The Little Witch’s Promise

tl;dr: Cute presentation, but lackluster and unskippable animations, bad controls, boring and grinding gameplay that never evolves, oversimplified sprites, poorly balanced bosses and enemies, NPCs never stop yapping and their dialogue is timed so you can't skip, disappointing rewards for taking on extra challenges, and no unlock for gallery despite clearing every challenge you can in the game. It's a lot of effort for very little reward. Big spiel: It's commendable enough considering it's the dev's first game, but there are a lot of rough areas. The pixel art is cute, but it's so simple that you can only make out the basic poses. Combined with half of the animations being shot from angles where you can't even see insertion, it doesn't carry the same weight or satisfaction of other more defined pixel games. While it first appears there might be a large amount of animations and monster girls, there's actually a very small pool that are reused throughout the game regardless of the actual environment they're in. You'll see the same beginner enemies in the final area of the game. A smaller pool of monsters would be okay if there was perhaps one more animation or two for each, but each only has two. One is where they catch you and it's a basic foreplay one, the other is after they're defeated for proper insertion. Some of the monsters (like the raccoon or second alraune) show a good amount of personality in their animations considering the simple art style, but most are rather plain and they could be replaced with just about any other generic girl. What's also disappointing are the hidden and extra bosses. All three only have the same two basic animation approach as the rest of the enemies, despite being special and extra challenges the player has to go out of their way for, and they lack personality like many others. A shame. What the game really needs is polish in all areas. The controls are stiff and there are many times where a jump or a dash simply won't occur when you press them. Your attacks are slow and lock you in place with plenty of recovery frames. You can't combo in mid-air, and considering half the enemies (including bosses) stay airborne, this means you're swinging a wet noodle around to whittle down enemy HP. Their behaviors are also random. Sometimes they're stunned by your attacks, other times they act like nothing is happening at all and charge through to grab you. This happens regardless if they're already in a different state or not. When they do react to a hit, they flinch and are move backwards, but this happens based on their current direction, not where the attack came from. This means you can hit an enemy from behind, but they stagger back into you, causing you to either lose HP or be grabbed. It's rather annoying you're punished for properly outmaneuvering them. The platforming is fine enough, but it's odd you can fall through platforms, but can't jump up through them and are forced to go around. The most obnoxious part of the game is the animation itself. The two main ways of gaining EXP are defeating a monster and having sex with them afterwards. The sex is basically free and it heals half a heart, so there's no reason not to. The problem is the animations can't be skipped, so you're forced to watch the same slow animation constantly for every enemy you defeat. Combined with the small monster pool, this makes for a terribly grindy and boring experience. You can just defeat them and move on, or run past the enemies entirely, but now you're losing free exp and will have to struggle for the next bosses. As for Exp itself, I'm unsure if it's really that helpful. Even though you're fighting the same enemies in the endgame as you are from the first stage of the game, they're still HP sponges that take far too many hits and it makes you wonder if leveling is bugged or damage parameters aren't programmed properly. You have two gauges, one for HP and the other for "stamina (climax)." Most enemy hits deal half a heart, but you'll always take one full stamina point of damage. The only way to heal this is to either find a hidden apple in an area or reach a save point. Splitting the two into separate gauges was a bad idea. You can recover half a heart with sex, but not stamina. Stamina isn't lost when you defeat an enemy and initiate sex, but you have an invisible meter that dictates whether you can escape from an enemy's grab or not after being grabbed one or two times. It doesn't matter if it's the same enemy or not and you're grabbed the moment you touch their hitbox, so it's frustrating combined with the many stiff and unpolished parts of gameplay. It would've been far better to merge the two into one HP gauge and have a climax gauge that wanes over time instead. Your gameplay never changes from start to finish. You obtain an air blade skill where little gusts of wind are shot out with every attack, but they deal little to no damage. They clear vines as obstacles, but these vines come after you've already received the upgrade, making them pointless, and the dev didn't seem to commit to the mechanic as these vines rarely ever appear. This isn't a metroidvania, it's a straightforward 2D platformer, so this idea was unnecessary. The vines also have poor hitboxes and you need to hit a very specific spot for them to be removed. The other boss upgrade drops a plant when you dash, but it only works properly not even half the time and the plants take a long time to spawn, not to mention deal such insignificant damage. Your only hope of defeating enemies and bosses is to just spam the basic attack. Bosses are very disappointing. Some are so easy that they stand there and just take hits without performing any attacks, others are so overblown that the dev seemed to forget how few tools the player is given. Instant screen-wide spells with no charge-up or warning, random attack behaviors with no rhyme or reason, and some attacks where they disappear for over 30 seconds and you need to stand there waiting out the animation without even dodging anything. Whether you have temporary invulnerability after taking a hit is completely random, and some attacks will give you the chance to recover while others will drain all your HP in less than a second before you realize what's even happened, and these attacks look like any other one and aren't special. You'd think the story would be rather simple and lighthearted considering the game's premise of going out and sexing monster girls, but it takes itself too seriously. Bosses are presented and named like they're from a Fromsoft game when there really isn't such a need for that kind of gravitas here. Characters want to dump their backstories and trauma on you, but the bright and cheery interface, music, and presentation just aren't there to support what they're saying. Dialogues are long-winded, and there's a timer for each line of dialogue that's a full second long. This means you can't skip, skim, or speedread through it, you have to wait at least a second for each line before the game lets you go to the next. Some of these lines are only two or three words, not even a full sentence. Imagine having to listen to someone talk, but they could only say two or three words before needing to pause for a second before saying another two or three words. It's absolutely maddening. There's a gallery where you can see animations and review any secret pixel CGs you've collected, the standard fair. Though I feel the dev should've made it so after beating the game, or at least defeating the three hidden bosses, all should be unlocked and you shouldn't need to go back and search. The combat and platforming really aren't good enough to warrant needing to scour every inch of every level for art, so the fact you're required to do so anyway is a bit insulting. Overall, the game's a mess and nowhere near worth the amount of effort it's asking for. It really needed another few months in the oven to clean things up and make it more solid. That wouldn't have made it a great game, maybe not even a "good" game, but it would've made it "serviceable." That being said, I can see there was passion behind the dev's work and they clearly had a sort of vision they wanted to fulfill. The secret CGs you can find are fun and show more personality from the monster girls and more-defined pixel art, so it's not like the simple sprites are because the dev is artistically limited. There's a message after the final boss admitting the game is very rough, so they're aware of the bad state it's in and thank the player for making it to the end anyway. I would like for them to continue following their passions, and hopefully their next game will be more polished and fleshed out in all areas and we can look back on this one to see their humble beginnings.

