to see for yourself.

Let's face it
Could this have been part of the premium eddition? Sure
Should this have been part of it? Debatable.

We already got everything that was promissed we'd get in the premium eddition, nobody is entitled to ask for more, you got what you payed for with ralley adventure.
Recently, we're getting a lot of new to forza cars for free with each monthly update, playground games have been doing a great job lately. We're still getting new free cars this month alongside the biggest monthly update to date. I am more than happy to support the further development of the game if they keep this momentum up with buying a car pack here and there.

I am especially excited for the Pagani Huayra R, this beast of a car sounds like a an F1 car and the team really did the sound justice, I am basically buying this just for that car alone. Good stuff

If you have at any point seen Food Wars, imagine that but kind of on its own head.
However if you didn’t see a single episode of this Legendary anime, here’s how it goes. Character cooks a really amazing dish -> a judge eats the dish -> if the dish was 10/10, the judges clothes come ripping and flying off. This anime gave the term “food p*rn” a whole new meaning. Now this game is kind of like that, only the one who’s losing their clothes is the cook that did the worst job. It is kind of like Strip Poker only with vegetables, knives, spices and pastry. Honestly just another Tuesday in the Japanese Anime world.

Gameplay
Let’s actually look at the game and dissect what it offers and ask if it’s any good.
At its core, this is a rhythm game consisting of 22 different songs with each having 3 different difficulties to choose from. You don’t really pick a song to play, rather you pick a girl to play against, each girl has her own “theme song” that will play and her own menu that will be cooked. You need to press 6 (up to 8 on hard) different buttons that scroll from right to left on a line, similar to games like Taiko. Each song is sort of split into 3 sections as you have two short intermissions to show you how you did. If you did good, you’ll be rewarded by tearing a piece of clothing on your opponent. If you did bad, the same happens to you. Honestly the more you look at this it looks like a win-win situation but I digress. If you do well enough to fully complete a heart, you’ll be able to strip them from everything they’ve got and also get a special scene where the girl at the very end is presented on a plate as food, complete with chocolate and whipped cream.
I am happy to say that I did not experience any motion sickness as someone who suffers from it with fast moving notes in Taiko-like games (or Mania like games, just really anything where there are fast moving objects you need to semi-focus on) and that’s largely due to the fact that the notes don’t really move that fast even on the fastest song. This can be a negative to those, who can’t handle dense note presentation as seasoned Rhythm players know, faster notes are not just making the game “harder”, it kind of makes it easier by lowering the density of notes you see at any given time. There's no way to speed this up so that might be a kicker for some people. As for the difficulties, everyone should find one that fits them here. I play Rhythm games recreationally, I found easy to be way too simple, normal hit just right on most songs and hard, while I could see the hardest difficulty to be even harder, still providing enough of a challenge if you want to try for perfect scores. This is not a hardcore rhythm game, it’s clearly way more of a casual game, which is not a bad thing, not everything has to have me sweating.

Music
There’s enough variety for everyone to find a couple favourites, I don’t love every single song but I didn’t hate any either. For a fully original soundtrack, it’s really quite good. If music is a deciding factor for you, you can easily look up the OST on youtube and just skim through it to see if it would be to your liking at all. I would maybe just like to see more music if nothing else, but given they went with the “each character is a song” approach, I can accept this, it just kind of repeats a lot if you’re trying to finish every storyline.

Story
Every character has a unique story to tell, they’re all fairly short and are presented in a Visual Novel kind of style, plus you get a nice key art for every character you finish the storyline with. The premise is the “Super Dish cook-off” that’s happening in town, with the main prize being a “secret ninja art scroll” that will grant its owner any wish, it’s like competing for a discount Genie. Every character has a different reason to enter the competition and the vast majority doesn’t even care for the scroll, which was a bit of a letdown I feel. Those who did want something out of the scroll happened to be my favourites out of the bunch. Either way, each story is ridiculous in its own way, it’s good comedy, like who enters the competition to win the scroll in order to wish to “be able to buy a refrigerator” for your room, only to realise in the end that you’re now missing a microwave in order to live the perfect “shut-in” life. 22 similar stories to go through, short and sweet, mostly consisting of just playing the rhythm game. You will have to go through 6 songs in each story on the difficulty you select at the beginning. I did all of it on Normal as I didn’t want to get stuck on songs where Hard would be a bit too rough, which worked out just fine.

