Unity - Completed - Widow in the Endless Labyrinth [v1.1.2 + R18 DLC] [Hajime Doujin Circle]

Combat is fine but this game is reaaally boring, it's like a roguelike but the enemies are braindead and builds are uninteresting, movement is too slow and all floors are basically the same, the game is rearelly interupted by the story and it comes out as kinda rushed, but at the same time the game could have half the lenght and it would still be too long for it's content.
But the game does have it's positives, it look really good, especially comparing it to the developer's other games, and it plays decently, it's pretty ok if you just want to turn your brain off and push buttons for about 5 to 7 hours.
The real problem here, I think ,is how incomplete it feels, story is confusing and short there's a bunch of characters but we don't really get to know any of them properly, the levels are always the same and combat gets boring fast, there's not that many enemies in the game and the ones that the game has feel the same. This game feels like a overextended demo, I hope it gets more content in the future or the developer reclicles a good chunk of it for future games

as PORN this is crap 0 out of 5. the porn is an addon to tick the box of an adult game. just some BDSM scenes with a single recycled voice and animation. with some variance in restrain device.

as a game is very good for 10 hours or so until you finish it one and never look back. is better tha most 3d roguelike on steam (a very low bar but still)

Game is fairly unchallenging, but who cares; it's all about unlocking the bdsm scenes! Nevertheless the game has some quite captivating gameplay; fun to play just to unlock the scenes. Renders aren't the best there could be, but they re quite decent. Clothing needs a bit more work , other than that i dont have more to say; it's aleady hard to find 3d bdsm games with realtime rendering

Pros
Hajime Doujin Circle (HDC) knows how to surprise its player base by keeping the games varied and the players on their toes. If you have played the previous titles and feel confident that you know everything, get ready for a surprise. Cinderella was a tank that laid waste to armies. Mina was a ninja that could ill-afford to fight more than three enemies at a times. But now, the Widow is a red mage.

The Widow does not excel at close combat. And before you complete the tutorial section, you realize that the Widow can no longer spam Huuma Shuriken because of its long cooldown timer. She must choose her skills wisely and pick items that customize her skills. Lightning Bolt needs Sky Breaking Drill to be most effective. Floating Eye needs Energetic Batteries. Sword Rain needs Hourglass of Disorder. You then need items to help you against various enemy combinations. Each skill helps you deal with enemies in a unique way. Lightning Bolt, for instance, can stun electronic enemies such as robots and quadcopters.

On the whole, there many challenges and many ways to stratagize.

Other game mechanics have changed too. Neither the Widow nor her enemies can become staggerproof by simply having clothes on. There are no DP bars in this game. Some rare enemies are staggerproof by default, but you know why when you see them. There are far less staggerlocking too.

And don't worry, the labyrinth is anything but endless. There are five multi-staged labyrinths with a boss fight at the end of the last stage, plus one lengthier Labyrinth X with two bosses at the end of each stage.

You have full control over the game's difficulty. If the Widow falls in combat, you can either reload your game or have her deal with it. She must pay half her hazelnuts to come back to the game. Before doing that she can either pay half her gold to get her ax back or keep fighting in bondage, Cinderella-style.

Cons
The game has many problems, not one. You can't fail to notice them. And if I create a bug-log of them here, I'll become very unpopular. But we can focus on big ones.

Even though the game features full nudity (unlike Mina and Cinderella), there are very little sexual contents, even less than previous titles. Only the Widow can end up in bondage. Fortunately, the gallery lets you see them without you getting defeated. But the only way to have the Widow fight in bondage is a defeat.

The biggest issue, in my view, however, is the story. HDC often selects poorly written, macabre stories, and this one is by far the worst. But I don't think anyone here cares. Eroge games usually have three types of stories: Bad, awful, and abysmal.

As for the minor issues, the game is too white. We do have other colors in the nature, though. Also, the gold is mostly useless. You cannot buy skill upgrades with it. The biggest consumer of gold in this game is the hairdo category of the Widow's wardrobe!