Games needs optimization, but over all good . Also the game comes with the gallery unlocked if you don't want to play, so it's good for that as well. Well I need 2oo words, so uh it's not the most complicated game. More than Erico where there was no plot and just a little more than succubus affection. I guess once complaint I have is that I have no idea how big the protagonist is. The spirte makes me think Shota, and the size with a few of the girls makes sense, but int he more detail cgs he looked like a young man. Make up your mind game, some people have a fetish for that. Those people are me, I like Shota x Monster girl. I don't need a Shota, but it's nice. I still would have have played the game without it, but I feel lied to. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... oh you're still reading I also put 2 hints int he thread on page two. Once to counter act bullshit, and one for general hits if you want to 'earn' the detailed cgs. Why did I not put that int he review? Felt cheeky.

Very cute game with some great pixel art, one of my favorites in recent memory for its art and animation alone, reminds me of forest of blue skin - it's not technically impressive but has a lot of charm - however, the dev has no idea how to make a game beyond that lol. The game has horrible balancing, the hardest boss is by far the very first one you fight in game, an utterly senseless difficulty curve. The platforming can also be annoying, the chosen control scheme is awkward. Fortunately there's an 'easy mode' which loosens up the punishments across the board and makes the game much more fun to play as an actual H game - get caught, see the animations, etc - the game would be best if there were a middle option between easy and normal, but that sadly doesn't exist. There are a lot of H-animations in this game. It might be too simplistic for some but I found them very cute. The other issue I have is with the spread of enemies, there will be areas where many new enemy types will be introduced in short succession (thus new H animations), and then there will be areas where you won't see a new enemy types for quite some time, which means you are mostly just going through padding. I still give it four stars because of its variety of enemies, the art and overall vibe are very cute and nice, I think the game has a lot of technical incompetency, which isn't very unusual for H-games in general, so I give it a bit more leeway.