Graphics
This game originally came out on the PS Vita, it’s also 9 years old at this point so you can’t expect miracles out of it, however the models are quite nice, they clearly had higher poly versions saved. The only thing that really looks off is the underwear, on a PC display you can clearly see the quality being very low, you could almost count the pixels, destroying the “immersion” a bit. As for some other notes, game will only run on up to 60 fps, not the biggest of deals, but I would really like to see at least 120, thankfully as I said earlier, the notes don’t move nearly fast enough for this to be a big issue, 60fps is plenty playable, but the game would feel better on higher refresh rate.

Other modes
There’s no way to alter the core gameplay, what you get is what you get. No adjustable note speed, no extra difficulty settings. You chose out of 3 modes to play. Story, Arcade or Free Mode. Story has 6 stages with Visual Novel-like sequences in between. Arcade is Story mode without the story part, 6 stages in quick succession. And free Mode as the name suggests is a simple pick and play, single song and done. There’s also the dressing room where you can put all kinds of clothes on every character, including a choice of underwear and accessories. Once you save their appearance they also appear like that when you play against them. In the dressing room you can also “play” with each character only most of them don't really appreciate the harassment.

In the end
This is a really fun Rhythm Game, albeit probably the most distracting one, that will provide you with a great experience whether you have never played a rhythm game before or you’re a seasoned veteran. If you dislike pesky “godray” censorship, there's a way to remove this completely, simple model swap mod, isn’t it great to have a choice on PC? That’s why I didn't mention anything about censorship in the review as you can bypass it. Game is not very costly and if you manage to grab it on a sale, even better. I will leave you with a simple video that I quickly put together showcasing how the three difficulties differ on two songs. One faster, the other slower and you’ll be able to see that even the seemingly slow song can get quite hectic to play on Hard. Plus it gives you a chance to listen to some of my favourite songs from the selection. Bon Appétit!

If I could give this a neutral review, I would but given I have to chose between "yes I recommend" and "no I do not recommend", having experienced what I just experienced, I can't in good conscience give it the thumbs up. But it's not all bad so let me break it down.

Gameplay
It's a third person shooter, from a cast of 5 characters you can form a team of three. While you play you can freely switch between the three characters you selected, each one having two different active skills tho they're all a variation of a melee attack and a grenade throw. In-game you can take cover behind objects, dodge roll, dash in a form of a sprint button and a stamina bar and of course shoot the enemies.
You're always following a simple objective like run here, kill enemies, kill boss.
Game is split up into 4 chapters including 4 stages each + hard version of each stage. Each stage is pretty short, you'll only spend a couple of minutes in them.
While you're killing enemies you pick up resources in the form of currency, sometimes equipment and after each boss you're guaranteed a couple of equipment drops. If you manage to complete the challenges in each stage, like "have no one die" and "have at least 1 character type in your roster" you also get to collect extra rewards for completing those. You spend this currency on leveling up your characters and the equipment you pick up, you can also buy some equipment for it in the shop tho I found this feature pretty useless.

Now that all sounds fine but:
You never need to swap a character, not really. You pick the one that has the most powerful weapon and you just complete the whole stage with that one.
Your melee skill is pretty useless, you get to use it safely against one type of enemy in the third chapter and even then you'd rather keep a distance. While the only other enemy that charges towards you, that also appears in all the chapters is a robotic spider type enemy that happens to explode on death, if you're close, you get hurt...
Your starting weapons suck, you have a machine gun that's shooting with the spread of a shotgun, the bullets are flying everywhere around your crosshair but in the center, quite a frustrating experience, it doesn't matter if your aim is good, the enemies barely move anyway, you will still play in the style of "pray and spray" at least til you get better weapons with larger bullets or you just use the sniper once you unlock the sniper character where aim is more reliable.
As for taking cover, while you can, I didn't have to at any point in the game, kind of a useless feature.
Same for dodge rolls really besides maybe one boss encounter.

