Tainted Light

Fairly mixed bag this one. If you like story focused games, this could be a neat ~2-3 hour diversion depending on how fast you read. However, I feel like it is more a mild mystery*/romance story than corruption or NTR. Story/Writing: 4/5 This is far and above a story heavy game. You are not coming to this game for the gameplay or the mechanics. The writing is mostly solid. The characters have a fictional realness to them. There are some incongruities in the narrative (e.g. MC is described as being basically barely literate struggling to read, but sometimes she reads important info just fine. You can suspend disbelief with the cyberpunk-esque setting and obviously text readers are a thing. But the oddness of it remains. I do note that I don't think this is a good corruption or NTR story. In fact, I'd go as far as to say those should just be stricken from the tags. The "corruption" is really more "just set it to whatever you like and reset it as you please" which is _fine_ for exploring routes. But you really don't get any sense of corruption from it. As for NTR, I'm no expert. I come more for the corruption. However, my read on this is it is more "cheating" than "NTR" because the boyfriends perspective is essentially non-existence and the "NTR" is more an artifact of "MC gets stressed and overwhelmed and finds comfort and love with the other guys." But the NTR enthusiasts are free to disagree here. I just felt this is more a "twisted romance" story than NTR as the focus is pretty much wholly on MC and whichever guy you decide to follow the route of and all other love interests and their route progression are a non-factor basically. Gameplay: 2/5 Mostly an RPGM walking sim. Which is nice in that you can ignore much of the typical RPGM grind but also often feels like you could've just made it a VN or Ren'Py game and click to make all your choices. I will say they did put appear to put in a lot of work into creating the maps you wander so it's not terrible. Just not much game to play here. I would give it 3/5 stars here, however there were some rather strange menu decisions and I take minor issue with the corruption tag: I liked that you had hot keys to jump to the quest menu (Q) or ero status (M). I did not like that those hot keys were the only way to access those options which seemed unnecessary. As for the corruption tag, there's really barely any corruption. The other love interests could maybe say to have some degree of corruption in the dialogue of later scenes in the "NTR" routes, but the corruption mechanic is basically "getting harassed raises stress and makes it possible to enter the "NTR" routes but you can reset stress in the hospital". Functionally it's more "choose your own adventure" than navigate or even watch any sort of corruption happening Art: 1/5 Honestly, maybe being harsh here. It's just pretty low-to-mid quality 2DCG. Definitely games with worse art. But this is more notably "bad" than "good". And there's just not a whole lot to look at. Averaging those ratings: 2/5 stars and then giving it a Bonus Star for ambience. The game did a pretty solid job on building the environment even if this was a minor thing. Maps were visually distinct and interesting and bgm fit them well. Overall, 3/5 stars. It's maybe worth a read/play if you like story based games and aren't here for the NTR or corruption. In my opinion it is very much more a sort of twisted romance type of game where rather than focusing on the solving the mystery and getting the money to pay your BF's hospital bills, you get stressed out and decide to cheat and eventually become official with one of the side characters. *mystery is probably the wrong word. maybe investigation? It's not that mysterious or complicated. But I'm also too lazy to think of a better word to describe it. Point is, I don't feel NTR or corruption are particularly accurate genre descriptions and some kind of mystery/twisted romance feels more correct to me.