Out of all the porn games I've played in the past ten years, I can confidently say Corruption of Champions is one of the only, if not the only adult game out there where the porn, the gameplay and the story all coexist in perfect harmony and compliment each other really well in interesting ways. If I had ONE adult game to recommend to anyone, it would be this one.
At first glance, the game doesn't look like anything particular, and might even be off-putting to some people more used to graphic games. It's a text-based game in its integrality, made in Flash some billion years ago with an unpleasant user interface, where the only kind of personal touch is tiny, barely distinguishable sprites representing the characters you meet along the way. This game is old, and it definitely gives off the vibe of a living fossil, even though it's far from the oldest adult game out there.
In a similar fashion, both the gameplay and the story have nothing outstanding. The gameplay is a basic implementation of the traditional RPG formula, with character stats, equippable items and consumables, and a primitive turn-based combat system that offers diverse forms of melee and ranged attacks as well as spells. The complexity of this system comes mostly from the variety of enemies you encounter. A specificity of this game that makes it stand out is that every enemy in the game has its own fully written set of attacks, win and lose sequences that isn't shared with any other enemy in the game. Each victory or loss you will encounter will be unique per enemy type, and can sometimes be even more diversified by what fetishes or character attributes you have unlocked. Even though the gameplay quickly becomes grindy due to the exponential leveling system, you will regularly come back to previously explored areas and confront old enemies again just for the pleasure of seeing their lines after a victory or loss.
The story, similarily, isn't impressive when you start playing for the first time. Your character is sent to a parallel world to fight off the corruption encroaching on your own world. That's pretty much it. Some lines of dialogue refer to your old life in your previous world, but for the majority of the game, you're pretty much let loose in an alien world, free to do whatever you want to do. Usually, this kind of open-ended direction for a story isn't one I'm a huge fan of, because most of the time, this results in a very barren world to explore with the story boiling down to a pathetic excuse for the player to goof around, without taking the time to properly flesh out its inhabitants or the events that led this world to what it has become.
But here, exploring is one of the main appeal of the game. Want to go complete the main quest? Sure, but you'll be missing out on a ton of content if you don't take the time to trail off and discover completely different biomes, locations and events, and talk to many different people, who have nothing to do with the main plot, but whose lives can be massively change by your actions and have dramatic consequences on your future.
One aspect of this exploration that I really love in this game is that, due many details about the world being left out for the major part of the story, it's up to the player to fill in the blanks of what happened not so long ago to all those new places, for them to be this twisted by the corruption that has filled this world. Soon enough, you start to feel this sense of mystery about so many places, and you start to feel like a real explorer, discovering uncharted territories and fighting improbable creatures.
If there's one thing this game does really well, it is instigating that sense of adventure so many other RPGs fail to reproduce. Corruption of Champions is a REAL adventure, where you can shape the world around you as you play and as you like, and see the long-term consequences of your actions, good and bad, long after you've done them.
And what ties both the gameplay and the story together, and enchancing both, is how the adult content is implemented. There is an absurdly huge amount of content in CoC, for pretty much every major fetish you'd expect in this kind of game, but the two main fetishes, corruption and transformation, are really what elevates CoC from okay-ish with some problems, to something really cool. The corruption mechanic not only affects your appearance and what kind of choices you can make in dialogues at any given point, but it also influences your lust meter, which in turn dictates what kind of spells you can use in combat. Some enemies are unaffected by melee attacks and require using spells or tease attacks, but some enemies are also resistant or immune to some spells; and if you let your lust increase too much, your build will have a much harder time winning fights, so the goal is to keep a delicate balance between rising it enough to reach most of the game's content, and low enough to avoid most of its negative effects.
Depending on what level you allow yourself to be corrupted to, you will have drastically different conversations with people, different areas you can access, and what kind of gear you can use, making each run of CoC unique enough by that metric alone. You can also do a pure run if you want, which is perfectly doable even with (or without any) transformations, and brings its own set of perks and challenges (on top of being able to use what's arguably the best weapon in the game), but the game clearly encourages the player very early on to take risks and increasing that meter as much as possible.