So with all that, the game kind of boils down to running short stages, killing 4 enemies in this room, running to the next, killing 6 here, a bit of backtracking, killing a few more enemies in newly unlocked room and finally killing a usually very easy boss, collecting your loot and moving to the next. All on one character, despite having access to 3 at a time and barely ever utilizing all the different actions you have at your disposal. It's not horrible, but not good either.

Graphics/looks
Honestly the game looks nice, characters are vibrant and the 4 different tilesets you'll walk through are really pretty. Lighting is great, real time reflections look nice either on shiny surfaces or on puddles on the ground. The game suffers from texture pop-in in some areas, especially visible in the last chapter since it plays out in a fairly large open space, and on bosses, that spawn as a "grey model" and shortly pops their textures into existence.
The few cutscenes that are presented show some real shoddy animations, in one of the scenes there's meant to be an injection of some serum shown, one character injecting another, but the needle never even makes a contact with the skin, not by a long shot. Anything that the characters do that isn't just running or shooting looks very low-budget and to be fair, this game is pretty low-budget anyway so no real surprise there.
In the last Chapter you can spot some partially flying objects above ground level. All that was required was to tilt the axis of the object a little but instead some of them were just thrown on the map, making the back wheels of a car stand on the ground but the front wheels levitating above ground... Part of a rock pile sitting on ground and part of it floating above, you get the idea. These issues are not prevalent but they're there, if you don't let yourself be too distracted by your characters backside, you'll notice.

Music/VA
When there's music playing, it's really good, I quite like the OST, there's just a bit of a problem. The music tends to be over-dramatic. Most of the songs I would expect to hear in some other games towards the end of the game, where the stakes are high and you're marching through some epic setpiece to really let you feel the tension. In this game? That same music plays while you're battling 4 robots that are having a real hard time landing a single shot on you. It's kind of out of place.
As for the VA, well it's there, that's much better than some other games with similar budget constraints, but don't expect a stellar performance, there probably wasn't much in the way of VA direction. And there's this really weird sounding voice after you finish each stage, it's meant to be celebratory kind of thing but it sounds like the sound file is really damn low bit rate, sounds crunchy.

Story
Lol what?
There is some story happening here, something about AI going rogue and taking over the world, where have you ever heard this one before. But it's really not worth paying attention to as it doesn't really have any conclusion at all, there are few short cutscenes in the game trying to get some narrative across but it's pretty uninteresting and with how it ended, I can only imagine they're setting up for another sequel.

the H-content
Be honest, this is probably why you're thinking of getting the game. The characters are certainly quite the eye candy, each sporting some high caliber balistics. For each one you can also unlock various costumes that 100% don't fit into a battle scenario but who cares, here to look at some curves. While there's no real H-content to be had in the actual gameplay, your clothes don't even get torn with damage, if you install the free DLC, you can unlock a different feature called "scenes". There's a couple rooms you can enter, each having a different set of characters in. In these rooms you can "interact" with them and unlock special animations that you can then play at will. You get a free roaming camera so that you can look where you want in detail. The animations themselves are just OK, for each action it's one animation on a loop for a while before you can "finish" and get another one for that. It's not bad but nothing ground breaking or interactive in any way, pretty much just an animations viewer. The characters here wear whichever costume you got them to wear for the actual game and you can also strip each piece of clothing independently, which is a nice touch, but nothing I have not seen before either. If this is what you get the game for, it's servicable at the very least.

Other issues part of the review cut due to character limit. [i.imgur.com]

Conclusion
The game is an effort of a likely very small studio, it's very niche, there are not many games like this so if you want something like it, this is not the worst thing you could buy. If you're not a degenerate for whom playing as an anime girl in skimpy clothes is enough to justify buying a game, there's probably nothing here for you, unless you like Janky, yet still perfectly playable games. Might be worth the laughs if you see this on a deep discount.

