Wishbound Desires

Compared to a lot of the other adult games you see floating around, Wishbound Desires was a breath of fresh air. There's a lot of others, but in this case it just exceeded my initially low expectations.

The gameplay is (to my knowledge) rather unique, the story and narrative - while perhaps a bit stereotypical and straightforward - is relatively well written and has a decent flow. I only skimmed the sex scenes, so I haven't properly read through all of the text, but apart from some minor errors it seems to be a solid translation - clearly not an MTL or done with zero effort.

The game isn't very long, you can expect to beat it within a few hours, although those that found the gameplay interesting can attempt to beat the game on the Hard difficulty to get some additional mileage out of it. It lacks any real replayability beyond that, though. There's not real much you can do to change your deck, as most of the cards are available to you while you play. There's only a handful of meaningful choices to be made as you advance, most other choices pertaining to how battles flow are done in-battle, using a mechanic that where you "purchase" cards to improve your deck while fighting, which then reverts back to default at the start of your next battle. You get to choose some new cards to add to your available options as the story progresses, but it's only a few new options.

As for the adult content, it's fully animated and there's 7 sex scenes in total. Visually represented there's 6 variations of vaginal sex and one anal sex scenes, as well as foreplay described in the narrative for them. The scenes are mostly pretty basic, and while the visual quality and animation is decent, the girls and the scenes themselves largely look pretty bland. There's also nothing to really appeal to any niches - the girls have "normal" chest sizes and similar body types, arguably except for one girl with a slightly larger chest, and as already mentioned the content itself is pretty basic.
In other words, it's not a game I'd recommend if you're only interested in the sex scenes.

The main downside is that the tutorial and instructions are rather lacking - it'll give you a basic understanding of the game, but it fails to explain some of it's important mechanics, such as how the mana system actually works, along with some other minor features. That means it may be difficult to grasp the gameplay properly if you're not already familiar with similar games, but if you are then you'll learn to understand it very quickly, as it's largely intuitive.


Summary of Pros and cons;
Pros:
+ Original and well structured gameplay, with interesting mechanics.
+ Well written story and translation, with a good flow to the plot.
+ The visuals are solid.

Neutral:
* The story is very straightforward/simple.
* Subjectively, some of the game mechanics may be a bit too easy to abuse, but unless you're looking for repeated playthroughs, that doesn't really become an issue.

Cons:
- Short, with lack of replayability.
- The story is also too short to really develop the characters, so they remain very simple and shallow. That also - makes it arguably contain some stereotypical cliches.
- The sex scenes are all rather vanilla, and while they and the girls look decent visually, both are rather bland; no real spice or outstanding qualities.
- While the gameplay mechanics are solid and thought out, there's not a lot of real variety to the cards available to you. It serves the length of the story, but would quickly become repetitive beyond that. With some work, you could build something much greater with this.


As a final note, this review could use some formatting, which I might add at some point, but I cba right now. I just wanted to get my thoughts out about this game, for anyone that would appreciate a bit more thought and reasoning to help decide if they're interested in this game.

The "card game" portion of this game is terrible. It's very cluttered, UI is very unclear, cards effects are unclear, rules are badly explained, and tutorial is as barebone as possible.

I kinda like the sex art, but it is recognisibly AI made, it could not be liked by everyone.

All in all : don't buy, too expensive for what feels like a lazy cash grab

Neither the porn side nor the game side of this porn game makes it worth buying. The deckbuilder that's used for the combats certainly has some merit, but it feels unfinished: it's poorly explained and even more poorly balanced. Cards have extra requirements or restrictions that aren't listed; a lot of things key off of rarity, but cards' rarities aren't shown anywhere; some cards show the wrong costs; there's no meaningful build distinction or any reason to do a strategy other than taking everything that does big numbers or hits multiple enemies.

As for the H-game aspect, the girls are blandly attractive in a same-y, mildly uncanny way (AI gen will do that for ya!), but the scenes are poorly written. None of the characters have any personality to them, the writing has a lot of jarring cuts, and the art and animation progress to...certain events...well before the script does. The description on the store page makes it sound like there's a meaningful story, but that's pure puffery: you have zero choice points in how the plot (or the "plot") unfolds.

Give this one a pass. There are better uses for your money, time, and tissues.

Good art and animations. The cards are a little confusing at first but once you figure it out it is fun. The game is pretty short and only has about 8 short scenes.