But that's not the only thing adding uniqueness to each run. The transformative items in the game that allow you to gain attributes of the different species inhabiting this land also affect how you play the game drastically. The mutations aren't just cosmetic for the adult content; some of them offer stat buffs or debuffs to fit you character more to that species, offer different auxilliary attacks in combat, the ability to flee more easily or to skip some scenes you might not want to see, or add different flavour options for the adult scenes after a victory.
For each different run of CoC you do, you might want to try out a different set of mutations to see what each species can offer you in combat, or what kind of sex scenes you might unlock. Did you like being a bee-girl in your previous run, flying around and poisoning everyone with your stinger? You can try being a shark-girl and bite everyone instead!
Just like the game encourages you to corrupt your character as much as possible, there are many transformative items lying around in the land, with some NPCs even using them casually. And just like it's hard to avoid being at least tainted by the corruption, it's also very hard to undo the changes you made to your character. Mutations are very hard to remove (and random), and once you've started, it's pretty much impossible to go back to being a human, even in appearance only. This is to tie-in once again to the theme of corruption being omnipresent and unavoidable in the game, as you naturally gain corruption by just doing any action, and going from corrupt to pure (or vice-versa) can be quite a long process if you want to see every choice the game has to offer.
Sadly, the game isn't perfect. It's has been abandoned quite a while ago (and has been in development for even longer), the developer Fenoxo having moved on to other projects, meaning many bugs haven't been fixed and even more storylines have been started, but have never received a proper conclusion. Many characters that are seemingly important (like Marae or Lethice) barely make an impact in the story, the latter only present at the very end of the game, when you've almost beaten it. The writing of the characters and sex scenes, while overall of very good quality, is not equal between them, as Fenoxo often hired volunteers to pick up the slack and add content for him. This isn't necesarily a bad thing as it allows the community to grow and offers better transparency between it and the developer, but the story does contain some bad apples that passed through a quite lackluster quality control.
The game can also easily softlock you into bad ends if you haven't saved right before that sequence and don't even know that bad end exists. There's a very notorious one where you can chug a special jar of honey to get a bee-dick, but if you drink too much your lust meter will skyrocket without any way for you to lower it or remove that mutation, leading you to a game over if your lust reaches its maximum. It will take a few hours for it to raise though, so you might think it's not that big of a deal, override your latest save file to deal with it later and instantly lose a ton of progress if you didn't have any unimportant save file left, and your last one was from hours ago.
Which leads us to what I personally consider a sin in many similar indie games: The over-reliance on the wiki to reach any kind of progress in the game. You can fumble through the game up until the final boss fight, but doing so without the wiki is very complicated, and will probably take you a dozen of tries and failed builds to get there. Not only that, but the way to get most powerups and mutations throughout the story can be quite convoluted, and you can even be softlocked out of some of them without ever knowing their existence. For example, roughly before the end-game, you can save a specific NPC who will then live in the game's main town if you uncorrupt her, but the only way to do that is to use an item collectable only in the very early-game; item that you can also be locked out of getting depending on your choices made hours or even days ago (depending on how frequently you play this game), without even ever knowing whether that item will be one day useful to you or not.
And cases like this crop up pretty often in this game. Not only do I consider this over-reliance on the wiki a pretty huge flaw in terms of game design, it's also a problem in terms of immersion, because every time the player gets stuck on a convoluted problem, they have to basically pull themselves out of the story they've been invested into to read a very specific and convoluted solution to solve that problem, only to discover they don't have the items needed, or they have been softlocked eons ago by an easy to miss dialogue branch they didn't take. This isn't a problem exclusive to CoC, that happens in most sandbox games due to their very nature, but it's pretty egregious here.
But overall, Corruptions of Champions is a fantastic experience, a very suprising one for a text-based game, and one definitely worth checking out at least once, even if you're not a fan of text-based games. It's so good it popularized its genre, and even spawned multiple variants from fans of Fenoxo's work. Even when playing as fast as possible, the game stays relatively long, but the sheer amount of content can allow you to make it last as long as you wish. Even if you're not a fan of most fetishes in it, you will be guaranteed to find at least SOMETHING to enjoy. It's not just a good adult game, it's a straight up good video game.