I keep getting asked by people on my friend list what I think about the game, so I'll drop a pre-emptive review/thoughts about the game so far.

The world
I could gush about this forever. The world is so well crafted and there was so much love put into it, it's kind of absurd. You start off in the castle, it's bloody massive, very faithful to the template you know, it's clear they tried their best to do a 1:1 replica. Walking through the halls and rooms in ecstatic, never did I feel that exploration is in any way forced, I was encouraged to explore and I have yet to properly utilize fast travel, it just doesn't get old and I still keep bumping into corridors that eluded me, still finding new things. And that's JUST the castle, the moment you look past the castle and take in the sheer scope of the world, it is possitively jaw dropping. The world is ginormous and the developers found clever things to sprinkle everywhere you go. Every now and then you bump into a small village out there, each one is different and again, very detailed and even tho they keep the same aesthetic, it never felt like exploring more of the same. It is honestly kind of overwhelming how much there is to find and play around with, this is a real work of art that even if you do not fancy the world of Harry Potter, should give you plenty of enjoyement to travel through.

Gameplay
I jumped in on Hard difficulty as I was seeking some challenge out of this, however not much challenge is really provided. I keep being capped on my healing potions, rarely having to reach out for them. There are moments that test you certainly, large group of enemies are fun to tackle and the higher difficulty does not allow you to make many mistakes. Combat is satisfying, you generally play with a selection of 4 main spells you chose, from what you have learned, but you're not limited to them. You get up to 4 spell tabs for a total of 16 spells at the ready that you can switch between during combat at will. You'll learn combos of spells that work well together and swinging your wand around will feel really good. Enemies attack back with attacks you can protect against and ones you can only dodge, always visually apparent by a different colored circle around your head, it's a simple nuance but you'll trip up here and there, game doesn't make you feel invincible. Enemy variety could be larger, but it's not absolutely terrible, what's a bit of a shame is that you rarely battle more than 1 enemy type at the same time, maybe that's something that will be happening more later on, I can imagine that could spice up combat a bit. Every enemy type has some kind of weakness for you to discover and you'll be keeping mental notes.
Beyond your spell selection, there is not really much else you can do to build your character differently, all gear slots are basically stat sticks that you can eventually augment a bit for specific situations but I feel like it's nothing too significant. Still they made the best out of what they had, maybe gearing being more casual was the goal here.

Story and questing
The story is intriguing but nothing ground breaking, so far it stands on its own pretty well, without spoiling as this is in the opening scenes, you learn that your character can see traces of ancient magic which leads you on a path to pursue this calling, but there's a faction of goblins and their leader who are after the same thing, the knowledge of great magic that's only rumored to exist, very few people in the past knew of its existence and could wield it. The game presents sense of urgency while also intentionally slowing you down, but you can argue it is doing so for you to slowly master this magic and uncover the whole truth so I give it a pass.
As for sidequesting, you have the usual fetch quests most of the time, that are made interesting by the possibilities a world like this can present. I never felt annoyed doing a side quest that was simply "deliver" or "find and bring" as it pointed me to places to discover, this is very much carried by the setting and the amazing world.
Some side quests are more convoluted and eventually lead you to what could be described as collectible chains. The game slowly introduces collectibles and series of puzzles for you to complete through side quests and it kind of feels natural. The only time I wasn't happy with this was when the unlocking spell "alohomora" was locked behind one of those, multiple tiers of it even, as someone who wants to unlock every door, I felt forced to go on collectible hunting but in the end, again, I was happy doing so as it led me places... Did I mention exploration is fun yet?

other systems
Flying! My god, getting your first broom and taking to the skies feels surreal. You could fast travel, sure, but why would you when you can fly? Game places very few restrictions on where you can and can't fly, practically the whole world is traversable on a mount, it's amazing.
Room of Requirement. If you like creating your own space or ever found yourself lost in building a house in The Sims, this will be right up your alley, everything is customizable and by exploring you will find more items to place down,, but this feature got overshadowed for me by taking care of your own beasts. I damn nearly cried grooming and feeding the creatures, it's so adorable, I could spend hours just watching them in the space you get for them, this is my single most favorite feature.
Beast catching. You have to catch your beasts so better go out there hunting, many types of beasts to catch and bring home out there in the world. Some are easy to catch, some harder, always having to find the best approach, it's honestly fun.

