The Sultan and His Harem

I really disliked the gameplay loop of balancing the 3 stats and gold, and the renders and scenes weren't strong enough to warrant playing more in my opinion. To summarize, there just didn't feel like there was enough content in general.

The Sultan and His Harem v0.6.13 is a management visual novel created by Strategic Desire, tagged as complete despite its version number. The objective of the game is to conquer the world while dealing with the tribulations of your kingdom. Between warring and ruling, you get some relaxing time with your wife and your ever growing harem. The main idea sounds great: you incarnate a powerful leader who takes women from far lands and rules with wisdom or an iron fist, indulging in an always appreciated masculine power trip. The reality, though, is a very rough gameplay experience plagued by many obnoxious repetitions caused by one of the worst game designs a developer can make: constantly decreasing stats. The game requires you to fill the love gauge of your uncooperative wife, increase the respect of your vizier, please the rabble, and balance your finances. However, these stats are constantly in friction with one another, which prolongs the gameplay excessively for no purpose other than pushing numbers up while fighting the ones going down. Since this is a renpy game made by a single developer, there are not enough events to accommodate this grind, meaning you will constantly see repetitions, effectively killing enjoyment. Writing-wise, the story feels inconsistent, with the recently crowned sultan acting and reacting as if he has ruled everything for years, instead of depicting the beginning of his time. A better approach would have been dividing the story into chapters, first portraying a young sultan, then a more experienced one, alongside dialogue that reflects this growth. That said, it is undeniable that Strategic Desire has a knack for poetry, wrapping dialogue in a meticulous use of metaphors and verbal fencing with unruly girls who refuse to accept their new position. The short back-and-forths during the limited progress you’re allowed with your beloveds, or in matters of national defense, can be interesting to read. Alas, these minor excitements are obfuscated by a plethora of eye-rolling elements. The gameplay consists of choosing between simple or comedically ridiculous options: becoming an exaggerated tyrant, a dumb egotist, or the obvious benevolent ruler. This is paired with an extremely boring target-practice minigame coded to be pitifully easy, yet forcing the same tutorial every single damn time. After conquering a country, you are simply given an option that affects very little in the game, not at all how such mechanics usually work, and not even helpful in replenishing your dwindling coffers. After taking over the world in an hour, you are left arm wrestling stats to reach the credits, all while trying to enjoy a harem that charges money to be used. The ministry options make little logical sense. A short test period quickly proves that the choices made do not correlate with the obvious outcomes that should benefit the people and, by extension, improve your stats, such as reducing taxes (theft) that may not improve your popularity. This struggle can lead to a game over or even lock your progress, depending on your save. At least the girls show some semblance of personality development, though they remain very shallow and often exhibit abrupt behavioral shifts never previously portrayed, as if a lengthy story path was cut between interactions. The models are nothing special: a couple can be considered well-built, but most of the daz models are mediocre at best, with a few being horrendous, despite attempts to follow the traditional physical appearance, behavior, and attire of their respective countries. Your harem can include up to fifteen girls, an excessive number that, as per the golden rule of adult games, results in very little connection and only a couple of scenes per character, leaving a strong sense of dissatisfaction. Even your wife, despite her narrative importance, has a very limited number of scenes. A few personal nitpicks include audio options that seem bugged and unresponsive to volume settings, as well as an unnecessary spoiler at the beginning that outright reveals who your wife will be. Furthermore, if neglected, harem members will attempt things on their own, leading to a vociferous reaction from the sultan and the absurd option to execute them. This feels like a waste of budget, as no sane player would willingly delete one of the girls from the buffet. Being a sultan juggling politics and a hungry harem is a solid idea, one that is simply poorly implemented here. A major overhaul could elevate the game to greater heights, but such an endeavor would require a herculean rework that few would be willing to do.

