Unity - Loser [v0.10.02] [Night City Productions]

Very bad. Not only does the game have a disgusting interface, there are no normal settings, but in general, nothing is clear. All you need to do is grind. Grinding moving from room to room would not seem difficult, but the transition process, on my PC, takes from 7-10 seconds. Also, every action in the game you will need to wait while looking at the black screen. It's like the game loads all the locations again every time. Although the girls look cute and the game has decent art, you will not see the sex scene very soon.
Disgusting (do not recommend)

As the super -powered game is among my favorites. When I find out that its creator also did this game I decided to play it with joy ...... But I fear that the result could not be more disappointing .... If I had to describe the game it would be: "Bored." The game is squeeze slowly, and revolves around a quite tedious "conversations" mechanics, with a list of options to be executed very limited, because even to eat an apple you have to unlock the action, after hours of conversations and "healthy" ".... in the end you spend the game cleaning non -stop ... after 3 days "playing" (rather repeat the same things again and again). Unlock 2 things 1_ The power to iron clothes. 2- A gym in which there is nothing, or anything happens ... With those large amounts of stimuli for the player, such as not wanting to continue playing ........

I would give this game 4 or 5 stars if the developer didn't choose such an awful engine for a grindy game. I don't mind the grind if it's interesting, but having those long load times whenever you switch to a room is just killing me.

WORST GAME EVER !!

Its the fucking ''definition of insanity''

Grind till U die over and over and over same fucking thing again and again...

Just why ??

Porn games should be quick decision - not blue balls and losing focus.

I understand its a pity xcuse from dev to prolong gameplay (or rather said - MASK LACK OF CONTENT) , and make updates somehow usable but c'mon...

Tho models looks nice and story is kind a ok (nothing new that we didnt seen 1000 times around...) but overall I can rate this crap max 2 stars. But I wont.

Edit 3: for Version 0.10.02
I'm glad I gave this a 3rd try. MASSIVE QoL improvements and no more slow load times between screens. Still some bugs and I still play with the mod (which actually helps me circumvent those bugs) but I'm actually looking forward to the upcoming changes/additions for the next update.

It's definitely getting good. I'm just still hesitant to give it a 5.
- There are times where it feels a little imbalanced concerning Becky since she has a lot of ATs but not a lot of opportunities to interact. Then there's the parties which seem like a separate category on its own but only available on Fridays but there are other events that don't concern that cause a scheduling conflict.
- A lot of aspects are also a work-in-progress, which I understand but it does make me wonder whether we'll ever be able to see those things.
- Some more hints would be a good thing. There are just things that would take way too much trial-and-error if it wasn't for a few users having the answers. It's just that I can't expect them to be able to field all the questions. One example being that you can only initiate a scene with Diane on certain days. I honestly would've just assumed it was a bug and given up if it wasn't for the thread because the wiki doesn't say anything about that.
-On that note. While I understand bugs will occur in a game this complex, it's made me more inclined to assume something not happening is a bug rather than another specific condition not being fulfilled. Of course, more hints would erase any doubt or just a better central guide (the second option obviously not something the dev should have to deal with)

But it's reached the point where I'm willing to try and map out a guide for myself so I don't have to keep going and forth from the thread/work-in-progress wiki/incomplete walkthrough. I'm holding back for now but I'm optimistic the next few updates will make up for my concerns. From what it looks like, the dev took a little more time on this update but it feels like he really made a big breakthrough with it as well. That really gives me some faith in his ability and consistency since I usually see devs dick around for a while then plop out something that doesn't explain the time taken.

My advice to first-time players would be to use the mod. You'll be able to see what the game has to offer and then maybe be more inclined to start over and play more aligned to how it was intended be played.
Edit 2:
So I came back to this game after initially playing version 7. I think I have a better idea of the dev's intentions for this to be a time/resource management game and why there are certain limitations added.

