Shroud

I am all for some post apocalyptic AVN. This one has a generally good story concept but poor execution all around. Most if not all images have this stupid vignette effect. Really annoying. Its baked in. Can't be turned off. The intro kind of drags on and on. Its not really that interesting. Sex scenes are literally just mechanical. Not erotic at all. No text at all. Totally a mood killer. Dev thinks implementing a constant tinnitus sound in one moment is a good idea. With a choice in between. To be clear. Not the whole game but it can stay for like ten seconds if you ponder your choice. The game basically hides its lack of content behind a bunch of gameplay stuff no one really cares about.

PROS I like the Fallout vibe. Tone and stylistically, its very dystopian. That's what I want from a post-apocalyptic game. Relatively unique dungeon crawler gameplay. Unfortunately, there is not much to explore so far. Most of the 'squares' you use to explore are locked. MEH Story is you fell out of some ship where your community lives and now you have to survive in this toxic surface world. The game doesn't really give you enough time to care about the characters so idc that guy/girl dies in the beginning. Its a whatever plot honestly. Also a Dragon? Really?? Is this a medieval fantasy or a modern post-apocalyptic game. Why tf would there be a dragon lol. I guess the line between Skyrim & Fallout got crossed. I also guess there isnt much creativity on Daz store. CONS Renders are okay. The animations are just short premade Stimuli animations, nothing custom. For the first sex scene, he uses this & this . If you're familiar with the AVN scene, you've probably seen those animations in many other games, particular older games, as the new devs just do their own animations. Get ready to click. Just to kill one enemy is a lot of clicks. And the enemies are insanely strong to prolong gameplay time & encourage resource hoarding. If you used your bullets beforehand, its impossible to kill the raider boss with the resources available to you, you must convince the companion to help you and give them bullets. Also, skill doesn't matter, the entire combat is based on luck. This one I can't forgive, he disabled rollback and disallowed the use of edited save files. Soo if you tried to upload the saves to saveditonline and edit your stats, the game will not recognize it. Now you can edit the savetoken.py file to disable this but wtf... how mod/cheats unfriendly is this game. Lets players do whatever they want. Who are you to dictate how they play the game.

Played 0.3.2 – Sandbox game with a male mc. In this postapocalyptic world the mc lives on a skyship flying over the poisonous clouds. He joins a group of explorers who scavenge the world below for material. As is classic his first dive goes wrong and he gets stranded on the surface where he meets a society of survivors. I tried it due to the high reviews in combination with the bdsm and male domination tag. Sadly I was disappointed – I do not understand how this got such great reviews. The only good parts are the interesting world and the decent writing. The sex scenes are plain bad – they consist of a single, textless animation you can view from different angles that ends when you press cum. That’s it. The characters have weird glossy skin, a lot of renders are pretty dark so you don’t see much unless you play in a darkened room and the minigames are a mess. I personally also hated the combat system. After a short introduction you get thrown into a free-roaming section that’s highly unfinished. You constantly run into enemies that cannot be defeated or dead ends. Only has a handful of short, bad and vanilla sex-scenes – stick it in – watch short animation – cum. It might have been better to skip the sex altogether than to deliver it like this. I guess if you like games with a lot of minigames and a dev who tries to build combat into their game you might keep an eye on the game. As it is the game feels like the dev had bigger eyes than their stomach – maybe this could be a good game in a few years of hard work – in its current condition I’d derec it.

For me, a mixed bag. What's good: Nails the atmosphere, very dystopian feel, atmospheric and foreboding. Graphics look great, worldbuilding is nice. Whats Meh: Characters look extremely similar to other games, MC looks like some young teenage kid, not the gruff MC you'd hope for in a dystopian setting. Sex scenes are just different camera angles and a cum button, extremely basic. Game is listed as a VN but it's very clearly a sandbox game. Whats bad: The games a pain in the ass to play, there are a lot of mechanics and they feel clunky. Navigating around is kinda a chore and the menus are very clunky. Also, you cannot go back in dialogue for some reason? If you missed something that somebody said and want to re-read it, well you can't. Overall I think it's a mixed bag, needs some more time in the oven so to speak. Otherwise, I think it has some real potential to be a great dystopian horror-esque game.

I'll give it 4 stars, although I am very annoyed with the game. I stopped after a few minutes of playing. For me, it is hardly bearable. No rollback? Why? Sometimes you skip over something, and renpy gives rollback to you for free. But not here. I like to progress at my pace. No forced slowdowns. But in this game, I am forced to wait for the next text to appear. If I accidentialy skip, I cannot go back. So I have to be very careful with my clicks. That is not enyoyable. The story and the visuals are great so far. Because of the above mentioned shortcomings I really would like to give 1 star (yes, it is that bad for me), but that would be justified. so, 4 stars and if you get the gamplay into some usable state, I will upgrade that to 5.