From Cinderella Escape 2 onwards, the devs of this cricle have made progessively more ambitious action games and progressively less ambitious H-games.

The outfits are less varied than they were in their second ever game, the h-scenes have animations I feel are ripped form their other games and honestly the characters are worse as well.

Does the gameplay make that worth it?
Eh.
The fundamentals are good, movement is decent though not great, and aside from the wonky camera I have little negative to say about the movement.

Combat itself is bad though. Enemies are way too strong for you to seriously use the competent melee and combo system, as you easily get stunlocked and killed. So just use the skills which do more damage and are way more effective anyway. So instead of beat-em-up action game you play mage, oneshotting enemies from afar and waiting for cooldowns the rest of the time.

What about the roguelike aspect?
Quite bad honestly. The fact that you have a persistent levelling and perk progression while fighting through a roguelike means that on your thrid or so run you'll have to slog through 20 minutes of enemies you oneshot before you get any challenge. But don't worry, you next run will be 30 minutes slogging, 10 minutes decent gameplay, and then you're probably done with the game.

There is potential here. If, for example, every time you lost you'd get put in different bondage and that changed your next run, if there were more varied and better items, if the combat were better....

As an enjoyer of bdsm, ryona and roguelikes, this could be the game of my dreams. Unfortunately, it isn't.

There's a lot of potential here. The combat is fast, fluid, and entertaining. Good animations, fun skills, some combos to learn, etc.

But the enemies are total derps and the skills are SUPER overpowered, so none of it matters...

You don't need to block, you don't need to stun, you don't need to learn AAB or AAAAB or whatever else there is - you just walk in, drop a clone, one-shot everyone with the big sword skill, wait for the annoying slo-mo "Room clear!" animation to finish.

The other problem is the sexual content is pretty bleh. PC is not very attractive, outfits are bleh, CG's were bleh, need to force yourself to lose in order to "win"... I quit after an hour or so.

The gameplay takes another slight turn from its predecessors—Cinderella Escape was more of a puzzle platformer; Huuma Mina was a sprawling free-roaming adventure game; and No!Ah!'s Ark took a wild turn into more of a shmup genre; this game has changed the formula slightly to a series of more linear beat-'em-up contests. The combat, however, is functionally the same as the last games, so if you remember how to play either of those aforementioned games, you've probably got a good grasp on the controls already, barring the fact that certain things that were mainstays of prior games like sprinting and double-jumps are now locked behind item pickups here.

The difficulty curve really starts to plateau upon reaching "Maze 3", where you should start to have a decent number of item and emblem slots to buff your character, not to mention the types of skills afforded you. You could very easily get items that double the duration of your summons, allowing you to summon a sizable horde of minions, or that make your projectile skills infinitely pierce, trivializing combat. Where this game starts to fall apart is its lack of character creation content, in which other games would let you dress the protagonist up as characters from previous installments (and even dress and play as other NPCs if you used the dev console), in this game, your dress-up options are limited only to what comes from the boss characters and cutscenes in this game. This is saved—slightly—by a console command that gives you a new camera type, "orbitcam", which lets you take more dynamic and scenic pictures of your character and her surroundings.

As a fan of bondage games myself, I personally download each of Hajime's games whenever they release. And while I personally enjoy all of this developer's games that they put out, at some point, they start to feel incredibly same-y. That said, for as much as I still liked this game, the best I can give it is three stars. It needs more... more level variety, more customization, more... something.

Controls seem slightly sluggish.

My main problem with the game is where it forces you to use a specific skill set three times before you can even continue with the game at the beginning, thanks but no thanks, in most games like this 95% of the combos are worthless and being forced to use them just to continue through the in effect tutorial, yeh no.

This game feels extremely unpolished, to the point where you could basically skip the entire gameplay and miss nothing. As soon as of the first level, you can already throw together a completely broken build with permanent invincibility and one-shotting every enemy by getting the big sword and the barrier skill, the cooldown and duration item. At that point, you basically can't die unless you choose to. There's not much of an incentive to play it properly either, you unlock scenes by killing enemies. Enemies are stupid enough that you'd struggle to die regardless, if you have some life steal from emblems. The parry system isn't really rewarding, you stun melee enemies and deflect ranged attacks, but the damage you deal is pitiful, compared to spamming skills or attacks and there are easier and less dangerous ways of stunning enemies. The entire combat system feels tedious, rather than challenging in any way, even if you engage it properly. Only one or two enemies present any kind of danger, if you choose not to use skills to just one-shot them. There's also rather little diversity among the enemies, you probably won't even have to change tactics for bosses.

The scenes themselves are pretty lackluster as well, a few lines of dialogue at the start and then the bondage/snuff stuff. It's basically just looping a relatively short animation, if that does it for you, get a save, the gameplay is not worth it.

The story can basically be considered incomplete, it feels like a set-up, there's no actual resolution to it, by the end you're just caught in the endless labyrinth. You get some revelations about the main character, but that's it.

Overall, I'd recommend to skip this or get a save file, since it's just ~3 hours of tedium, rather than an actual game. You can try to get some enjoyment out of the gameplay, but after trying out the skills and everything, after roughly 30 minutes you'll probably get bored.

The bondage/bdsm devices are great, but the rest of it feels pretty half-baked to be honest. Would need some pretty big overhauls to really be great.

The game is largely made up of 5 levels of 3 floors each, followed by a floor that's just a single boss room, and a presumably endless level after you finish for postgame. Unfortunately, the gameplay doesn't really develop much past the first level, more just numbers going up with the same motions. Someone else would probably be best to describe the Rogue-like elements, because on my first run I threw together a random build and it was so comically overpowered that my health pretty much didn't dip below 80% ever. Lifesteal, multiple floating turrets following me that shoot enemies, a large lightning ball that quickly multihits and stuns with a less than 2 second cooldown. It felt cool at first putting it together, but when you've trivialized the game by 1-3, having 12 more floors to finish the game isn't too exciting.

Now what is a floor in this? It's a grid of some size, and you move from room to room searching for the exit between squares. Each square is one of three things. A basic room, a ? special one, or an exit. Basic rooms are simple, you enter, enemies spawn, it gets closed off and only opens once you defeat the enemies. Standard fare. Exit rooms are the same but with more/stronger enemies, and take you to the next floor. The special ? ones have a small variety, either a chest, rock to hit for gold, ghostly person offering a challenge for a reward, or a character stuck in a bondage device which you can rescue at the cost of an enemy encounter.

Unfortunately, this does mean that the bondage devices are pretty much entirely divorced from the actual gameplay, with only a single one showing up as an uninteractable prop to signify the rescue encounters. Where they are put is in the lose situations, taking the main character to a dungeon where they're tied up and whipped, allowing you to freely move the camera and watch. Definitely the best part of the game, while some bondage is recycled from the dev's other games, it does all look great with the visuals, devices, and sound effects in my opinion. But after you continue you basically pay half some of your resources to escape, then back to the main hub to continue. You can also manually enter these bondage/torture scenarios with the Collection tab, with each one unlocking based on a certain amount of kills of certain enemy types. I unlocked like 1/3 of them on my first run, but based on percentages I think a second full run would probably get them all as I was halfway to most.

Honestly this dev is confusing to follow, while I think the animations and devices get better with time, each subsequent game feels like the bdsm gets more and more separated from gameplay. Cinderella had it integrated in combat and puzzles, Huuma Mina did it around the maps where fight takes place, No ah's ark made it a postlevel/game reward, and now this one makes it a lose condition only/unlocked through grinding. Like you've got randomized rooms, I'm shocked there isn't some sort of trapped chest or trick npc that utilizes bondage. Hope they return to more gameplay integrated devices in a future game.

TL;DR: Bondage devices are great to watch, but gameplay needs a lot of work to be fun. Losing and using the Collection/Gallery are available for viewing bondage scenarios, so probably worth the download for you if someone puts up a 100% save or you don't mind grinding for them by dying or MMO-esque mob farming.