HTML - Unholy Arts [v0.4.5b] [Deep Interactivity]

This game has a lot of flaws. Lack of visuals, non intuitive mechanics and very strange system of progress (there are A LOT of stat checks and almost every aspect of a game gives or requires some stat/relationship points but you simply cannot grind them because of time dependance to story). When you start a fight all you can see a thousands of numbers and sometimes it is hard to understand what is going on. I can name a lot of other cons of this game but it would change nothing. The writing is brilliant. The story starts simple with "it s a magical boo-hoo world where everyone fucking everyone" but soon enough starts to be fucking awesome light passed thrilling story with excelent characters and most important it gives you right to choose and YOUR CHOICE HAS IMPACT on everything and everyone, story and gameplay wise. Give it enough time and you will gain awesome experience. I really hope in future UI will be better and there will be a graphic part (that has a start already). Can't wait for the next update

review as of v0.4.3

I have a love-hate relationship with this game.

On the love side, there are:

+ Very nice, albeit limited, art. The characters all look nice, and animations, while rather rough, are not unpleasant either, for an early feature especially. But you don't play HTML games for visuals, so it's just a pleasant extra.

+ Good writing. The setting is fun, the story is interesting, the characters, while kinda one dimensional, are not unpleasant to be around and have some growth over the course of the story. Basically, yes, reading is a joy, not a chore in this game.

+ The general idea of a "school" where you go about your daily life while making others submit to you (or submitting yourself, whatever you prefer) is not something you see too often, especially implemented well, and I would say this is one of the better examples.



However... when you get to the actual mechanics of this game... oh boy does it get bad...

- For starters, the optimization is actually kinda bad. This is the only HTML game that takes more than a moment to do things. Moving around can take a second or two. Saving and loading take around 10. It's a little thing, but it definitely detracts from the experience. Add to this that you can't fast travel to a distant location, so if you want to move 5 spaces, you have to click the adjacent one, wait a few secs, click the next, wait, etc.

- Sex scenes are so... unbearably... boring... 30 turns is way too much for it, but that is, thankfully, customizable, but even then, just adding "end scene" button would go such a long way to making it less of a pain to go through. I don't want to be here for half an hour just clicking "Thrust -> commit action -> thrust -> commit action -> thrust -> commit action...". What a chore.

- Same can be said for combat, although for some reason I find it less tedious.

- Talking... talking to characters is one of the worst experiences I had in gaming ever. And there are two main culprits for this.
First is the fact that characters act COMPLETELY out of character during these. The shyest of girls will start touching and caressing you out of the blue when you were just talking about weather or something. It ruins all the nicely written events and personalities that were established before that. Completely immersion breaking.
Second is the fact that you can't tell other characters to fuck off. You start talking to someone, then someone else joins the conversation, and all you can do is leave yourself. No. NO. This is a game about domination, give me an option to tell them to fuck off. I don't want an orgy, I just want to work on a character I like.

This is done atrociously. You have zero control. And this lack of control over anything is my main issue with this game, I guess. You are way too dependent on game interacting with you, rather that letting the player interact with the game and... you know... play it...

I feel like this game would be better served as a renpy game, or one of those numerous "choice of games" projects, with just story and multiple choices, abandoning most of mechanics entirely. So far, they do nothing but detract from the overall experience, unfortunately.

It's a sex game where you'll actively be avoiding sex because it's so boring. A "dating sim" where you'll be avoiding social interactions because they break characters. An RPG where you'll be avoiding combat because it's simply frustrating.

And yet, it's a game that I tend to enjoy and wish for it to succeed. But it's not there yet. Far from it.

Rare to see a game focus on rather arcane gameplay maths, choose your own adventure and longterm interpersonal dynamics created by gameplay. It's honestly too ambitious for it's own good, but remarkable ambition and quality for what's honestly a game that stands on it's own legs as one.

It's very hard for me to evaluate this game: I like it despite serious flaws some of which are quite fundamental, and most likely can't be fixed at this point. I give it a good score because it deals mainly with slow-burn power dynamics, corruption sub-dom relationships inside closed group of people, which few if any other games do. It opens numberless possibilities... at least on paper. The game consist of two parts: story and gameplay, they exist on their own, and almost don't "feel" each other . The story is by far is the best part, author knows how to write high quality engaging text, characters are written pretty well too. Events and the story are the main part that make you keep playing, not sex per se (you can and will bang every love interest almost on day 1, so there is no much reward in this area, progression will add very little to generic h-scenes), events however put characters in more interesting spots and dynamics between them can be written beautifully.