Missing this
Reputation system, honestly, the game allows you to cast unforgivable curses and nobody seems to care you do so. You can fling avada kedavra next to dozens of witnesses and most you may get is a couple of comments. I wish there were some drawbacks, if not in "reputation" then at least visually, think Mass Effect 2 where Shepard would look more scarred the more evil you'd be. I'd take anything.
Points system, it's Hogwards, part of it is winning points for your house and while during some quests you get the "points to *your house here*" comment, it isn't reflected anywhere. There's virtually no rivalry between the houses as a result.
Quidditch, please... The game comes up with an excuse to not have it but man, what a shame.
And lastly, I would like to see some deeper relationship feature, building friendship with some important characters, outside of main quests. Doing things for them and maybe being able to take them with you on your exploratory adventures. When I think Harry Potter, I also think of the friendship the main group had going for them, it sometimes feels a bit lonely in this giant world.

The bad
Performance is rocky, the game drops frames unexplainably, in cutscenes and in a few areas, this is something that can be fixed with patches so hopefully it'll improve.
Voice pitch? Don't even bother, leave it on the default spot when creating your character. It makes your voice robotic, echoey and just plain weird.
And lastly... Why in the seven hells in a game with 4 houses you think it's enough to give players 3 character slots, at least give the damn 4. Been resolved, you now get 10 character slots.

Conclusion
This game makes me feel like a kid again, I don't remember the last time I was this happy and eager to explore a world, this is coming from someone who grew up on HP, this is all practically a wet dream made real. I am overjoyed the be part of all this and despite knowing this could be a much better game, both improved in what it offers and in some of the glaring issue it has, I can overlook it because so much of this game has been crafted with a lot of love. Bravo, loving every second of it.

Demon Queen Melissa is a weird recommendation for the general public given the nature of the game. But these kinds of games are well beloved for the niche community of Eroge RPG enjoyers and this one is practically a classic. It took a while for this one to debut on Steam but given the nature of the game, they had to remove a ton of stuff and make it a downloadable patch from their site. With that said, if you want the complete experience, the patch is mandatory and there's no reason not to get it as it's free.

Gameplay
For a JRPG title, this game is quite simple in systems and if you take your time just a little, you'll be overpowering enemies like they're nothing in no time at all. The way you power up is by collecting sperm from random NPCs in the world. You walk up to them and make a proposition, vast majority of male NPCs will take you up on the offer, which then leads to an h-scene with static images and some voice acting. After which you get rewarded with some of that juice that you can spend on leveling up your heroines directly or their clothes. Just taking my time in the first two locations, going from an NPC to an NPC and proposing with all three characters one by one had me boosted enough to when it was time to finally face some field battle, everything was dealing 0 damage and I killed everything in 1 hit. So in some odd 2 hours I have achieved "godmode", at least for the early game.
It doesn't stop there tho, if you push it and increase the "lust" of your characters high enough your "proposition" mechanic turns into "prostitution" and you'll be making some money on the side as well and further you can now switch to your birthday suit. What's funny is that walking around buck naked increases your stats tremendously. It's like the devs are playing into the good old joke in gaming - the less the armor covers, the better it is. Like really +999 to all stats when the other alternative is ~+40 defense etc, it's kind of ridiculous.
If you manage to push your lust and Naughtiness to its limits, your characters will lose the ability to "prostitute" and "proposition", they just jump right into action as they become absolutely sex hungry. At this point your only recourse is to go to the church and having your status cured by the priest.
Your heroines can also get knocked up, if you get pregnant enough times you unlock a title that prevents this from happening again, conveniently named "contraceptives". When a character has a belly, they can't "propose" anymore and you have to go to a clinic to get it "treated". Instead of a baby you get a consumable item like potions. Don't ask me how that works.
Beyond all this depravity is more depravity as in battles you can sexually assault your enemies, which levels up your "Sexual" skills, drains enemies mana and lets you collect some spare sperm, tho this is a very unoptimal way to go about things as proposing to NPCs in tows yields way more and they also have no cooldown. Battles are otherwise over in seconds if you level enough as pretty much everything is a 1 hit kill.