At first glance, the game doesn't look like anything particular, and might even be off-putting to some people more used to graphic games. It's a text-based game in its integrality, made in Flash some billion years ago with an unpleasant user interface, where the only kind of personal touch is tiny, barely distinguishable sprites representing the characters you meet along the way. This game is old, and it definitely gives off the vibe of a living fossil, even though it's far from the oldest adult game out there.
In a similar fashion, both the gameplay and the story have nothing outstanding. The gameplay is a basic implementation of the traditional RPG formula, with character stats, equippable items and consumables, and a primitive turn-based combat system that offers diverse forms of melee and ranged attacks as well as spells. The complexity of this system comes mostly from the variety of enemies you encounter. A specificity of this game that makes it stand out is that every enemy in the game has its own fully written set of attacks, win and lose sequences that isn't shared with any other enemy in the game. Each victory or loss you will encounter will be unique per enemy type, and can sometimes be even more diversified by what fetishes or character attributes you have unlocked. Even though the gameplay quickly becomes grindy due to the exponential leveling system, you will regularly come back to previously explored areas and confront old enemies again just for the pleasure of seeing their lines after a victory or loss.
The story, similarily, isn't impressive when you start playing for the first time. Your character is sent to a parallel world to fight off the corruption encroaching on your own world. That's pretty much it. Some lines of dialogue refer to your old life in your previous world, but for the majority of the game, you're pretty much let loose in an alien world, free to do whatever you want to do. Usually, this kind of open-ended direction for a story isn't one I'm a huge fan of, because most of the time, this results in a very barren world to explore with the story boiling down to a pathetic excuse for the player to goof around, without taking the time to properly flesh out its inhabitants or the events that led this world to what it has become.
But here, exploring is one of the main appeal of the game. Want to go complete the main quest? Sure, but you'll be missing out on a ton of content if you don't take the time to trail off and discover completely different biomes, locations and events, and talk to many different people, who have nothing to do with the main plot, but whose lives can be massively change by your actions and have dramatic consequences on your future.
One aspect of this exploration that I really love in this game is that, due many details about the world being left out for the major part of the story, it's up to the player to fill in the blanks of what happened not so long ago to all those new places, for them to be this twisted by the corruption that has filled this world. Soon enough, you start to feel this sense of mystery about so many places, and you start to feel like a real explorer, discovering uncharted territories and fighting improbable creatures.
If there's one thing this game does really well, it is instigating that sense of adventure so many other RPGs fail to reproduce. Corruption of Champions is a REAL adventure, where you can shape the world around you as you play and as you like, and see the long-term consequences of your actions, good and bad, long after you've done them.
And what ties both the gameplay and the story together, and enchancing both, is how the adult content is implemented. There is an absurdly huge amount of content in CoC, for pretty much every major fetish you'd expect in this kind of game, but the two main fetishes, corruption and transformation, are really what elevates CoC from okay-ish with some problems, to something really cool. The corruption mechanic not only affects your appearance and what kind of choices you can make in dialogues at any given point, but it also influences your lust meter, which in turn dictates what kind of spells you can use in combat. Some enemies are unaffected by melee attacks and require using spells or tease attacks, but some enemies are also resistant or immune to some spells; and if you let your lust increase too much, your build will have a much harder time winning fights, so the goal is to keep a delicate balance between rising it enough to reach most of the game's content, and low enough to avoid most of its negative effects.
Depending on what level you allow yourself to be corrupted to, you will have drastically different conversations with people, different areas you can access, and what kind of gear you can use, making each run of CoC unique enough by that metric alone. You can also do a pure run if you want, which is perfectly doable even with (or without any) transformations, and brings its own set of perks and challenges (on top of being able to use what's arguably the best weapon in the game), but the game clearly encourages the player very early on to take risks and increasing that meter as much as possible.
But that's not the only thing adding uniqueness to each run. The transformative items in the game that allow you to gain attributes of the different species inhabiting this land also affect how you play the game drastically. The mutations aren't just cosmetic for the adult content; some of them offer stat buffs or debuffs to fit you character more to that species, offer different auxilliary attacks in combat, the ability to flee more easily or to skip some scenes you might not want to see, or add different flavour options for the adult scenes after a victory.
