VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Delirium [Nikraria]

A substantial improvement over Stroke of Madness, Delirium is another point-and-click visual novel that refines what worked about the previous game while increasing the scope of the narrative. You play as Eloise once again, who after escaping the horrors of the estate, finds herself trapped on an island under siege by eldritch forces. In order to survive, Eloise must evade cultists and abominations alike while searching for a way to escape the island while she still can.

While this game is old, the story is very engaging by porn game standards and the smut is plentiful since nearly every outcome ends in a sex scene one way or another. Even if you're solely gunning for the true ending, there's plenty of opportunities provided where Eloise can get into some...explicit situations with the other survivors she meets during her dire ordeal.

However, Delerium is not perfect. While the point-and-click gameplay doesn't feel as tedious as Stroke of Madness, there are still moments where you can find yourself hitting a wall without a guide since the places/objects you're supposed to be interacting with have no visual indicators until your mouse is already over it. The thankfully rare few shooting mini-games are also a pain in the ass to get through for the same reason, so be prepared to save before these sequences pop off.

While this isn't a new game it is definitely worth playing. I binged their entire Lovecraft inspired series this weekend and encourage others to do the same. I was surprised to see it only had two reviews. I'd give this five stars were it not for a few technical issues.

Pros
+The artwork obviously. There's no shortage of h-content here. You don't have to work hard to find it either.
+ The themes/tone. Horror games are great, and any game that doesn't infantile humor deserves props in my opinion.
+ The game play is a simple point and click adventure, with a few timed minigames in between.

Cons
- There are bugs. The game gets stuck in a loop sometimes forcing the player to reload. When trying to examine a room you're transported back last one you examined previously.
- While there are multiple endings there are rarely multiple choices. You can choose between dying, and advancing the plot toward the real ending. Granted there's secret content you can uncover by exploring carefully and taking certain actions, so it's not like you're just watching a movie.

So in summary I recommend this game, and really all the one's this devs made in this series. The older ones have a bit of jank too but if you like this you'll probably enjoy those as well. Each one is better than the last, so I recommend playing them chronologically. I look forward to whatever they're making next.

T'was pretty gud, best and longest of the series so far, lots of outcomes and "game over" slides, some more elaborated than others, but gud nonetheless, love the lovecraft setting and Eloise especially, sweet Eloise.

TLDR A game with potential that is squandered in an attempt to pad the length of the game with arbitrary difficulty and where's wally-esque gameplay. Find the CGs, dont bother with the game. If you really need to play it, get the walkthrough. Oh and turn your headphones down at the start. It just jumpscares you right away like a fucking cunt.

Review:
This game has some aspects that I like, some I really don't, it has some good ideas - but most of them are executed really poorly. It's like when a amateur artist does a painting, gets it to a good place, but then keeps slapping more and more unnecessary paint on, they start making mistakes, things get confused, and any chance of a quality work is lost.

First, lets talk about the art. Nikraria's art is obviously an acquired taste. I, for the most part, really like it. I find the stylization pretty sensuous and erotic. But. This game, this series, and Nikraria's work in general has the issue that all of the characters look pretty similar. Almost all of them have unrealistically large breasts, even on characters that dont really have them in their original media. If this were occasional, or even on half the characters lets say, it would be fine. But it is every singe character. The other commonality is almost all of Nikraria's characters are redheads with bobcuts. He loves Leliana from Dragon Age (who is one of my favorite characters) for instance, and this game series features the protagonist, her mother, and her aunt as the three main sexual characters. All of them look almost identical.

The other issue with the series' art is that all the sexual situations are very samey, its either vanilla or tentacles. Thats really it.

So basically I like the art style, and think it can do a lot to improve characterization, but its really kinda boring after a while. Which leads us to the writing and story.

The whole series is lovecraftian horror-y stuff. It's a decent setting for a porn game, and for a while it's effective, but the series just repeats the same story beats over and over and over again until it's just dull as hell. Most lovecraftian stuff has elements of growing madness, of an unreliable narrator, of questioning reality. the madness is never expounded upon meaningfully. It just shes spooked and horny, and then in sex scenes shes spooked and horny, and in game over sex scenes shes spooked and horny and then loses herself to being spooked or horny. It's the same every fucking time.

The narrator is hinted at being unreliable briefly in the second game in the series, but that gets blown away like 10 minutes into the game and never really comes back. Reality itself is never really questioned. Everyone sees the same stuff and perceives it in the same way, its just how batshit nuts they go that changes.

So yeah, another good idea thats just squandered through constant, unending repetition.

I should also mention that the English is understandable, but has frequent spelling, grammar, and word choice mistakes.

Then we get to the downright awful stuff. The fucking gameplay. The idea again has some promise. Making you go to different places and find shit to advance the story is a perfectly acceptable way to give a narrative context. But when you need to read through text every time you enter a place, wait for a button to appear SOMETIMES in the top right, then move your mouse around until you find something, often a FEW PXELS in size, with no visual marker, you get to the point where the game can go and fuck itself.

The game also has several delayed game overs, where if you miss one of these small pixel perfect objects in one of 8 different places itll let you continue the story for like 10 minutes, then remove the ability to get the item, and them game over you. Which is just bullshit. You'll need a walkthrough.

This game takes that finding shit element present in the first game and then adds a whole bunch more bullshit on top of it. Like trial and error mazes that game over you if you make one wrong turn. Like shooting bits with 2 seconds to find a few highlighted pixels, and a photo section where you have to click on the right spot on a BLANK FUCKING BACKGROUND.

And thats the other thing. So much of this game just has a black background. Its so fucking lazy and immersion breaking.

All in all. It had potential, but there is so much there to intentionally stop you from progressing that it isnt worth playing. Find the CGs, otherwise take a pass.