As of now ( v0.3.0 ) it's maybe too early to judge, but there's already enough to constructively criticize with the intend to improve the current and future content... so let's do: 1) The post-apocalyptic story premise & world isn't believable or realistic. How high into the sky has an airship to fly to avoid the toxic mist that 's covering the gist of all earthly ground?​ In other words: so high above the clouds that there would be not enough oxygen to breeze without air masks or proper tech behind. And yet people frequent the open deck "outside" on that airship without much indication of this kind of tech. Under these circumstances they should all be dead within seconds - but not here. Is it magic? Or just ignorance? In any case it's a severe issue, isn't it? 2) The writing is more or less decent but does not leave much mentionable impact on me . For me it's too much trivial and almost jovial chatter between a bunch of newly introduced characters (with really odd names like "Daust", "Narone" or "Arlae") that seem to know each other well, but are still kind of blank pages for me as the player after their first appearances. So it's hard to immerse with their group dynamics. Sometimes the dialogues even feel somewhat stiff and seem to lack the substance that could build up some deeper immersion with those characters as well as the horrific world they are trying to survive in. To be fair, some references hint at their world, their tech, their societal structure and so on, but without any ingame codex explaining those more detailed, it's difficult for me as the player to comprehend those initially. The almost absurd cliffhanger at the end of the intro showing what their next destination on the toxic fogged earth inhibits ... a DRAGON !!! does not really contribute to something more immersive, realistic and profound for me. Cause every post-apocalyptic plot certainly needs some serious threat out of fantasy tales, doesn't it?! But well, maybe that's only me yearning for more plausibility here. 3) Almost the whole introduction of this VN is purely kinetic . Choices start later on , so a bit of patience is needed if you like some player agency. Some of those choices seem to impact the story progression, some affect the MC's skill stats or relationships with the potential LI's. But at times it's not clear enough to what they may lead - in particular those regarding the lewd scenes. Btw, in an earlier version the first sex scene happened without a choice and was therefore forced - always a no-go for me! Thankfully the dev added that choice, so thumbs up! 4) The few lewd scenes so far are okayish , but I've seen better. Because they come too sudden and often lack erotism and some build-up. The animations are mostly solid, except for some minor glitches or stutters. There are usually varied camera angles for each scene as well as mostly a small number of different poses. Pretty much vanilla, but that's not bad in my book. The potential LI's introduced at the moment are few and there's only one you can get intimate with - too early to say anything else about her or the few others. 5) A minor issue, but: You can't rename the MC right from the very start . It makes not much sense that you're given the option to name the MC (originally "Daust") much later on. So why not before the beginning? Conclusion: "Shroud" in this very early state of development is definitly not bad or poor - it's okay . But it lacks quite a bit to be really an interesting story with the right amount of immersion with the world and its characters so far to be more than passable, slighly above average. After the introduction some RPG-like gameplay elements are introduced - such as inventory management, skill & relationship stats, sandbox exploration (no grind!) and turnbased combat. The combat system seems to be a bit too random to me and may need a bit more polish, the gameplay elements could maybe need an additional short intro tutorial, but I generally like this direction into being more than a AVN. The visuals aren't an issue, the renders and the few animations are mostly okayish, some of them up to quite good. Can't say that the music or sounds were annoying or distractive in any way, some ambience & fx sounds quite well chosen - so that's no issue as well. But the writing and character introduction is just not interesting and immersive enough for me so far, the apocalyptic setting kind of inplausible and not well enough developed yet, world building only fragmented. I get that it's impossible and not smart to stuff all of the information in the player's head at once, but perhaps a codex could help to feel not too much thrown into an unknown world without any knowledge of it?! After my first playthrough nothing was really outstanding or picking my interest, that's why I initially rated "Shroud" only 2.5 stars. That has changed with my second playthrough. I think, after the unspectacular intro the story get's a twist in the right direction. The post-apocalyptic world becomes more threatening and tangible. And the addition of the gameplay elements are - even in the need of some more polish - potentially a benefit to the immersion and the plot. Therefore I raise my rating to 3,5 stars - with a recommendation for keeping an eye on the further development and give it a chance. - With more future updates I may revise my review - ​

As a fan of everything steampunk I was really really happy to find this one, the banner immediately got me interested. But as so often is the case with these things the happiness dissipated just a few minutes after starting the game. As soon as you start the game before even beginning to play and you try looking at settings to get full screen mode you hit a wall it doesn't exist, Not untill you start a game and see the in-game menu at the bottom of the screen can you find an option named "screen" and this will let you enter fullscrene mode. Fine I found it! not where I was expecting it but it's there at least. Then you start playing the game and the second thing you try to immediately find is the setting to turn off the horrible voice. This one you find where you think it will be so now you feel all set to enjoy a possibly great game. But the dissapointments just pile up, the pace of the story is slow. Then we have the lack of choices having a meningful impact on the story. Graphics are good but far from great and i really hate that i have such a negative response to a game that could be amazing if done right. The story is there but burried under piles of meaningless text and the scenery is ok but far from what the banner implicates.