For each different run of CoC you do, you might want to try out a different set of mutations to see what each species can offer you in combat, or what kind of sex scenes you might unlock. Did you like being a bee-girl in your previous run, flying around and poisoning everyone with your stinger? You can try being a shark-girl and bite everyone instead!
Just like the game encourages you to corrupt your character as much as possible, there are many transformative items lying around in the land, with some NPCs even using them casually. And just like it's hard to avoid being at least tainted by the corruption, it's also very hard to undo the changes you made to your character. Mutations are very hard to remove (and random), and once you've started, it's pretty much impossible to go back to being a human, even in appearance only. This is to tie-in once again to the theme of corruption being omnipresent and unavoidable in the game, as you naturally gain corruption by just doing any action, and going from corrupt to pure (or vice-versa) can be quite a long process if you want to see every choice the game has to offer.
Sadly, the game isn't perfect. It's has been abandoned quite a while ago (and has been in development for even longer), the developer Fenoxo having moved on to other projects, meaning many bugs haven't been fixed and even more storylines have been started, but have never received a proper conclusion. Many characters that are seemingly important (like Marae or Lethice) barely make an impact in the story, the latter only present at the very end of the game, when you've almost beaten it. The writing of the characters and sex scenes, while overall of very good quality, is not equal between them, as Fenoxo often hired volunteers to pick up the slack and add content for him. This isn't necesarily a bad thing as it allows the community to grow and offers better transparency between it and the developer, but the story does contain some bad apples that passed through a quite lackluster quality control.
The game can also easily softlock you into bad ends if you haven't saved right before that sequence and don't even know that bad end exists. There's a very notorious one where you can chug a special jar of honey to get a bee-dick, but if you drink too much your lust meter will skyrocket without any way for you to lower it or remove that mutation, leading you to a game over if your lust reaches its maximum. It will take a few hours for it to raise though, so you might think it's not that big of a deal, override your latest save file to deal with it later and instantly lose a ton of progress if you didn't have any unimportant save file left, and your last one was from hours ago.
Which leads us to what I personally consider a sin in many similar indie games: The over-reliance on the wiki to reach any kind of progress in the game. You can fumble through the game up until the final boss fight, but doing so without the wiki is very complicated, and will probably take you a dozen of tries and failed builds to get there. Not only that, but the way to get most powerups and mutations throughout the story can be quite convoluted, and you can even be softlocked out of some of them without ever knowing their existence. For example, roughly before the end-game, you can save a specific NPC who will then live in the game's main town if you uncorrupt her, but the only way to do that is to use an item collectable only in the very early-game; item that you can also be locked out of getting depending on your choices made hours or even days ago (depending on how frequently you play this game), without even ever knowing whether that item will be one day useful to you or not.
And cases like this crop up pretty often in this game. Not only do I consider this over-reliance on the wiki a pretty huge flaw in terms of game design, it's also a problem in terms of immersion, because every time the player gets stuck on a convoluted problem, they have to basically pull themselves out of the story they've been invested into to read a very specific and convoluted solution to solve that problem, only to discover they don't have the items needed, or they have been softlocked eons ago by an easy to miss dialogue branch they didn't take. This isn't a problem exclusive to CoC, that happens in most sandbox games due to their very nature, but it's pretty egregious here.
But overall, Corruptions of Champions is a fantastic experience, a very suprising one for a text-based game, and one definitely worth checking out at least once, even if you're not a fan of text-based games. It's so good it popularized its genre, and even spawned multiple variants from fans of Fenoxo's work. Even when playing as fast as possible, the game stays relatively long, but the sheer amount of content can allow you to make it last as long as you wish. Even if you're not a fan of most fetishes in it, you will be guaranteed to find at least SOMETHING to enjoy. It's not just a good adult game, it's a straight up good video game.
While impressive in several fronts, this feels like an unfinished game even though it has its endings in place. Several bugs and UI problems left in after it got abandoned by the creator also leaving a couple aching voids and loose ends.
