Succubus Heaven is a 3D Action game with rouge-lite elements. We play as a squad of three Witches that has been sent to reactivate a demon-repelling relic that has gone dormant. With the relic being down, the demons were quick to slay their opposition and take control of the massive underground sanctuary. The few survivors that managed to endure fled towards the entrance of the cave, in one last desperate stand to contain the evil within. This is the scene our characters Eleonora, Dorothy, and Sera walk into upon starting the game. Having little in the way of time, it is up to those three to fight their way through without reinforcements and reactivate the relic.
To make this situation even more dire, our heroines came quite under-equipped for the task at hand. Only Eleonora had the foresight to bring a decent sword. Sera merely has a crummy mace she likely found on her way in, and the mage Dorothy has exhausted most of her spells. So starts the brief tutorial. It teaches you the controls and how to make do with your flexible combat options. We can throw both weapons and our items to varying effects. Dodge roll to escape damage within the few invincibility frames it grants. And most importantly, learn how to manage our limited four-slot inventory. Each character possesses their own four slots, but ideally, you’ll want two weapons or offensive spells for everyone. The ancient weapons you’ll find here are still deadly, but very brittle due to age.
Dorothy plays far differently than her other two melee-based peers. She is a mage with the ability to transmogrify any weapons she finds into spells. What spells she gets out of it is dependent on the type of weapon. Converting a mace, for instant, grants the spell Stone Bullet that casts a shotgun-like spread of rocks at foes. On the other hand, whips will net you a spell called Blood Thorns that covers much of the battlefield in damaging crystals. It won’t tell you what a weapon converts to. That is something you will have to learn via trial and error. Each spell has a limited number of uses, so they have their own durability-like system. As resource intensive as it is maintaining them, they are well worth it. More so due to Dorothy being the slowest character and having little capability in unarmed combat. Her weak shin-kicks will not be much help to the group.
Being a rouge-lite, your success will primarily come down to pure luck. By far the most important thing is to constantly come across weapons to maintain your offensive capabilities. The others characters have more useful unarmed attacks, yet a schoolgirl’s fist is not as deadly as a morning star cracking down on an enemy’s skull. As you can see from the pics and the aforementioned dodge rolls, this definitely has some inspirations from the Dark Souls series. Knowing when to attack and when to get out of the way is the core of the gameplay. If you’re familiar with the DS style of combat, it will serve you quite well here. Skill alone will not be able to get you through this, however. You’ll need some luck as well.
There is no health system. Instead, it plays into the succubus theme by having Impurity (red) and Horny (pink) statuses rolled into one meter. To talk about them, I first have to explain the clothing system, which is your first and most important line of defense. The more damage you take, the further your clothes tear off until you eventually find yourself in the nude. While in that state, combat becomes far more dangerous as enemies can now grapple and sexually assault you. Every character starts off as a virgin, though being vaginally penetrated is not the end of the world. Some unique weapons get decreased or increased stats from that, and not much else is yielded. Your danger comes in the form of Impurity. As the act continues, it will keep increasing. If it goes on long enough for him to cum inside you, that will be a massive accumulation.
The effects of more Impurity are that you take longer to get up when knocked down, and the meter’s shared (pink) Horny status takes less to entirely fill. Horniness is far from harmless either and can be gained from regular attacks. If it is full, you will no longer be able to button mash to escape from sexual assault. That can become quite a dangerous loop as your Impurity will start to clog up most of the meter, and it takes less for you to become thoroughly aroused. Your best hope while being uncontrollably Horny is that the foe grappling you is weak, allowing another character to help you. However, when it comes to bosses, their massive or powerful forms make aiding someone being assaulted far more difficult. In those cases, your own willpower is what will allow you to escape.
It is a pretty cool and innovative system. Impurity is a slow killer that results in a player losing via attrition of going through the dungeon rather than in one grueling fight. As your weapons wear down, you need to risk exploring. This is especially true in the later spider cave with randomly spawning enemies, and the need to crack open their eggs hoping for an item drop. Speaking of items, there are several to be found throughout. They have a wide array of uses, like opening special chests or negating specific types of damage. The most indispensable are Holy Water potions. It is the only way to decrease Impurity. They also heal horniness, which fixes itself over time, but not in the most ideal way. During a fight, the last thing you want is for your character to randomly orgasm and be entirely defenseless.
Succubus Heaven has a significant emphasis on story. These occur in scripted events always found in the same location, no matter the playthrough. With the focus being on the player going on multiple runs, it would have been appreciated to let us skip the dialogue and story entirely to immediately get to fighting. The current method has us manually fast-forwarding the game at the press of a key, yet story content happens often enough that it’s still not devoid of tedium. For instance, I’d much rather get directly to the action rather than being introduced to a common foe in the dungeons for the dozenth time. Still, the fast-forward feature does help and makes it just a minor inconvenience.