The Sultan and His Harem is a sandbox conquest game set in the Ottoman age where the goal is simple: Conquer the world while balancing your relationship with your wife, your advisor and your people. Sounds cool on paper but comes with many, many caveats that make it a cheap, shallow and unenjoyable experience. Story & Writing Plot summary: No real plot here. You're the son of a sultan who dies and passes the sultanate to you as his successor. No other family members to speak of, no political intrigue, and no end goal besides "conquer everything." Characters are completely disconnected from the world and their titles are just flavor text. Strengths: The text is decently written with fluid sentences and dialogue that doesn't get too verbose like in similar titles. But take this with a grain of salt, because it genuinely looks like the text was mostly (if not completely) written by AI. So of course the grammar is fine. Weaknesses: Shallow. Everything is shallow and forgettable, from the nonexistent plot to the characters and everything they say. There is no relationship building in the sense of getting to know a character and bonding/corrupting her. Conversations are meaningless, sex scenes don't reflect your relationship with the person, and all corruption/conditioning happens off-screen. Overall quality: Very poor. There's really no reason to read any of the dialogue, and I'm not exaggerating. You won't miss anything by skipping, and the "ending" is just a congratulatory screen, a brief conversation with your now pregnant wife, and zero sex scenes. Art & Sexual Content Art style: Mostly dated Daz 3D models with some AI-generated 2D renders during "combat." Sex scenes: Plentiful but shallow, repetitive, short, and not at all arousing. The renders look compressed and/or low res. Images look blurry on a 1080p monitor. Strengths: Not really a strength, but the sex scenes are serviceable if you have low standards, and it doesn't take long to access them. Sex sounds are pretty decent too; not distracting but also not overly minimalistic. Weaknesses: Repetitive poses, quantity over quality, wacky angles that feel claustrophobic, and no integration with the actual story. Every sex scene is completely linear, only giving you an option of where to cum. They also feel very incomplete, either starting abruptly, ending abruptly or both. The game has very few kinks (foot fetish, BDSM, watersports, femdom) but they're all unavoidable and have no warning. There is also no reason to have sex with your harem. No relationship points, no character arcs, nothing. Most of the characters are also pretty ugly in my opinion, and the blurry renders don't do them any favors. Appeal: If you have no standards, the sexual content is fine. If you happen to be very into the specific combination of kinks that the game offers, this might even be a 2-star game. Gameplay & Technical Mechanics: Choices don't matter, period. All they do is give or take points that are a pain to manage and only affect the ending, which is just a matter of whether your wife gets pregnant or not. Nothing more. This game can hardly be called a sandbox. Strengths: None. Weaknesses: The gameplay loop is too restrictive, and the way you gain/lose points is utterly ridiculous. There are no day/night cycles, meaning you can only take one action per day, but you also passively lose points with your wife/advisor/population every day, meaning you'll be constantly swimming against the current. The empire-building aspect is also nonexistent. No territories, cities or villages to manage. Issues: Half of the time, the dialogue doesn't properly use the custom names you've provided. Can't adjust the volume of moans and other sound effects in-game. Third dialogue with Mina crashes the game (CTD). Final Score: 2/10 Rant Section: Spoiler I've played bad VNs and sandboxes before, but this is one of a kind. From the writing to the sexual content, everything feels cheap, hollow and not worth the time. Here's a few extra pet peeves of mine: The dialogue is too poetic and pretentious most of the time, which kind of kills the sense of self-inserting and makes you feel like you're reading a theater play instead of a porn game meant to arouse. It feels AI-generated, which would explain that overabundance of theatrics that lack any character. I'm not an AI hater at all. In fact, I roleplay with AI all the time, which is also why I can recognize AI quirks in the writing. One of them is the sentence structure being too proper and all the characters speaking in the same way. Too many reused renders. The game is already relatively short, so reusing what limited renders it has makes it feel cheap and padded. 