Now, gameplay is the sad part, during this time you will try to craft stats to get this or that event, but other than that it doesn't match the story, it's very dry, basic and few-worded, characters are acting out often randomly and out of personality and numbers (if you have fetish on numbers you MUST play).

There few parts to it, including battles (passable, for this engine), sex (gets boring after few times) and social interaction, those are torture: you are forced to click one button for hundreds of times to get a little boost for a one stat in relationships with one character, it's the worst part of the game by far. There are few other features, but special relationships don't have much story behind them, and bondage is basically just a debuff.

tl;dr:
A unique game, with unique concept and well-written story, but very boring and repetitive gameplay. As for now game has 1 in-game month of content, with almost daily events, first adventure completed and a little content after that. It's about 1/6 of the plan, so keep waiting.

The sex scenes could use a rework. Its just a combat system that could be fun, but there is no real narrative there, you have your sex battle and its done. If there was a way to maybe take the combat encounter and turn it into a descriptive story at the end or something that ads some sexiness to the scene. As it is, its just bland and after a couple of encounters, I had zero motivation to progress with anything.

Absolutely loving the game. I always wanted more games like Night Games, and this one really does it.

The story seems interesting with some twists here and there. The progression is really nice and I love the events happening, really give the game flavor. The combat feels nice, though some more ingame tool tips about skills and attacks, and how they interact with your stats would be great. It's a battlefuck, a really nice one. Artwork is great, animations are really good too and with time I am sure there will be more diversity in body types, positions etc. Consensual acts and socializing are quite repetitive, I think maybe making the chatting shorter but more impactful would probably be better (actions taking and rewarding more points so you don't have to spend 10 mins in every converstaion).

All and all a great game already, with a lot of potential. Easily up there with other text based games like DoL and BDCC. It does what Night Games wanted to do, but way better, because it actually has a story and character story arcs that flesh out their personalities and backgrounds, which is just awesome. Hope the gameplay loop gets updated slightly, because all the stuff in between the story arcs is really repetitive and not really that interesting.

One of the games I've really considered subbing to on patreon with how good it is!

Really good game, characters are fun an interesting. I just wish it had a couple more art assets especially for the characters to make the interactions and sex scenes more engaging. Love the way that they release the mechanics as you play vs other games that give you everything after the tutorial is over. Looking forward to future releases.

Updates are still just ott "adventures" instead of fleshing out the actual game and how it plays. Interaction is inconsistent and boring at best, even with cheats to give them max personality based on what you want, the characters still just do and say random stuff. This feedback was common since the start but the game is still so hollow outside of the VNs that feel like sidetracks honestly, very disappointed

This game is honestly amazing - a dom/sub focused with cool power dynamic, characters and gameplay, the illustrations for the characters also very well made so it enhanced the characters and dialogues a lot (as far as text games go).

Also I see people complained a lot about the beginning of the game being overwhelming, and the combat / team up is unfair etc. I agree somewhat but at least for me this game has one of the most balanced sex combat I seen in a while, maybe because I played a lot of RPGs lol. Anyway here some tips (with spoilers) if you are struggling:

• The most important stats to train are: Agility > Int > Charisma > Resilient. Explains: Agility makes everything easier - hitting, dodging and acting first. Int because the best skills in the game scale with it. Charisma helps with applying buffs and debuffs, and Resilient improves your defense overall.
• Physique and Will are always nice to dump some points into, but please ignore Luck until you are actually strong enough, since it provides minimal advantages at the start of the game.
• This game is a lot like the Shin Megami Tensei games in the PLEASE USE BUFFS AND DEBUFFS category.
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Still, I am sure the game has potential to be a lot more. Hoping the author the best and sincerely wish that they will complete the game as true to their vision as possible.

I've only played version 3.9 for a few hours and I'm shit at reviews but I highly recommend this game and hope it continues. All the characters and kinks are great, and most importantly there's a good story. The portraits for the characters are well drawn, and I like the fact that there's only one of them for each girl, they never change at all so I know what the characters look like but can still use my imagination for everything else. The only bad I've encountered in this game is sometimes actions that shouldn't be possible go through but others don't. I don't mind one way or another, would just like for it to stay consistent. The only other issue I've had is when a character's being a dom or sub, the dialogue that pops up feels random and doesn't pertain to the actions the characters are doing.

Really good for early dev!

The only cons are being able to save. I really wish I could save before training days. The battles are nearly impossible to win, so any advantage would reduce the frustration.

That and being able to switch workloads. Once you pick it you are commited for the whole day. It'd be nice to back out and pick a secondary workload.

Other than that, very awesome and original idea! Can't wait to see where this goes!

I got some time on my hands and I've been following this game for a while so i thought a review was past due. First of all any game that has more than the bare minimum search-for-the-next-event-and-trigger-the-next-scene linear gameplay, maybe with some default engine assets thrown into the mix, immediately looks promising to me. Unholy Arts very much falls into that category, as it has deep mechanics with regards to relationships between the MC and the other contestants.

The main gameplay loop consists of spending your time doing actions that improve your characters attributes, as well as actions affecting relationship values between you and the other candidates. The other candidates AI do the same, and a lot of interesting procedural interactions can occur. These interactions are usually generic, which depending on who you ask can be good or bad (in my case i see this as good as it leaves more room for player interpretation), however there are also hand written scenes to be discovered.

The main gameplay loop was interesting enough that i've already gotten hours of fun gameplay just poking around, and seeing what reactions and results i get. It was also fun seeing how the behavior of the AI changed over time. The game is relatively early in development (as of 0.3.3 when this review was written), but with such a solid framework it seems even if the rest of the development was spent decorating and tweaking things into place you'd still have a very high quality game still.

One part that is slightly disappointing to me are the lewd scenes. While you can argue that the sub/dom relationship attributes between the candidates are nicely fleshed out and are sexual in nature, the lewd scenes themselves are a bit lackluster. Atleast in terms of effect on the overall playthrough. Yes, depending on what actions you chose during the scene, you will get varying changes in relationship values. But outside of that the scenes feel empty, and the choices you make inconsequential.

As for the story, i don't know if i have that much to say because i generally don't pay attention to it outside of the parts that are important for the game setting (and it has been a while since i played through the intro). You are a candidate priestess chosen by your tribe, to compete with other candidates to determine which of you will become the next Valley's High Priestess. There is a lot more to it and the story is far from finished, but the main draw for me is that the world setting makes sense and is immersive with respect to the gameplay, and the writing is high quality.

Overall I'd say this game is definitely something to look out for, and even in its current state provides hours of gameplay (if you like text based sandboxy games that is). Will be interesting to see the world get more decorated and made more "alive" as development continues. Aside from the sex scenes, everything else looks good from a design perspective, so looking forward to see where this goes.

Not fully to my tastes, but what is there is very well done! I am reviewing version 0.3.0.

I quite enjoy the gameplay overall, building the characters and maintaining interactions and relationships with the rest of the cast felt like a fun puzzle, even if it was one where I felt like I was at a bit too big a disadvantage for what I prefer in my smutty games.

The one feature of the gameplay that might to turn people off is the relatively grindy nature of the moment-to-moment gameplay. However it didn't bother me much at all, despite my usual aversion to grindy games. It also provides some sandbox time for you as a player to do whatever you want and interact with the characters, which feels great.

I really enjoy the characters and writing overall. When it comes to my tastes it basically boils down to the fact that the game is designed as a fight for dominance where there is no real incentive to playing as a sub - I played with a female rather than futa protagonist and the sex gameplay is super awkward if you want to receive because you often lack ways to initialise specific positions or acts, you're at the mercy of the AI, and the AI rarely picked positions that I enjoyed tbh. The bondage elements also felt overall fairly poorly integrated with the sex/fights, but it didn't bother me too much. Similarly random threesomes and general interactions between the AI characters sometimes ruined the mood or just made things kind of strange too.

Overall, I would say the elements of the game that relate to AI actions and randomness are the weakest part, while the writing is quite nice, the art is good and the gameplay is fun.

Its a great game, no doubts about it. Great concept, gameplay is engaging tho a bit repetitive at times. Art looks great as well, the multitude of options there are to try is really something. In fact its good enough to convinve me to subscribe to the patreon because i want to see more of this game. Its a 5 star easily. However, a 0.3 in a year of development doesnt sound great tbh. I hope its not a patreon scam, the creating the game for as long as we can to get as much money as we can type of deal, because im about to sign up for this.

After so much time I feel it's right to do a review of unholy arts. So... let's do it!:

-First of all we have to talk about the concept and how the game works, overall we are the chosen one of the human tribe to become the high priestess and we see a demonic woman in our dreams that can be our character first time.

It's a decent way to introduce but suddenly we have to choose what we are good and bad at. The thing is, at this point we don't know what is a decent build, the effect of the stats or anything like that. Something that should already be in the game are a few presets with an explanation on how to use them later on, but no, at this point a blind new player has to guess what should be chosen and this is what I would call a mistake in the game.

Later on we meet the candidates and we can see their personality and interact with them, we can see that some are more pure and are weak to you being forward, others will use your flirt and counter you while we have even a beastgirl that is quite aggresive at the start. We can even have sex with one out of 3 friendly rivals.

I would say that on the story level everything is okay, we have a motive (wanting to be high priestess), rules and a competition aspect. But then... we meet the gameplay.

-Gameplay: I will be quite direct, this is kind of the worst part of the game, all the interactive system and the storyline aspect is really nice but on this aspect it just needs a lot of improvement:

*For example, when you are moving in the temple there are many things that need to be changed:

1º If you have a map you don't need the hyperlinks, let people just clic on the map and give a better use for that space

2º The map shouldn't be below but on top and in fact it should be 2 or 3 times bigger.

3º Related to characters in the room it should directly say to the right of it what each character is doing (like walk towards east library) it is kind of meaningless to write it below the character list. Still out of the 3 this is a minor thing that can easily be ignored.

Still we fall again at "we don't have any freaking idea of what to do at the start", what should we train? what stats are important? we don't know it, starting players have it quite hard unless they love to make mistakes and learn from them.

On the other hand soon we get an introduction to events, I would say that events are the best thing on this game cause they are quite fresh compared to generic interactions. It would be kind of nice if the generic interactions could actually have a bit of that spirit.

But finally we have the fights, again this needs at the very least to give some customization to the player and... use colours and explanations. Seriously add a colour depending on the stat that the action chooses and especify if it's a lust/control or what type of action it is. Even more let us hide some of the actions that doesn't fit our current build, if I'm physique focused I would love to hide mage actions and viceversa.

Another point that would be nice is the ability to be able to hear what is happening on nearby rooms but well, that's a bit secondary.

I have to say that the game is nice, especially how interactive it is, but it has so many minor mistakes that make it harder for people to start/learn to play that it kind of overcomplicates stuff, in fact I kind of feel like on the setting level the game is starting to go a bit on the wrong side (like the overall setting being made for all characters being futanaries but you can just disable it and being able to choose if there are servitude relationships or not, I mean, all that is canon shouldn't be an option, but that's just what I think).

I think the system is in a good place. Hopefully more and more story events to flesh out the world are added. I think the developer is already going in this direction but having events that build a character to certain fetishes would also be nice. I like where this game is going.

This game definitely stands out in it's story and character interactions. It's a turn-based-combat dating simulator that surprisingly fits together quiet nicely. The character backgrounds and personalities are nicely fleshed out, (at least to the extent to which the game is developed to right now), and there's at least 3 hours of content available (.29) before you run out of scripted events. I do wish there were more dialogue, events and interactions, but it's still pretty early in development as of right now, and it seems like more will come. I passed over this game a couple times before trying it, and I definitely wish I did earlier. 4/5 Worth a try.

God bless. What a mess.
Game is just full of questionable design choices.

Lets look at progression, fucked on every single level:
You can pick if you are good or bad at stats 3 times each on chargen. But it doesn't list 90% of what any given stat does. Ie it doesn't tell you damn near every sex act scales with agility. Like nearly all of them. Pure agility or partially, nearly nothing doesn't involve it.

You can grind agility if you fucked that up (or do what I did and not bother because the sex is also fundamentally flawed anyways), but you gain pathetic stat growth per day and grinding stats means you aren't interacting with the girls; the thing you played this to do. You CAN do both at once. After day like 20. At which point the game is full of other issues anyways. And studying with a girl adds no unique interactions or anything; they just also gain exp, which means you fuck yourself over doing so.

And you will want these high stats. What for? You don't know yet. You see, the game is very linear. On X day you will get an event with Y girl. You may be able to make this event less shitty if a girl is submissive enough to you, you have a high enough x stat or xyz stats, but you won't know what stats you need for X day until X day comes. So either suck it up or replay half the game to try and reach enough to see that result. How much is enough? Game doesn't say.
A lot of these events make no real sense even if you have good enough stats. Why is athletic girl 1 (not a bitch) 'settling' on training with me when athetic girl 2 (a bitch) won't do so? Saying they're the only fit girls around? I have higher stats than both of them physically.

Even if you do reload the game to do a dozen days to get x stat higher, make y girl like you more or just to try out the dozen functionally identical options presented to find the one that actually differs in an encounter, enjoy how fucking slow the game is, for no apparent reason.
Click thing
...
...
...
Hey it happened! Like 2-3 seconds per action. Doesn't sound like much, but it adds up.

And even if you are only wanting to redo a single event to see all the options, unless that's at the start of the day, you will have to redo more. Because you can only save at the start of every day. You can't press back arrow to go to last option either. Why? Far as I can tell, because fuck you, that's why.

At one point 2 girls have a fight, you can help if one likes you enough. That's the only check. Your other stats? If the OTHER girl likes you? Irrelevant. Fuck you. If girl 1 wins, girl 2 becomes 'more open to talking with others'. But she'll amost always lose. Time to savescum for this bonus you likely won't know exists.

At another point, you are offered 3 spells; hypnotism, binding, some other one. What do they do? What do they scale with? Do they act differently in convo, in sex, in sex fights? Name aside, you get no fucking info until you pick them. And that's just 'you can use it in battle' or the like, not what it does; need to go find someone to talk to, fight, etc, to see if what they do is worth a damn. Enjoying replaying that day 3+ times over. And hope you made a backup here for when it introduces sex fights, so you can reload, mash through all the days to the sex fight day, THEN see what it does in a sex fight. I don't care enough to do this. Fuck off. Just tell me what the fucking thing does when I'm given the choice, goddamn.

And speaking of speaking, good luck with that. Girls have a near permanent -20 'mood' debuff. All of them. All the time. You have to click them to check, wait a few seconds, be told 'lol fuck off', wait a few seconds, then you can try on another girl. Fuun. And if you DO talk to them, what you can do per turn is random. Say you are trying a dom-sub relationship with grass girl domming you. You want to ask her for headpats and the like. FUCK YOU. Enjoy nothing but 'call her a whore' and 'rub her ass' options 20 times in a row.
Now say you are doing this to make fit girl like you for that guaranteed static encounter later on. Enjoy reloading until you can talk to her, then again when it makes you only able to call her fat. Fuuun.

It gets worse once you unlock the combat. Hoo boy the combat. Its so bad. You just spam freeze or whatever until they get to 0/5 control, mount, zap tits, fuck until you win. Except when they escape instantly for no reason. Which they do. Reload.
You can team up with people to make it easier, but so can the AI. And the AI does this. A lot. Get ready to be 3 v 1'd when 2 girls who hate fit bitch 2 but explictly love you inexplicably help her rape you into submission every time you try to do literally anything at all. Want to train? RAPE TRAIN. Want to read? 5 v 1 rape train! Its fucking absurd. Any fight where you outnumber the enemy is just absolutely trivial so you end up just hiring and raping everyone yourself just so you can do anything at all ever.

On top of all this, sex itself is just a series of 'you sucked her dick' messages identical for everyone; one size fits all sex, ala liliths throne and similar games. So its not that tittilating. Its similar to jacking it to a calculator. And when you DO have sex, you go the girls room to do it. So you have to click to exit her room, then go up, then go up, Then you can click to any of the rooms relevant to training stats. 2-3 seconds per input.

Like holy fuck why does it take so many clicks, so many rng checks, so much bullshit, to do anything?

Why is so little explained? Why do I need to replay like 5 days just to see what 'shackle bitch' does in an actual fight? Why is the map so bad? Why are 90% of the stats and character relationships useless, despite being 100% of the fucking game, only being checked with any meaningful level of interaction during entirely static, pre-determined scenes, which barely use any of them even when they should?

As a last note, if you are hear for the futa; you can all be futa or all not be. There's no option for only futa protag unless you pay for a cheat version that apparently has that. If you want to pay for a slightly less bad version of a game stitched together entirely from flaws.

Good game with a lot of potential. Each update has shown some decent progress. The battle system and character interaction system seems to have enough bones for some interesting possibilities in future updates.

Probably the most interesting web game so far. that can go many ways
A hidden gem more should play

The focus on NPC's that have different goals and objectives simulating something akin to an A.I that has goals contrary to planner means a game that can vary quite alot based on your actions

Battles in my opinion can be a bit long and could benefit from some art and icon navigation but the content and design of this game is second to none and is fresh air in this engine