Having so many static locations helps the player plan ahead in future playthroughs. The rest of your journey consists of randomly generated rooms that may or may not appear again next time. For instance, you could come across a Treasure area without finding a way to unlock the chest. Even if that’s the case, it is still a win for you as rooms have multiple connected regions you can go to, and that one is always safe. The number of rooms you must get through differs from floor to floor, yet not deteriorating your weapons in needless fights can genuinely make a difference. This brings us to the Altars we can randomly come across. Praying to these can grant you either a permanent blessing or a curse. You may either be utterly immune to poison damage or unable to dodge roll, to name some of the possibilities.
Getting a game-over requires all three of your characters to have full impurity meters. Once one of them does, they will no longer be able to get up on their own. You’ll need to spend a lot of time helping them up, far more than you can afford during a battle. They can still be useful as they are now entirely willing to have sex with anything, and a monster could be distracted by her lustful body. You are usually vastly outnumbered, so things can quickly spiral out of control regardless. I have to give props to the friendly AI here. They can genuinely hold their own and be as valuable as the player themselves. You really notice their absence in the scenarios where you have to fight alone. About the only thing we have over them is our human ability to learn enemy attack patterns and the best moments of when to dodge roll.
The AI are good at fighting but will not help each other up. It may be for the best, considering how quickly a single person can get overwhelmed if all the aggro is on you. I do wish we had some control over them or the ability to issue commands, though. Our only order is for them to stay put. It can be helpful if they’re both injured or lacking weapons as we decide to face what’s ahead alone. As stated earlier in this review, skill can only get us so far. Never does this hold more true than when facing bosses. They possess a ton of health. While it is technically possible to beat them bare-fisted and by yourself as the AI inevitably falls, it will take ages. It is more similar to an MMO fight than something out of Dark Souls.
Succubus Heaven has full controller support and handles well with keyboard & mouse. It’s best to break out your preferred input device because, oh boy, does this title offer a challenge. In particular, the ending stretch is a brutal affair that will have you sweating beads no matter how good a run you’ve had so far. Skill alone won’t get you to this point, but it’s undoubtedly required throughout, alongside good item management. It is a combination of brains, brawn, and luck that will finally see you to victory. My first time completing the campaign took me around six hours of repeated attempts. I’ve played it for 15 hours now and have only managed to conquer it twice. Neither of them did I succeed in keeping any of my characters a virgin. This high level of difficulty is pretty addicting, and there are things to learn that will improve your chances.
As difficult as it can be, it does have ways of helping out struggling players. After every run, it will judge how well you did and convert it into points. These points will fill a progress meter at the bottom that unlocks new buffs or debuffs to equip before starting again. You can make the game harder on yourself to increase the points you receive or give yourself advantages at the cost of slower unlocks. It allows you to tailor the experience to your liking. Want more treasure chests to spawn and to booby trap your vagina with a bomb if someone tries to rape you? Go for it, assuming you’ve unlocked those buffs. There are a ton of them, and as much as I’ve played, I haven’t gotten even half.
If your concern is the hentai aspects, those are far easier to unlock. You simply defeat a boss or area to unlock their unique ‘loss scenarios’. In the main menu, you can find a gallery mode to view said scenarios or unique enemy H animations. You can govern which character you’d like to see the animation play out on, choose whether they’re still a virgin, and accelerate or decelerate time itself. It is a stress-free environment with many other toggleable features I haven’t mentioned. The loss scenarios are good as well, though a bit odd. They are scripted cutscenes involving those that defeated you. It lacks any flexibility, however. You can’t even hide the story text covering up a portion of the screen.
The graphics are nothing to write home about, especially with how dark some areas are and the small variety of rooms. On the top right, it does tell you whether there is a chest in the current room. That saves you from needing to ever explore and helps one ignore the environment, as the main focus is on whatever creature is in there. Its lewd element radiates quality despite the questionable assets. The animations are great, and Succubus Heaven has a knack for the small details. Little things such as the body language and expression when a character is sexually aroused make a huge difference. With how much bodily fluids they drip out in that excited state, they could probably flood demons out of the ruins given a few weeks.
All in all, Succubus Heaven was a blast. It has many creative concepts for its gameplay, and the hentai is very well implemented. The stress of having to fight with your bare fists, accidentally flinging a Holy Water potion into a wall rather than setting it down for your partner, there is so much to love here. Heck, this review reads like a manuscript with how much I’ve written about this game. I haven’t even mentioned how Dorothy has a backstep instead of a dodge roll. Don’t judge a book by its cover here. Its graphical stock assets may remind some people of poorly made Unity games, but this is anything but that. Succubus Heaven is a game that should be on the radar for those seeking an intense challenge and a good selection of 3D hentai content.
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