90% of the time, the renders don't reflect whatever action the characters are taking, which means you'll be staring at a still shot of the girl standing next to a window while the text tells you that she's laying next to you. Most of the sex scenes are just slide shows that lack any sense of motion or dynamic. The game does have some animations, but they're few and far between. That being said, I don't discredit games for lacking animations. My point is that even cheap shovelware games have pseudo-animations nowadays, like two renders transitioning back and forth. But with this game, it's either a bunch of still shorts transitioning like a power point presentation or a couple (very few) full animations. No in-between. The dynamic between MC and the wife carries unavoidable undertones of femdom, from the way she addresses him to how he seems to enjoy being belittled by her. Every conversation with her feels like you're putting her on a pedestal. Most "choices" lead you to put yourself in an almost subservient role compared to her, and even the letters she sends to you when you don't visit her for a while read like a mistress talking to her pet. And that's all despite the fact that we're supposed to be the sultan of a powerful empire while she's a war trophy turned political bride. Acting assertive in any way makes you lose affection points. Lose too many points and it's game over. Still on that note, for some reason the game has many, many undertones of female sovereignty and empowerment, as if imperialism and harem dynamics were just one big consensual BDSM party at the time. The MC treats even the women of his harem with reverence that borders on worship; He even gets straight up dommed by one of them; I'm talking whips and everything. He also submits to several other women of the harem, usually in the form of verbal humiliation and footjobs, all unavoidable. Regarding the nonexistent empire-building, you only have three choices in the main screen: Visit wife (no story relevance and very few sex scenes), visit your harem (just as meaningless), or visit Yazir (just flavor text followed by a few choices that only serve to increase or decrease population satisfaction). There are no territories, cities or villages to manage, only circles on the map that represent each empire, and they disappear once you conquer them. And even when you conquer them, your choice on how to handle your new conquest is only a matter of how much gold/population satisfaction you gain/lose. It's just numbers and effectively meaningless in the long run. The gameplay loop is also completely inflexible. Even if you choose to mind your own business and focus on your own empire for a while, you get constantly bombarded with hostile letters from neighboring kingdoms and forced to make a choice. You can choose to not declare war, but then it feels like you're missing out on something or bowing down to the provocations. And for whatever reason, you lose Yazir's respect by visiting your harem or even your literal fucking wife. Unless you visit this fucker every day, you'll never max out his respect for you. There's no such thing as policies and incentives that shape your kingdom organically. Instead, we're offered black and white choices that earn us a lecture if we pick the "morally wrong" one. For example, rejecting religious and cultural diversity when asked about it isn't a matter of preference and authority, but a way of taking away your good boy points if you're not progressive enough in this 15th century imperialistic regime. But truly, at the end of the day it doesn't even matter, as every choice is just a binary +/- point system. Just remember that you don't need a walkthrough. Simply pick whatever is the most economically or culturally liberal choice every time. Because liberalism is always the way every time no matter what, right? Verdict : Not worth your time, trust me. I expected very little from this game and was still left disappointed. There are many negative qualities I forgot to include in this review, but this should give you an idea of what you're not missing out on.

