itch.io

Take the basic gameplay and setting ideas of Trials In Tainted Space, strip out that game's utter mess of "too many cooks spoils the soup" until only the best and most consistent writing is left, condense it down to a size that is satisfying rather than overwhelming, and add in a really good main protagonist (by any standard, but especially for an H-game), and you've got MERCANOID.

Extremely good slay-the-spire-like h-game, with both fun gameplay and good scenes. However, I do have one big problem with it: the bosses don't really scale, with the first boss being a huge difficulty spike because it is exactly as strong as the second and third ones. The only way I have found to beat it is by having the Battle Trance card, at which point it instantly becomes not a problem, which... is just a sign of poor balance.

Getting 500 gold via selling Elasticity Elixers seems fine. Though it should be noted, getting that 500 gold is the final task for the current version; whether that pacing is still appropriate when there is more content to see and more things to purchase afterwards is uncertain. If you do decide to reduce it, I'd say 300 would be good.

So far, there are 7 scenes that I could find:


(extra lines to spoiler it for those who want to figure it out themself)










1. Use Allure Potion on Vine
2. Use Allure Potion on Vine after... either increasing Lewd rating or unlocking Elasticity Elixer (not sure what unlocked the alternate scene)
3. Use Allure Potion on Slime
4. Use Allure Potion on Slime after... either increasing Lewd rating or unlocking Elasticity Elixer (not sure what unlocked the alternate scene)
5. Talk about Allure Potion with Philia (the goblin), come back at Night
6. Talk about Elasticity Elixer with Jessica (the merchant), come back at Night
7. Talk about Elasticity Elixer with Beth (the minotaur), come back at Night

The four Slime and Vine each have alternate versions for doing them again. The Philia/Jessica/Beth scenes clearly are intended to have alternate versions as well, but those presumably aren't made yet.

Haven't found any way to do anything with Alo'Eth (the drow librarian); I would guess that will require something found in the First Wing of the library, which hasn't been made yet.

Bug reports: the Eul in Love Chair scene results in dialog from Mary instead. Also, mirroring the Love Chair and then doing any scene in it results in the partner's dialog being backwards. Third fishing Achievement (for 50 catches) never triggers, even after catching a total of over 100 fish and having all types caught at least once. Finally, at one point while working at the store, I randomly stopped being able to pick up any of the items to give to customers (no idea what triggered this, but it only happened once, and was fine again when working there again on a later day).

Bug report: in the second battle, even after killing all the enemies, the battle just never ends. No more cards from my deck show up, so the game acknowledges that I am supposed to be able to draw anything, but I can't proceed to getting new cards or the next battle. Have tried waiting, hammering the End Turn button repeatedly, left and right clicking on empty space, and clicking every other button I can (including "Quit"; I have gone through this twice now).

Bug report: Even if playing as a female, Teasing the enemy regularly results in references to you having a cock and balls.

Other commentary: Fighter seems really overpowered compared to the other two classes; it does more damage AND its second ability can heal in addition to doing damage AND it will likely have an extra 10 HP if you are min/maxing your race with your class. Traps are so weak, they seem completely pointless; they are easy to avoid regardless of whether you have good Dexterity, but even if you are hit, they do barely any damage, and that only matters for exactly one fight, after which you heal fully.

(Web Version) Bug Report:

An error has occurred. You may be able to continue, but some parts may not work properly.

Error: Not enough arguments to CanvasRenderingContext2D.setTransform..

Stack Trace:

handler/ldr<@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/8748867/index.html line 12526 > eval:2187:33

@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/8748867/index.html line 12526 > eval:2056:26

Bug reports:
1. Erika seems bugged in general, it treats her requirement as completed when it isn't and as uncompleted when it is
2. Legendary Pokemon counter remains at 0 no matter what, which even affects dialog in a couple places

Not all browsers support it. My main one (Pale Moon) results in the following error message:

Error

The following features required to run Godot projects on the Web are missing:

Fetch - Check web browser version

Cross Origin Isolation - Check web server configuration (send correct headers)

EDIT: And, my secondary one (Brave) gets a bit further, but then gets stuck forever on an endless loading wheel. No error message for this, sadly.

Good art, but very minimal gameplay and story so far, so I'll refrain from giving this a rating. A couple things that stood out to me as possible flaws, though:

The progress bars while farming seem kind of pointlessly annoying. It just seems like... a very artificial way of slowing down the pace of things.

The various vegetables you grow are all pretty much the same aside from the rapidly increasing costs that just makes each new one strictly better than all the ones before. Except for cabbages, since those grow in just 1 day compared to everything else's 2, but cabages sell for so little they are basically worthless after the first few days.

The costs for both buying and selling increase at an absolutely ludicrous rate; $100 per tomato, so you can easily skip past whatever the $50 vegetable was straight to tomatos, then within just a couple harvests of tomatos you can buy one of every gift (of which you will need only 4).

The conversations and choices of gift items you give Amelia frequently seem like responses to conversation choices that you have not yet picked.

Though I was paying attention to everything Amelia said... from a gameplay/progression perspective, there is honestly no reason to. It's just a simple linear progression of:
1. Talk to her exactly once per day, pick conversation choice (which one doesn't matter), repeat until heart is full.
2. Give gift. Pick special unique one time conversation choice, which one still doesn't matter. Receive provocative picture.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until all 4 hearts are full. Have short sex scene. All future interactions with her are now that sex scene.

Even though this is an early alpha, with multiple hints at things that things that will be introduced in future updates, the sheer lack of anything to do sticks out. By the end, after I had over $3000 from a couple tomato harvests on top of all the gift items, I didn't even bother farming anymore. For a few days, the "daily routine" was just, wake up, talk to Amelia, go back to sleep.

Finally, the bit about "due to browser constraints, the web version comes with a few limitations"... I am skeptical of, and worried about. I have played a lot of web games over the years (H-games and otherwise), and they can be *really* complex and elaborate. This, in its current state, is the opposite of that... and yet, it seemed to take up a lot of memory when it was first loading in? I can't think of what could possibly be causing it to take up so much space. The art is good, but not that good, and I can't think of any art style that really would be? There just ain't that many assets that I can see. And though music and sounds can take up a lot of space, there isn't much of that either. Is it some sort of coding efficiency issue? If so, you should really, really get on fixing whatever fundamental coding thing is causing this while the game is still small and young. Otherwise, it won't be just the web version that is constrained by file sizes.

Charisma is stat that needs to be high-ish to do this. I think you need a total of 10? Though a few of those points can be gained from equipment and temporary buffs... I think you can get up to +3 at this point in the game with little difficulty, meaning a base Charisma stat of 7 would be needed. An even higher boost might be possible with some effort if you go out of you way for them.

It's... okay. Decent art, points for simplicity, points for understanding that not everything needs to be a huge megaproject that takes years to complete across a billion updates. Nice idea for gameplay, with mediocre implementation. The biggest problems are the user interface (just arrows and enter/spacebar?), and how poorly explained (which is to say, not really explained at all) everything is. Other problems include: rounds that go on a while suddenly ending without explanation even when I have units still alive and attacking, and one of the units's ability to pull enemies resulting in enemies going behind you, eventually off the screen behind the start, which apparently screws up targetting and tends to result in the first bug happening.

It says a lot about our world that seemingly everyone agrees that a simultaneously anarchic yet megalomaniacal cult of violent perverts who openly admit that they are evil would be a preferable system of government to the corporatocracy/oligarchy-posing-as-democracy running things now.

Anyway, great game! The three or four different forms of combat are all a bit too separated from each other to work well together, but individually all are fine, and that's really the only serious complaint I have. Fantastic writing in a setting that is surprisingly original (considering that it is mostly just the result of merging a couple pre-existing common genres). Good art, good sex scenes, mostly good gameplay aside from the one gripe above, and great pacing for the various quests and sidequests.