Story
What you're all here for I am sure.
The former Demon King is dead, fell by the hand of the "Hero" and on his throne now sits, you guessed it, Melissa, his daughter. But the genral public is really happy about this change as little queen Melissa has a different way of running things. No more wars, demons should co-exist with humans and we can all live happily together. One day this hero comes for a visit to the demon castle and Melissa decides to invite her for a meal. But the hero had different orders, after enjoying their meal we see a scene where the hero puts a spell into the throne room but gets caught in the act by the house maid which alerts Melissa as well. Melissa rushing to the room unknowingly triggers the spell that was prepared and her, the maid and the hero all get caught in it. Besides the apparent destruction in brought to the throne room everything else seems fine, except all three of them now lost their magical powers. After getting assaulted by a group of demons, they realize that somehow, the sperm of their attackers made it possible to re-awaken their lost powers if only by little. And so the Queen, the Maid and the Hero decide to go on an adventure together to not only regain their lost powers but to also get answers as to why would Lufia be ordered to chant this spell in the first place.
On your travels you will see how the world now functions with demons and humans co-existing as well as help random people with requests they might have while making progress towards uncovering the whole truth.
The story is nothing groundbreaking but it works as a basis for the game well enough. It's funny that the "Hero" Lufia who bested the previous Demon King is now in a party with the Demon Queen working towards the same goal. The characters are interesting enough. Melissa acting the way a queen would, all high and mighty but her act breaks pretty easily. Marina being the house maid that can kill with a look, seemingly very uninterested in anything sexual now forced to "beg" for sperm. And the Heroine Lufina that's actually a closeted pervert that's really enjoying this whole situation while trying not to show it as to keep her "Hero" image intact.
All in all this gets a passing grade.

Graphics
This game appears much older than it really is, initial release in 2016, the game launches in what appears to be maybe 800x600 window and all you can do is to stretch it to full screen, there are no resolution options, which obviously doesn't make things look fantastic. I am not sure if it's a limitation of the used engine or what but this obviously isn't great. On the other hand, this is a mostly pixel art game so it's not the biggest of deals, I would just prefer the various scenes containing drawn images to be of higher quality, but it's something you can get over.

Music
Servicable? I will not go out of my way to find the OST on youtube to listen to casually, it's kind of just there, non-intrusive, forgettable, unimpressive. There's not much else to say.

Controls
Works with KB or a gamepad, with no ability to rebind keys in-game, third party programs will have to do if you want to rebind keys. On a controller "X" is confirm "Y" is back and "A" opens the menu and then you either use the stick or D-Pad to move, I would like for confirm to be "A" and back to be "B" by default but this is not a game where fast inputs are of any importance so taking time to adjust isn't detrimental to progress. It's just yet another thing that's missing that we're used to on PC, like changing the resultion or keybinds.

In conclusion
Demon Queen Melissa is a fan favorite game, there's no denying that. If you get it on Steam, grab the free patch as well, without it I can imagine this game being quite dull. The H-Scenes and depravity this game presents is what's carrying it. And boy is there ever a lot of H-Scenes. It's all static images, no L2D involved but at least it comes with quantity and the art is really good too. Difficulty in this game is non-existant, in no time at all you're basically Momonga from Overlord... Or Saitama from One Punch Man, walking the lands, 1 hitting everything in your way. There are better games out there these days but this has a certain charm to it and given the listed price, I can recommend it, if your mind is dirty enough and you have no care in the world if your Steam friends see what you're playing. That about sums it up. If I end up finishing the game, I'll update this with how long it took me to beat the game as I can't find the expected playtime anywhere.

