(reviewed v0.45 R1)
I first tried out Virtual Succubus when it came out a couple years back. It was an interesting concept but felt very shallow in terms of the provided features, models, and audio design. Decided to shelve it for a couple years and then see where it ended up. What's the verdict? Well...
Gameplay
Menus upon menus upon menus to tweak you Succubus to the fetishes and toys you want her to use and when you want her to use them along with how long you want her to use them. Setting up everything is some combination of exhausting and extremely customizable in terms of behvaiors. On the one hand it's nice to be able to specify all the minutae of every fetish and what arousal level it's used at. On the other hand the average player is probably not going to touch 90% of the fetishes and kinks on offer due to a lack of interest or a lack of toys. And going through his exhaustive menu section by section is required because holy hell the default Succbus settings result in a very odd Succubus that asks you to pinch you asscheek for 4 minutes at a time multiple times in your first session.
Once in a game the succbus gives you tasks according to your millions of settings at random. Sometimes that can work well and sometimes it can result in an odd fixation on a fetish that you enjoy but not multiple times in one setting. Every time you're given a task you usually can choose a "make the succubus happy" result or "make the succubus mad" choice which results in rewards or punishments respectively. Despite being a huge fan of femdom themed games I never felt like the punishment side of things to be very compelling and even after spending an inordinate amount of time in my menus i often became quite bored with the punishments before the Succubus would move on from them. The result was a strong incentive to only follow the "make the succubus happy" path of the session every time.
At the end of the day the point of the gameplay is to give you the illusion that an AI charcter is in control of your JOI session. Perhaps this illusion works well if you have a VERY wide range of fetishes and toys at your disposal. If however you don't what you end up with is a "program your own JOI bot" where the illusion simply doesn't work because of your aforementioned deep knowledge of all the minutae in her settings. Conceptually the Succubus could learn from each session and change but that really doesn't seem to be the case at all. It just relies on the exhaustive millions of little settings and RNG dice rolls.
Graphcis
Middling to below average graphics that haven't really improved significantly since its early days. You can customize some basic features of your succubus but compared to most H games these days there is an extreme lack of customization options available in the body type. No waist/hips sliders. No height sliders. No thick/skinny sliders. No face customizations. Futa genitalia is an on/off toggle that doesn't show as a bulge in any of the costumes. These all seem like very reasonable limitations for an early concept of a game but after multiple years and tremendous amounts of patreon funding it's such an obvious oversight it really leaves you wondering where the dev's priorities are. When you look into it you see that these things have been requested hundreds of times to a response of "IT'S IMPOSSIBLE!" from the developer because of the original design of a single model in their Unity game engine. It comes off as almost patronizing when game engine addons exist or can be custom made to do these exact things. H game players have experienced exactly these features in a multitude of other works and don't care if clipping issues arise. You're left thinking it's either a lack of skill, interest, or willingness to fork over the money to pay someone who can create those features. All three answers are kinda sucky.
Many costumes are available for you Succu-chan that you don't get to see a gallery of. Some are exciting. Many are rather boring and create a gameplay issue when you're just asked to edge to a model of your Succubus wearing a poorly modeled dress just standing there doing almost nothing.
Succu-chan is constantly animating but the best animations (those where the succubus actually does some large movement rather than standing there with a hand slightly moving) are rarely given out. They're great when you see them but again you don't get to see them much. Some actions such as butt/breast smother utilize a fully black screen as their "animation". The dev again tries to defend this by claiming a black screen is their "vision" for these actions when in actuality it's the cheapest, low effort route to add these fetishes. Not a good look for a game raking in extreme amounts of patreon funding.
H-Content
This is a difficult section. While the game contains an extremely large number of fetishes you need to decide for yourself how much effort is required to actually scratch your fetish itch. If simply being able to perform X thing on yourself that you enjoy is enough to get you going then this is sufficient for you. But if you expect like *any* sort of visual stimulation remotely associated with your fetish you're basically SOL. You won't be seeing your succu-chan-bot holding up any fetish related items or performing actions related to your kinks (example: holding a vibrator or crop when telling you to use one) most times. When you do get an animation such as a footjob I have to admit it's a bit... stiff. And that's not a pun. The animation quality for big actions isn't amazing - only acceptable.
Audio
Big disappointment and missed opportunity. Outside of a handful of (admittedly great) recorded lines your succu-chan-bot is silent. The whole experience would be elevated tenfold with some additional recording work.
Conclusion
A decent JOI game but you need to take into account the length of development and the very high earnings this game is raking in via patreon funding and early access sales. It's extremely difficult to be satisfied with the current product in light of what it feels like that kind of success should be able to provide for its fans. As it stands now I enjoyed a couple of sessions and quickly became cynical with how obvious the game worked behind the scenes. Once the immersion is broken the game simply doesn't succeed at what it's trying to do.