Great Concept. The graphics are good enough. The mainissue with this game is gameplay : - The lewd scenes have next to no choice wich kill immersion and reward.It really needs to have better and free interactions with characters before and during lewd scenes with choices and multiple ending scenes. This way would grant the feeling of immersion and freedom. - Overall, the political gameplay could bemore developped : investements in empire / army funding / management of conquered territory. Then we will have a top game. But right now, it's just meh...

This game is honestly really awful. I was hopeful because of the setting (stupidly thinking this would be a little like Desert Stalker in the feel of it), but it genuinely has no redeeming qualities whatsoever: - terrible writing - bland, unlikeable and unrealistic characters - boring sex scenes - boring 'combat' - no real feeling of choice or agency behind the choices - very little effort put into the visuals to make them feel legit - example, women wearing 1950s outfits, the sultan not wearing the slightest bit of armor when going into "war". Seriously, do not waste your time with this game. You're never gonna get that time back.

Less of a game and more of a point-and-click adventure, which is disappointing because this part of the world is rarely touched on, especially with gay/femboys included in harem genres. There is potential here and some of the scenes are nice, but the writing is awful, and the gameplay comes down to "click country you want to conquer, click on bad guys to win war, pick your chosen girl to join harem (or femboy in ONE case), talk to advisors to fill pointless meters, meet harem girls and guys in VERY limited and jarring scenes with no personality, buildup, or writing." There are also just too many members of the harem. They are all filler with no personalities outside of a badly written accent and a few scenes, if you're going to make a game about conquering, show it. You cannot try to be so vanilla or worse, boring, with characters created to be conquered by just having them all hang out in a bathhouse. Change your games to chapters kind of like Four Elements Trainer did, show their personalities, homes, and have different approaches to treating them. Then once they either submit or fall in love, you can move to the next. They are useless sidepieces relegated to a poorly created system of "fighting" as it stands, and it sucks the life out of a world you could have made interesting. Feels less like a game and more of a bad tech demo with poor writing. Seriously though there is an opening for this kind of genre, especially involving the Ottomans and the region. Dev could make something great, but this game needs to be completely changed to reach it, probably with a whole engine change and definitely different modeling. (I've never seen a white guy pose as a Sultan before to this level, but here we are.)

I enjoy conquering games like this one, but there isn't enough around. Cheers to the team for listening to feedback. All we need is more interactions and more styles of actions when interacting with our harem members.

I don't usually do ratings, because who really cares about my opinion, but the dev asked for it, so ... Is the game perfect, no, but the dev definitely takes suggestions seriously and addresses issues in a timely manner, which is better then a lot of other games. While I'm not a fan of some of the content, everyone has different tastes, the game does give the ability to avoid it, which is fair. The game is still relatively early in development, but has some good stuff going for it and has the potential to be even better, so is worth a try.

The system is very underdeveloped even for a renpy game, Some scenes look good but the rest looks bad. The "combat" gets boring fast. The "sanbox" feels like its getting in the way of the game rather being part of it. Unless a lot of things gets revamped , I have no faith in the final product All ideas but no plan.

Not much to say, pretty badly executed story, pretty bad renders and the battle mini game is worthless, There's no real progression in the story or between characters. The protagonist is pretty bland and sex scenes are a couple of images and unimaginative text. I don't know, there's really not much to write about it as it is. It's like scaffolding with some filler. They said in the thread in April that this was 70% complete. If that is the case it's a skip for sure!

