Greentext Does Niplheim’s Hunter.

So we all know that piracy will never be defeated by code or drm or serial codes. There’s only 2 ways to defeat piracy and that’s by either A. Making the paid version more convenient than the pirated version or B. By endearing yourself to your customers. After seeing this comment by the game’s publisher HappyHand I can definitely say they’ve done the latter.

The story’s beginning can be a bit confusing. In the opening you see the character on the cover, Azel, walking into a bar along with someone who’s narrating what’s going on. Why is someone other than the main character talking in the first person and why do you get to choose their name? Because they’re also your protagonist, kind of.

The story’s setup is pretty simple. Azel got a lust brand on her crotch from a demon and now wants to join up with a monster hunter guild to hunt him down. You know, as you do. Our mystery narrator is her blacksmith friend who she’s been tagging along with. He makes her armor and she brings him materials. He also supplies contributes to supplying the D.

See, the blacksmith adds something real interesting to the game. Many adult games have a character that the player is supposed to imprint on or even subconsciously insert themselves into. Aside from the ratio of cocks to clams being skewed towards cock a big reason people don’t like games with female protagonists is because there is no male character to latch onto. Blacksmith fixes this. Not only does he dick Azel but he also dicks all the other women in the game. Most scenes are still from Azel’s perspective and you still control her in combat but this still serves as a nice compromise between a game with a female and male protagonist.

The game itself follows your standard RPG formula with the addition of a heavier focus on crafting and a lust mechanic. You have a main hub town where you can buy and improve weapons and armor, purchase snacks before you head out, and accept quests. Actually they’re less quests and more “missions”. You have a set amount of dungeons and each one of those has gathering missions such as “Collect 9 troll kidneys”, extermination missions like “Kill 4 dire-lobsters”, and hunt missions like “Slay the evil giant badger tyrant”. Typically what you end up doing is accepting your 3 maximum quests for whichever area you happen to be heading to, collecting your goodies, exterminating your monsters, and then hunting your target at which point it will kick you back to town with all 3 missions ready to turn in. Of course killing monsters also nets you experience which lets you level up strength for harder hitting, dex for more items and chance to double hit, defense for taking harder hits, and luck for more crits.

Like I said before, the game also leans heavily into crafting but not to the extent that games like Alchemy Meister did. There will be resource nodes scattered throughout the dungeons that you can collect items at and every enemy you slay will immediately drop their teeth, hides, wallet, organs, and anything else they happen to have on them for you to scoop up and carry back to craft into new and exciting fetish outfits.

Lastly you have the lust mechanic. Instead of mana that counts downwards as you use skills you have lust that counts upwards. Healing yourself outside of battle or using weapon skills and special attacks will increase your lust. When your lust reaches 100 you get fucked by the enemy and then lose control for a few turns. At the beginning of the game this is a death sentence but as you keep playing and keep increasing your sexual stats you unlock abilities that make you invincible while lust stunned, completely negating any downside of spamming skills.

Due to the nature of what I do I inevitably need to talk about the sex. Unfortunately art, being what it is, is subjective so this is always hard for me to approach. I can say that I found the smut to be pretty good but that says nothing for you. I mean I thought Seeds Of Chaos had decent art but I’ve been informed that apparently it has the worst art in history and that I should off myself reconsider what I said. One thing I can talk about is tell you the type of smut and critique it’s presentation so let’s do that.

You can check the kinds of smut in this page’s tags but I want to explain how this game does a pretty good job of presenting it’s porn. For starters, it’s well known that I hate games that punish you for wanting to see porn. Normally a game where you have to get potential game overs to see sex scenes would be bad but luckily Niplheim avoids this by allowing you to see the scene for any monster by checking the bestiary after you defeat an enemy. Losing is never required. You also have access to seen CGs and full scenes at any time by checking the book in your room. Unfortunately there are a couple problems that hold it back from perfect porn presentation. You can press Q to hide dialogue during scenes but you have to hold down Q the entire time and, oddly enough, the text itself doesn’t hide, just the box behind it. My other problem is the lack of a rewind feature on scenes. You do have a text log feature but it only has a dozen or so lines and doesn’t let you see previous CGs or voice lines.

Niplheim’s Hunter is a good game and I never would have given it a real try if not for HappyHand’s conduct on IGG-Games. It’s release on steam has made it easy to buy and with a 30% off sale going on at the time of writing I’d definitely suggest taking a look. No more sale. The game is good but I’m not sure it’s $20 good. Maybe wait for another sale. As of right now you can download Niplheim’s Hunter for free here or show HappyHand some love and pay for it here. It also, you know, keeps him from starving.