Where did the time go?
That's what I keep telling myself 30 minutes in, whenever I launch the game, I am sorry, did I say 30 minutes? I meant 6 hours. And this here might be the kicker for some of you looking especially for an idle game.
Idle Slayer works perfectly fine as an "idle" game, much like you'd expect, you can launch the game, spend a few minutes spending resources, closing it and return later to do the same. Rinse and repeat. However your progress will be very slow, while it is fairly normal that you get rewarded for playing actively in these games, I feel like Idle Slayer has the balance skewed a whole lot towards active play. There are strictly "idle" players that played for a year or two, that I have surpassed in progress within a month of active play. I don't mind this, I really like the active gameplay and the impact it makes on the progress. With that in mind.

Is the gameplay any fun
Here's the deal, I find the very early game very slow and boring and it was the reason why I barely played at all for the first 90 or so days when I downloaded the game. You can barely do anything, your character is moving in a slow motion pace and it takes a good while before you even unlock first enemies, not to mention other mechanics. I think the early game may hurt this game the most, hell I almost quit for good and now I am ~230 hours deep in just over a month. Because once you unlock all the "essentials", the gameplay is actually quite fast paced and fun. You constantly press your dash button, making you run much faster, you jump around and shoot a bow trying to kill enemies with it as bow kills give you better rewards. You open random boxes giving you various bonuses for a time, you go into bonus stages that offer some platforming and you play a treasure chest mini game. There's constantly something happening and it just keep you entertained. Once you unlock more stuff, the game goes from 1 to a 100 and it's really quite enjoyable to play.

Progress
That's all these games are about, the progress, unlocking new things, buying more upgrades, seeing number go up. I see a ton of people on the Idle Slayer discord saying the progress is quite slow or being unsure of the next steps, it doesn't help much when you see things on the skill tree costing billions of souls when you're happy you got to a million, it may seem like an impossibly steep hill to climb. This is where seeking out outside guides helps. Also remember? Active play is the key to fast progress as well. Learning that it's optimal to ascend when you're at 10-20% of your total Slayer Points helps a ton. Also knowing that gold =/= progress is key. I see people hung up on buying more/better equipment where it really barely matters, your progress is measured with souls. Knowing when to ultra ascend and how to spend your points from these ultra ascensions does a lot too. None of which the game does for you, you either try and figure it out yourself or you help yourself to a guide, there's a lot of systems and math involved and if you don't understand it very well, you may end up progressing much slower. Ultra ascending too soon or not buying key upgrades before you do may be very bad for your overall progress and I can see a lot of people making mistakes and the game feeling quite slow as a result. Hop into the Discord and don't be ashamed to look at what people figured out over the years and your progress will be just fine. Also remember, this is not a new game, there's quite a lot to unpack and one can't expect to be "up to date" within a week.

The bad
Achievements, some of them are really just time gated (like the one that requires you to play the game for a year. However if you open the game now and then again 365 days later, even if you basically did not play the whole time, you'll still get the achievement but yeah). And some are an RNG fest, which can be quite frustrating even if you know that you'll be long done with them before you're ever even close to getting all of the achievements, they still feel pretty bad.
Time gated upgrades, with the minions you can unlock, you send them on missions and these missions take a certain amount of time ranging from 3 - 24 hours depending on each minion. After every mission completed, you get 1 point and for these points, you can buy certain upgrades. They are not detrimental, but they help. No amount of grinding can help here, you're on the clock here and have to wait.
Microtransactions, I mean, it's a free to play game, it has to make money somehow if its to be afforded continuous development but yeah, knowing the option is there to skip a couple of hours of grinding if you just spend a bit never feels that great and the gem packs don't really have an attractive price either, but again, given it's free to play, you take it as necessary evil in a way.

Conclusion
If you're looking for a new idle game, maybe skip this one... As it's not trully an idle game, your idle progress will pale in comparison to playing actively. But if that sounds interesting for a change, grab it, it's super fun once you get the ball rolling. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some slaying to do.

Editing the review with a link to an uncut late-game gameplay video. Wanted to make this ~10 minutes but I forgot myself so it ended up being 30 minutes, either way, it should give you a good idea of what the game is like later on: