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| Iratus, a very angry necromancer |
There is a point to it. Honest.
Technically, Iratus has monster girls. No succubi, as your forces are drawn from the necromantic section of the classic fantasy bestiary rather than the demonic, but you can recruit female monsters such as vampires, banshees (even ghouls) to your teams. The developers are Russian, so they're still allowed to put boobs on their female characters.
The easiest way to describe it is – Darkest Dungeon, but where you get to play the monsters.
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| Combat might look familiar if you've played Darkest Dungeon, but does play a little differently |
You play Iratus, the titular Lord of the Dead. After being released from long imprisonment, he embarks on a journey to conquer the surface world. The basic economy is body parts. You craft your minions out of body parts and get more by slaying the various hapless miners, dwarves and high-fantasy D&D parties stupid enough to stand in your way.
Unlike Darkest Dungeon, there is a clear fail state. Body parts are limited. Lose too many minions and you will run out of body parts to craft more and will have to restart. It is also very easy to lose minions as – just like Darkest Dungeon – the combat is fairly brutal and unforgiving. Your minions are very squishy and while you don't have to worry about sanity (this is a reverse Darkest Dungeon, so you get to drive your enemies insane instead, although this isn't always a good thing…), there isn't a Death's Door mechanic, so enemy crits have a nasty habit of killing minions out of nowhere.
As with Darkest Dungeon you have a home base to update and combat consists of 4 rows of your team battling 4 rows of their team, where position is important and dictates what attacks can and can't be used. Despite the similarities, it plays differently enough to be its own thing.
Combat is interesting. You can choose to either kill your enemies with direct damage or spook them hard enough until their hearts burst from stress. The direct damage is split between melee and magical, with both having different resistances. How the resistances work is also interesting. Defence comes in either armour resistance, which reduces incoming damage, or blocks/wards, which completely nullifies a hit at the cost of losing a block/ward (unless it's a crit). This brings an extra tactical component. Big, single-hit attacks are good versus armour resistance, but bad against block/wards. On the other hand, smaller multi-hit attacks are great for chewing through wards, but can be countered by decent armour resistance as each individual hit doesn't do a lot of damage.
Overall, despite looking a lot like Darkest Dungeon, combat plays a little differently. Enemies are a lot tankier, so it's difficult to nuke out a single target on the first turn. Also, because of the block/ward system, AoE attacks hitting multiple targets are viable, whereas in Darkest Dungeon they tended to be pretty bad.
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| Exploration is a little similar to Slay the Spire |
Currently Iratus is still in Early Access, so it's incomplete and there are a few balance problems. The devs do seem to be responding to feedback and making good updates. I like the change to show the whole enemy group when next to it rather than just a single unit. It's a game where you need to form teams to counter various different parties and that tactical element is missing if there's no real way to predict what you might face.
It's definitely worth a look, especially if you're a fan of the original Darkest Dungeon. The devs seem to have taken that for inspiration and then iterated upon it to make a game that is different enough to stand on its own. Which is pretty much the history of videogames in a nutshell.
Okay, so why are you talking about it, Hydra?
With Iratus and another game, Vambrace: Cold Soul, it looks like Darkest Dungeon was successful enough to spawn a new subtype of turn-based RPGs. And that usually gets me thinking as to whether that blueprint could work for a sexy monster girl game.
This time I thought I might as well put some of the ideas I have in a more public place. Rather than write them down in a notebook, forget them, lose the notebook, yadda yadda.
So, I'll make that a little mini-series this week (or next) - my thoughts on how to make a Darkest Dungeon-esque hentai game. As with most of these ideas, I'm aware I don't have the technical chops to pull them off, but it might inspire someone that does, and we'd all love to see more sexy monster girl games made!