However, there are still aspects of the game that would make it a lot less tedious but not detract from the theme. It's the parts of the game that don't seem "grindy" because of the gameplay but because of lack of good game design.
- An in-game gallery: (I get why it's not possible now)
- Content hints: You (as a player) put all that time and strategizing into getting a character to a specific archetype while juggling your inventory limit, how to pass the time without adding useless topics, influencing other characters, increasing skills you'll need or farming topics you'll need for archetypes later on but you end up missing scenes because you didn't think to do the correct combination of things at the correct time and at the correct location.
- Archetype transformation hints: Could definitely be more thorough. At this point, enough people have played the game to know about the certain hidden triggers. Ex. You need to have sex with Charli but not come then go wash up. or something like you need a topic with this certain tag. These things just come straight out of left field and just seem intentionally obtuse rather than encouraging exploration/experimentation. If you need people to go back and forth from this thread and the game, then there's a problem.
- Skip time function: There's no efficient and easy way to do this. You can already sleep an unlimited amount of times. So I don't really see how implementing "skip 1 hour" and "skip 1 day" buttons would hamper the "time management" aspect of the game. Especially when you're already pretty much set up with the perfect set of topics to just get into a rhythm.
- Streamlined UI: Way too many buttons and menus. I get that if there weren't submenus, the interface would be incredibly cluttered but almost every action requires a second (or more) click. What if certain objects were just clickable? Things like the wardrobe can only be accessed in the room anyway. Which would free up space for "skills", "save/load" and "characters". Also, the fact that you need to press "continue" for the dialogue when every other game just lets you click anywhere to continue. I don't think it's a Unity thing.
- Memory leak: I regularly need to restart the game because lags increase from 1 second to 5 or more seconds which makes the game feel even slower. It seems like steps have been taken to try and solve it but it still remains a problem. It might just be a natural result due to how many moving parts there are in the game.

I've come to understand why the gameplay mechanics have to be that way and it's a fun idea but it's everything else about it that just makes the game feel 10x slower than it should be. I wanted to change my review because I recognize the dev is listening to feedback and is actively trying to make those QoL changes but in its current state, I can only give it a 3 out of 5. Plus the game's been around since 2019 so ...

It's unique a game. For good reasons but also for all the wrong reasons. I'm not a dev but I'm sure it's not easy at all. I'm sure the dev is pretty smart for being able to implement all this but at the same time I've seen other Unity games that have covered these things mentioned above in their overall game design for a smoother player experience.

Excellent game that actually has sandbox gameplay rather than being a VN that pretends to be a sandbox game.

The game does have a significant amount of grind, but once you do get past the initial grind there is plenty of content waiting for you. I don't think there is much hope the grind will be reduced, but that isn't enough for me take any points from the games score since it is such a unique experience.

You know all these sandbox H-games devolve into a loop where you just skip days until you get the interaction you need to make the number you want go up. But having to grind out your stats, grind out your topics-the process of which might not even give you the topics you need-, then swap your topic bar-which can only be done in two rooms of the house-, and wait for one of the designated one-to-four hours of 24 that you can even talk to them, with NO FLAVOR TEXT, is pretty egregious.

Micromanaging conversations is a good idea and I like the progression of their personalities, but man it's not executed well.

This is a Night City Productions game in both good and especially bad. The actual content of the game is interesting and entertaining, but to progress through it you need to go through extreme grindfest. I cannot with good conscience recommend playing any NCP games without cheat mods that help cut the grind from extremely time consuming to very time consuming.

In a nutshell the game is about changing the characters around you by manipulating their interests. Each character has 3 traits (each consisting of 2 topics) they don't like and 3 traits they like. To change a character from one archtype to another you need to add specific two new secondary traits to them and then find the interaction to trigger the archtype transformation.

The issue is that to add new traits, the character needs to be interested in the topics of the trait, meaning they need 100% interest in it. Beyond random interactions during the day the main way to add interest is to have a successful discussion with them. This means finding discussion topics (generated by pretty much everything you do in the game - clean your room to generate topic about Chores and Cleaning for example) and mixing in the discussion topic with two others they already like.

The problem is two-fold: you first need to get the topics... And early on each discussion may add 4-5% of interest in that topic. Meaning you need to interact 20-25 times, consuming 60-75 topics. Every NPC also usually only has 2 chances per day to discuss with them.

Things get a bit easier as you play the game and get more skills which increase interest gain in topics related to them and unlock permanent topics that are refreshed each time you visit your room and each discussion is guaranteed to generate a new topic... But this leads to more annoying busy work as you have limited amount of topics you can have at a time and you need to constantly remove old topics to make room for new ones.

It also speaks volumes that one of the features the cheat mod adds is an option to speed up transition times. This seems to include save/load times. It speaks volumes that I keep that option on 99% of the time I've played this game, only turning it off when I actually get short burst of new content rather than watching the same discussion animations with the same character for 1000th time.

So in short: The actual content is good fun, but I can't really say the effort required to see it is worth the effort for most people.

Edit:

In case by some miracle the developer reads this, my recommendations to polish the game - beyond heavily cutting down the grind by at least doubling interest gains - would be:

- If the NPC has locked a door, show the lock icon in their location. This is already done with Diane with one of her ATs, which also tells why it is locked.
- The need to go to the PCs room to restock topics is annoying extra task. The party is the only scene in the entire game where there is any reason for this mechanic to exist. Just restrict restocking for those specific scenes. I can understand items needing to be fetched from the rooms, but for topics it makes no sense.
- The topic cap is way, way too low. Since some topics are so much harder to get than others, the game incentivices hoarding hard to get topics. This also means you need to constantly clean up less desirable topics like the one you get from cleaning.

As much as people say otherwise, this is a porn game that takes forever to get to any actual porn.

The main gameplay loop is so boring, most people will be bored in 6 hours. The grind is purposefully inflated to give a sense of progression which eventually leads to mediocre sex scenes. The XP requirements should be cut in half and there should be more interactivity with the world itself. Better and/or more interesting mechanics and maybe a complete overhaul to the conversation system.

If you're not prepared to waste a vast amount of your likely limited free-time consuming this huge nothing-burger for little reward, I'd give this a skip.

Holy jesus that is a grindfest. To give you an idea - playing with a cheat mod is a grindfest, I can't imagine how this plays without it.

Have you ever wanted to micromanage communication with npcs? Now you can! Certain dialog topics are expendable resources that you need to refill by doing N repetitions of a certain task. Also there is a cap - you can only have a max of 50 of them. Why? Cause fuck you that's why.

All in all it's a very detailed grinding sim, with stats, over 40 skills, money and more to grind till you die. Any sexual content is spread so thinly it wont distract you from grinding away

OK, so I have mixed feelings about this game. On the one hand, it’s a Night City Game, with all the good renders, characters, and story that entails. On the other hand, the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. Overall, I see a lot of potential here, but I think it, unsurprisingly, has a long way to go.

To be clear, I’m mostly going to be criticizing in this review, but I want to quicky cover all the good. The characters are interesting, with developed personalities and interactions. The sex scenes are great, as should be expected, and while there aren’t many yet, those that exist have a decent range of content. The world is pretty, the navigation is… reasonable (though I have complaints), and overall I look forward to playing more of this.

There, now that I’ve covered what I like let’s get down to gripes.

First, and not super important, there’s no real introduction. We get the scene of the player in jail and then get dumped into our room. I assume the actual homecoming will be added later since development is in such early stages, but even just a placeholder screen would have made things a little less jarring.

Second: the navigation. Overall I think this is quite good, it’s similar to many other games. However, with the fact that going to a location where a door is locked pops up a dialogue box (which in general are slow to progress and close) we end up in an annoying trend. I see that a character is present in a room but because I don’t know their schedule (because my memory is terrible and there’s no in-game resource for it) I must click on it to check. This wastes time as I have to wait for the dialogue box to go away to move on. This isn’t incredibly annoying on its own, but the annoyance compounds as it happens again and again. I have two recommendations for this. One: mark locations where characters are present but not available differently, either not putting the silhouette there or changing it in some way since there’s nothing for use to do there, and two: speed up the dialogue box, or add an alternative display method for those messages, maybe one of the corner messages like we get for XP and whatnot?

Finally, my big gripe, the one that really strained my desire to keep playing and would have made me drop it if I hadn’t installed the cheat mod and edited my save: the gameplay. Look, I get at least the general idea of what you’re going for here. I can see how it follows on from SuperPowered’s conversation and stats system. That said, there doesn’t seem to be much actual gameplay here, just a lot of grind. The only time the game actually feels like there’s a challenge or interesting puzzle is when you need to trigger a transformation and must get the right items, variables, and events. Otherwise it’s just performing the same routine over and over with little to no change and basically no fun. So here are a few suggestions of thing that I think could make this more interesting, understanding of course that this is an early stage game and obvious has a lot of refining to go through so many of these issues are likely only due to it’s unpolished state. Still, here’s what I’d like to see:

• More permanent topics and more ways to get them.
  • As the game goes on you can mostly get by with permanent topics once you’ve leveled up, but there’s the occasional specific one that causes problems. I’d love to see a way to convert temporary topics to permanent ones, maybe through number of uses? Maybe this way you could eventually have all available topics as permanent ones, provided you put in a lot of work to do so. This would reduce or remove having to randomly grind for a very specific topic in the late game because you need it to activate an action or whatever. Which leads us to…
• Don’t require an item to be in the hotbar/inventory to use it.
  • There’s nothing so annoying as getting to an interaction only to see that an option is greyed out because the item required is in the wrong inventory, especially for those interactions that happen rarely since it means going through another week to try again. This is also the case for interactions that require a specific topic to be available. I have the topic unlocked, but because I didn’t know I’d need it for this event it’s not set so I have to go back to my room, change my inventory up, go back to the character, and now the window has passed. This is incredibly annoying and doesn’t really present a challenge since there’s no way we could know we’d need that specific item or topic unless we’d done the interaction before, and even then we’d have to remember it since all but the archetype transitions aren’t recorded anywhere. Please just set it so if we have the item/interaction it just works, regardless of where it’s located. I could maybe see an exception for temporary topics, since we might not want to burn them, but maybe an option in the settings or something to pick the behaviour for them.
• Add a “Pass Time” button.
  • Yes, the Sleep and Relax options exist, and I thank you for adding them, but any game like this that is very schedule and location based begs for an ability to wait in the current location until a given time. I understand the scheduler may cause an issue with this, but if possible I’d highly request a button to advance time by one hour, just for sanity and a reduction of the number of times we have to go back to our room to sleep.
• Add more descriptions and details on the Archetypes.
  • The archetypes are really cool, one of the best parts of the game, but as others have said they can be confusing. It’s not generally clear what exactly an archetype will be like, and the only source I’ve found have been forum posts here stating which is the “vanilla” or “slutty” option. Ideally I’d love to see a brief description for each when they’re hovered over or something, a way to know what we’re getting into, especially when we have to choose between two. Some way to see the paths each archetype could go to would be great as well, even if it was as simple as saying it’s the vanilla or slutty path. Additionally, I’d love to see an easier way to revert to a previous archetype, we already achieved it, honestly grinding to it again is annoying. On that note, marking which of the available archetypes was the previous in the available section would be helpful as well since it’s not always easy to remember.
• Less grind.
  • Look, this is likely because the game is so early in development, but it feels like it takes way too long to make much progress, and the curve doesn’t seem to change as the player levels and develops, it’s always a grind. XP gains (both player and character) are quite small for how much we need to acquire. I think increasing the amount of XP gain would help with this immensely, even just 2X. Additionally, and I realize this may already be planned, passive XP gain would help immensely. This was a great part of SuperPowered, expending resources now to get a steady trickle of change. Maybe this could be more items purchased for ourselves that increases the player’s XP over time and some kind of options to ask the other characters to do things for us that increases their stats, possibly at a constant or large one-time cost to us. Either way this would mean we could be passively gaining in areas that are harder to improve through conversation while focusing on other topics or tasks.

Overall, I really like the idea of this game and I very much look forward to future installments. These are just a few things that irked me as I was playing, but I have every confidence that this will get even better as time goes on.

TL; DR
Almost SUDDENLY and surprisingly nice game, I really can't top-rate it atm, but NCP definitely raised its quality to 4+*. For now, + is not big enough to transform in +1, but with some more updates like 0.10.00 it can really get up to that.
Strongly recommend at least to try it, but be ready to really play, even with 2 hands on the table at the start until you earn your one hand down! XD
Guys who reacted to this rating with likes - you may reconsider those, or even better - give this game one more try, it's really MUCH better now than it was when I've posted this!

I always feel bad when I see a Night City Productions title get bad reviews -- I really think the dev is going for something a bit different from other adult games here. If you are into corruption, I think the grind sort of adds to that fetish. Getting a subject more corrupt by just a few button presses doesn't feel great to me, whereas the grind does. Also these games aren't meant to be finished in a sitting and I'm OK with that.

That being said, I think games that do this grind need to be engaging. Sort of like ARPGs. The gameplay can be repetitive but must have a hook and a feeling of progress that feels fun and makes you want to play more.

Does Loser do that? I think it does it a million times better than other adult games, for sure. The chatting and archetype gimmicks are really unique. I think it's a great way to incorporate "corrupting" someone while also providing different directions to go with them and cover a wider array of fetishes.

The one thing I really didn't like is the amount of memorization. If the dev can find some way to keep the difficulty and corruption of the chatting and archetype stuff without having to go back into your inventory and character log constantly it would go a long way to making the grind feel good.

To sum it up: the corruption here is second-to-none. As someone into that, I have to give this 5 stars. Night City did it amazingly with Superpowered and they are pulling it off again with Loser.

Full disclosure, I did review this before, but my review got pulled because I mentioned another game title. Which is not a topic I will complain about at the moment. Anyway, if it's not obvious to you or anyone you know, this game is a grind. And I don't get why. My ONLY idea is that it's for people with a statistics and spreadsheet fetishes. The kind of people that make a living off of fantasy football. On top of that, it's made in Unity which means it's over developed and sluggish. I don't like sandbox games, but RenPy is better for that and has much less of a system impact. The UI is very "early 2000's" if that makes sense. It's ugly.

It also has the same story as 90% of the games on here. MC (which is not renamable for some reason) leaves home for X amount of time. Comes home and, for whatever reason, is suddenly attracted to his family. After that there is no story at all. You literally just grind skills and stats until whatever character you're chasing acts the way you want.

The first time I played this I used cheat engine, meticulously, to dodge the grind. Nothing is intuitive at all. You repeatedly do activities to RNG a new conversation topic that you can't even re-use. Are you joking? And this means MC is a blank slate before this game. You start with no permanent topics and almost nothing takes less than 2 hours to do. I am thankful that the characters have a set schedule and it's not all random. That would be an actual nightmare. It's also been a minute since I played and have NO idea how I got anywhere in the game.

Sure, render quality is good and the models and scenes aren't the same 5 that are in every game on here. But the engine is clunky, the walkthrough is a novel, the entire story is told in two lines on the first post about this game, and nobody has enough time to actually play this. Night City overcomplicates games on top of slow update time. None of the scenes are in engine, otherwise the game would be smaller when it's compressed. And if you like the models install DAZ and use the models there. It'll take just as long to render an image in that as it does to actually get to any content in this game.

My suggestion to the player, get an actual girlfriend, you'll see boobs faster that way. And to the Dev, next game use less stats and skills. You don't make a commision off of my play time and you just make more work for yourself so everyone loses. Cut back and chill out.

My favourite adult game. But definitely not a VN.

The characters are beautiful and dynamic.

I appreciate there being an actual game of collecting topics and transitioning characters between archetypes.

There is certainly a level of grind, but I feel like it creates motivation for the kind of interactions and what directions you want to develop different characters.

Older sister is THICC and there are many fantastic renderings of her lying on her bed with her thiccness on display. That in itself is worth a star.
Archetype system is not something I've seen before, and the neighbor girl is so pale she's gray (which I like).
Current grind to content ratio is a bit high, and enough spelling issues to distract me, personally. Some important events need more than is given in the hints, which is annoying when you then have to wait an entire week to reactivate it. But the game's hardly done yet; probably worth a re-review when it's done.

Very promising. Enjoyed what I played. The grind is a pain but can be easily overcome with the cheats, so can focus on moving the ATs rather than grinding stats. Loved SuperPowered, but honestly think Loser might be better because the concept of using the ATs to organically slide characters into depravity is much nicer IMO than mind control or supernatural powers.

A great idea with absolutely no execution. The UI feels cumbersome and the experience tiring. The balancing is very poor with the game requiring insane amounts of grind. The women look great but the scenes are too few and far between and just do not justify the tedium. Hopefully he balances the game but seeing that he doubled down on his previous one as well I have little faith in that.

Love it! Amazing game, can't wait for more!
I hope for an even bigger iteration among the characters. With a lot more of freedom
My only concern is the amount of grind, beyond that, there is no problem in my opinion.

This game reminds me of Lucky Mark. The dev of this game must have played that one and said sure it's a good game but where's the grind? The dev even posted he thinks it's FUN to watch your character cleaning house, cleaning his room, watching the MC sit and play video games within a game. An example of how much grind there is: The younger sister can ONLY be advanced Fridays at 18:00. There is no skip time button, so you have to just sleep hundreds of times. The writing is OK, but since you see the same exact scene hundreds of times there is basically no story. The Archtype idea cold be cool IF there were options to make them anything you want. There is potential for hundreds of routes each with unique content. But, as it stands you have to progress from exactly one personality type to the next, in sequence. I give it 2 stars because it could maybe in about 5 yrs be pretty good, what little writing there is isn't engrish, renders are not bad.