I first tried out Virtual Succubus when it came out a couple years back. It was an interesting concept but felt very shallow in terms of the provided features, models, and audio design. Decided to shelve it for a couple years and then see where it ended up. What's the verdict? Well...
Gameplay
Menus upon menus upon menus to tweak you Succubus to the fetishes and toys you want her to use and when you want her to use them along with how long you want her to use them. Setting up everything is some combination of exhausting and extremely customizable in terms of behvaiors. On the one hand it's nice to be able to specify all the minutae of every fetish and what arousal level it's used at. On the other hand the average player is probably not going to touch 90% of the fetishes and kinks on offer due to a lack of interest or a lack of toys. And going through his exhaustive menu section by section is required because holy hell the default Succbus settings result in a very odd Succubus that asks you to pinch you asscheek for 4 minutes at a time multiple times in your first session.
Once in a game the succbus gives you tasks according to your millions of settings at random. Sometimes that can work well and sometimes it can result in an odd fixation on a fetish that you enjoy but not multiple times in one setting. Every time you're given a task you usually can choose a "make the succubus happy" result or "make the succubus mad" choice which results in rewards or punishments respectively. Despite being a huge fan of femdom themed games I never felt like the punishment side of things to be very compelling and even after spending an inordinate amount of time in my menus i often became quite bored with the punishments before the Succubus would move on from them. The result was a strong incentive to only follow the "make the succubus happy" path of the session every time.
At the end of the day the point of the gameplay is to give you the illusion that an AI charcter is in control of your JOI session. Perhaps this illusion works well if you have a VERY wide range of fetishes and toys at your disposal. If however you don't what you end up with is a "program your own JOI bot" where the illusion simply doesn't work because of your aforementioned deep knowledge of all the minutae in her settings. Conceptually the Succubus could learn from each session and change but that really doesn't seem to be the case at all. It just relies on the exhaustive millions of little settings and RNG dice rolls.
Graphcis
Middling to below average graphics that haven't really improved significantly since its early days. You can customize some basic features of your succubus but compared to most H games these days there is an extreme lack of customization options available in the body type. No waist/hips sliders. No height sliders. No thick/skinny sliders. No face customizations. Futa genitalia is an on/off toggle that doesn't show as a bulge in any of the costumes. These all seem like very reasonable limitations for an early concept of a game but after multiple years and tremendous amounts of patreon funding it's such an obvious oversight it really leaves you wondering where the dev's priorities are. When you look into it you see that these things have been requested hundreds of times to a response of "IT'S IMPOSSIBLE!" from the developer because of the original design of a single model in their Unity game engine. It comes off as almost patronizing when game engine addons exist or can be custom made to do these exact things. H game players have experienced exactly these features in a multitude of other works and don't care if clipping issues arise. You're left thinking it's either a lack of skill, interest, or willingness to fork over the money to pay someone who can create those features. All three answers are kinda sucky.
Many costumes are available for you Succu-chan that you don't get to see a gallery of. Some are exciting. Many are rather boring and create a gameplay issue when you're just asked to edge to a model of your Succubus wearing a poorly modeled dress just standing there doing almost nothing.
Succu-chan is constantly animating but the best animations (those where the succubus actually does some large movement rather than standing there with a hand slightly moving) are rarely given out. They're great when you see them but again you don't get to see them much. Some actions such as butt/breast smother utilize a fully black screen as their "animation". The dev again tries to defend this by claiming a black screen is their "vision" for these actions when in actuality it's the cheapest, low effort route to add these fetishes. Not a good look for a game raking in extreme amounts of patreon funding.
H-Content
This is a difficult section. While the game contains an extremely large number of fetishes you need to decide for yourself how much effort is required to actually scratch your fetish itch. If simply being able to perform X thing on yourself that you enjoy is enough to get you going then this is sufficient for you. But if you expect like *any* sort of visual stimulation remotely associated with your fetish you're basically SOL. You won't be seeing your succu-chan-bot holding up any fetish related items or performing actions related to your kinks (example: holding a vibrator or crop when telling you to use one) most times. When you do get an animation such as a footjob I have to admit it's a bit... stiff. And that's not a pun. The animation quality for big actions isn't amazing - only acceptable.
Audio
Big disappointment and missed opportunity. Outside of a handful of (admittedly great) recorded lines your succu-chan-bot is silent. The whole experience would be elevated tenfold with some additional recording work.
Conclusion
A decent JOI game but you need to take into account the length of development and the very high earnings this game is raking in via patreon funding and early access sales. It's extremely difficult to be satisfied with the current product in light of what it feels like that kind of success should be able to provide for its fans. As it stands now I enjoyed a couple of sessions and quickly became cynical with how obvious the game worked behind the scenes. Once the immersion is broken the game simply doesn't succeed at what it's trying to do.
.