So, this was...*different*...

Yes, "different" is definitely the best word for Play My Obsession On Repeat:  The Demon Lord Keeps Reviving The Hero Who Came To Kill Him!

So, to answer the question of those who have seen my work before:  No, this is not a new direction in which my games are going.  (In fact, my next game is going to be a sweet fairy tale.)

And to answer the question of those who haven't seen my work before:  No, none of my other games are anything like this.  (In fact, my previous game was a literal fairy tale!)

"Why does it exist, then?" you may well be asking.

Well...I had an idea for Yandere Jam! that didn't work out, so I thought I'd just not do the jam.  But then I was playing Persona 5 Strikers (sorry for the bad press, Atlus!) and got to the start of the second dungeon of the game, based on the cheesy, fantasy light-novel written by the person in whose mindscape the dungeon is located.  When the party can't immediately get into the castle, the only one who's read the novel explains that they'll probably have to do what the party of heroes had to do in the book in order to get in, and one of the two least pop-culture-experienced teenagers in the history of modernity asks why the demon lord wouldn't just install a door that didn't open, so that the heroes could never get in.  Neither the characters in the game nor I came up with any logical answers about how without a door the demon lord couldn't get his subjects and supplies in and out, of course.  My immediate thought was "well, the demon lord must be into the hero, of course!"  (I forget what the characters said, but it was probably something about the basic conventions of fantasy fiction.  Which is also valid as an answer, naturally.   More so, really, given the highly derivative nature of the light novel in question, in fact.)

Anyway, having had that thought, how could I not want to explore the idea of a demon lord who specifically let the hero into his castle because he wants to bang him?

And, yeah, since it was for Yandere Jam! of course I ended up making him get a sick thrill out of watching the hero die, too.  Because, y'know.  (Also for a challenge, since I don't normally write this kind of character.)

But he's not just into watching the hero die:

He's also just plain into him.  :D

And I made sure (just in case you're reading this without having played the game yet) to make it clear very early on in the game that the hero is also gay.  (Technically, the demon lord is probably not gay.  He's probably more...callisexual?  Hmm.  There's probably already a word for "turned on by beauty" without me needing to coin one, only I do not feel the motivation to go look it up right now.)

The main reason I made it a reverse rogue-like instead of a more straight-forward story is mostly to give the demon lord's yandere side a chance to get out and play.  :P  Though it did mean I ended up writing some really strange stuff that I would normally never write or even think about writing.

Would I say that "reverse rogue-like" was a good idea for this story?

Yeah, actually, I would.  I think the idea works well.

Would I say that I accomplished what I set out to?

Enh....not really.  I mean, I sort of did.  It is a reverse rogue-like, and the demon lord definitely enjoys watching the hero die horribly, while also eagerly planning all the ways he wants to boink him when he gets up to the top, and that's absolutely what I was trying to do.  But it's still got a lot of flaws, some of which I could fix if it wasn't for the game jam deadline (having only started the script like a week into the shortest month of the year did not help on that score!) and some of which are beyond my abilities and/or require an engine other than Ren'py (thus making them beyond my abilities, only in a different way).

The big thing that I could fix if I had more time is the random encounters the hero meets on his way through the castle halls.  There should be more of them (which is not really something I can fix easily, because I'm not good at writing combat or even thinking of combat situations) and they shouldn't be random:  the player should dictate what the hero faces off against.  Ideally, rather than the hero gaining stats when he's revived, he should get experience from the battles he wins and level up in the usual way.  All of this is stuff that I could do in Ren'py (though it would probably be easier in some other engine designed with things like stats and RPG mechanics in mind) if I had more time.

Another thing that I can't fix (not on my own, anyway) is the lack of visual variety.  In an ideal version of this concept, we'd get to see the fights...though that would mean it would hastily turn into a very NSFW experience in one way or the other!  In an ideal version of this game, the setting would  be something like this, where you're seeing the demon lord in profile the whole time...