I got to say I didn't enjoy this at all. While someone might read "Harem" and think, "oh, I love these types of games," believing that the overall premise is to build a harem made of women of diverse cultures you conquer or as tribute to your greatness from visiting leaders/dignitaries, this not only isn't that kind of game, none of that even happens. From very the start you inherit everything. There are sections of full exposition dump like a remembering the dead section of a documentary (not that long but still) and while they give you reasons for what's taking place and how the MC's rule is going I found must of it very much TLDR and literally started skipping those sections because I wanted to read a visual novel. Emphasis on the visual and a wall of text is fine at the start, but 3+ more times? Come on, dev. You know what the V is right? Getting a war memorial of text time the day ends is a bit much. Anyway, right from the start this wasn't my bag. The MC is basically told to work with, now, his right hand man to rule the kingdom. I literally couldn't even be bothered to learn his name because I just didn't care. Guy came off has a douche to me so that's what I'll call him from here on out. Anyway working with douche requires visiting him at least every other choice otherwise you'll lose respect with him. Yeah, there's a respect meter. In fact there a "respect" meter for this joker, the wife, and the people. Sure there listed as other things but it's just the same mechanic under a different word across the board. This mechanic alone made this VN feel more like a chore than an actual unfolding story and very much shoehorned in. Nothing about this story was compelling and the conversations were dull as dish water. Especially with the wife. Just laughably bad. Sometimes they didn't even make sense and they can be easily mitigated by just rolling back, clicking her icon again which gives you a new dice-rolled dialogue tree that literally has nothing to do with any events that have take place so far. Dialogue like, "I saw you spending far too much time with the delegate from ..." or some such nonsense, and you, the reader, have never seen any such interaction the entire time. Choices like that left me completely lost and made absolutely zero sense. But they kept things moving so I just rolled with it. And every now and then you'll see the choice to ask her, "hey, how do you feel about palace life," and she'll thank the MC for asking about her feelings and the meter would go up about 1/6th of the entire bar. But at the same time because you didn't visit the douche for his counsel meeting about the same situation for the 8th time you lose 1/6th of his bar. So good luck finding the time to visit the harem because of that micromanagement BS, but that doesn't matter because visiting the harem, you know the one that's in the title? Yeah, that one. It's pointless. First, there's the problem of there being no building of a harem in the first place. They're already there as if he inherited them from his father. Thanks for the sloppy seconds dad. Then there's the H scenes. Massively basic and not enough dialogue with the girls to form any sort of attachment for you to really care who is who. And thirdly, they hurt your meters with douche and the wife so ... pointless. To say this even for a start of a VN was a disappointment is a bit of an understate. Don't get me wrong, it's well coded, the models look good and there's a metric ton of potential here, but ... I just don't see it improving without a massive overhaul. If I could give the dev some advice it would be, stretch events out. Lose the adviser completely. If he's meant to be part of the gay route than put him in as an ancillary figure (I'll explain how in a minute) and concentrate on the young man (Suli) becoming the man he is meant to be. Have the story start out as him on a crusade, for what I leave that up to you. Make it known he's a ladies man before the harem, but it's something that gets him into trouble often. This is where is subordinate comes in. He's meant to watch over Suli. Keep him safe and out of trouble for the Sultan. Give them a more brotherly feeling to begin with. While on his travels he receives word that he is to report back to the capital immediately. He finds it strange but knows better to ignore an order from his father. Have him come home to his father's wives with open arms. They are all very glad to see him. Have the final member of his father's harem be Suli's mother. As she welcomes him home, her happiness turns to a fairly concerned look on her face but she will say nothing more. Suli goes to meet his father where it is announced he is to be married. This is all very sudden and doesn't go over well with him. It's also the first time Suli has ever spoken out against his father's wishes. But his father will have none of it. He knowns his son is a bit of a card, but he is also obedient when he must be. He reminds him that he is Sultan and his word is law. Maybe he takes his son aside and reminds him he will not be Sultan forever and one day the burden of Sultan will rest on his shoulders. He nods in agreement and says if he must he will at least meet the girl, but if she does not live up to his mother's standards he will not accept her as his future Kadin. This shocks his father briefly but knowing how much Suli values his mother's opinion he will allow it. From here the story could lead to Suli talking to his mother, who states, "well you still have our head, so I assume you agreed to at least meet the girl." Suli smiles and says, "yes, mother." He learns from her (and her network of spies in the kingdom) all there is to know about the woman he is to marry. "She is to become the second of this house. No other woman will have say over hers and he is to remember that." Words he must take into account while choosing his own harem. From there the story could be about the different lands he visit on that quest. The different women he excepts as gifts (it was common practice for women to used as trade for favor at the time). How he wins each woman over, while keeping a close watch over events in the capital along with his best friend and advisor. Have them have to decide to go and squash a group of raiders, getting caught up trying to save a girl only to find out she's the raider's leader. Does he seduce the girl or find a way to crush her. While on another adventure to secure transport for a dignitary have him and his companion find an oasis. This could set them up with a very romantic encounter between the two and open a path for the readers to make the MC gay or bi. The possibilities of what could be done with this story are endless and are far less shackling than him already being labored with the title of Sultan. Just saying. I wouldn't want to write an entire story for the dev on here but this to me is a far more intriguing tale than what has been started in this VN. And Dev, I whole heartedly mean this, if you want to use it, it's yours. No question. I'm putting that in print here. If you want to use anything I've written here feel free to use it. Screen shot it, so you can rest assured I won't come calling for monetary gain afterwards (I wouldn't, my word means a lot to me). But if it'll give you a better story and your readers a better adventure, have at it. Anyway, that's all I wanted to say about this. As it stands this is far from the worst thing go through and there's plenty of time to tighten things up. Keep in mind this was uploaded for us to try for free so be sure to leave a review. Let them know what you liked and what you didn't. And if you did like this VN, don't let me sway you in any way and be sure to show the dev some love. Try to kick back some funds if you can afford to do so. As always, I wish the dev nothing but the best and truly hope they find their audience. Cheers