Okay, so you're one of those obnoxious militant asexuals who makes all other asexuals look bad by association. That or a troll. Fine, you're awful, whatever. If nothing else, you're a useful target to argue against for opening up a discussion to justify the existence of adult content to whatever buffoons are actually responsible for this idiotic decision.
Let's look at the causality of adult games and other forms of pornography, specifically pornography with fetishes that would be really bad in real life since that seems to be what you're focusing on (with the blatantly incorrect assumption that all of it is rape or similarly bad stuff; it's not).

Possibility #1: Consumption/production of porn with dangerous fetish increases likehood of people to do that fetish in real life, as you say
Possibility #2: Consumption/production of porn with dangerous fetish helps people get pre-existing desires out of their system, decreasing likelihood of people to do that fetish in real life
Possibility #3: No correlation between consumption/production of porn and likelihood of people to do that fetish in real life; they have a complete disconnect between their thoughts on the actual act and fictional depictions of it

I would guess that all of these occur to some degree, varying from person to person, with #3 being the most common, and #2 being common enough to cancel out #1. I don't actually know, there'd have to be some huge international statistical survey to even begin to figure this out, and if it's happened I don't know it. But until it's certain, the possibility of #2 seems important enough to not just throw it all away out of fear of #1.

There's also a variant of #2, where people try to use porn to get whatever messed up desires out of their system, but fail and end up doing it anyway. This is the most common cause of "There have been many incidents when people playing these games actually did the stuff shown in the game". They would have done the bad thing regardless, the porn was simply an indication of their interest; correlation does not imply causation. Also, though I admit that I don't know the statistics, this also seems like another explanation for "Also many people suffer from psychological problems from playing these games."; maybe it's just that people with psychological problems were more likely to play them.

Regardless, even in the absolute worst case, if you are completely correct that porn only increases the likelihood of rape and other similar sorts of bad stuff and psychological problems... they still wouldn't be "ruining the world" as you've said. They'd be causing a few serious problems, which would get thrown into an ocean of other even worse problems. You know what is ruining the world? Evil and incompetent governments and corporations trying to control everything and everyone and horde all the world's wealth. One of the many methods by which they do this is... censorship! Controlling what we can say, what information and ideas we are allowed to access. They regularly go after adult content because it is such an easy target (because of beliefs like yours), and once they have some laws in place to control it... hey look it turns out that those laws contained a bunch of loopholes that make it apply to stuff other than porn, and sets some precedents that make it easy to expand further with even more laws, now everything is censored, now we are no longer able to even talk about it or know about it let alone resist it whenever some government or corporation destroys the environment or uses slave labor to make their product or commits genocide.
That seems a lot more "evil" to me than drawing or writing about people having sex.

Wow, ANOTHER site trying to commit suicide via censorship? What is even with that, it's been happening more and more lately, despite the fact that everyone should really know better after the whole tumblr fiasco. I know hosting is expensive and that sites need to make shady deals with blatantly evil companies just to survive, but this is just, counterproductive to survival. I'll admit, this shit right here is slightly less incompetent than the usual methods of banning adult content, since it's less comprehensive and isn't yet another automated purge, but I'm guessing it's just Step 1, before things get really bad. I've said it before elsewhere, and at this rate I'm sure I'll say it a dozen more times in the coming years: porn is a canary in a coal mine, dying first to detect attempts at controlling everyone via censorship. Non-adult game devs: if you're reading this, I suggest that you too look for (or make!) other platforms to host your games, because you're next.

Using Linux, specifically an unusual version known as Puppy Linux, whose main thing is being so lightweight it can be run entirely from RAM, and thus does not always have certain things you'd expect to come pre-packaged with an operating system. Maybe it has something to do with how much memory it is trying to use at once? Or trying to save data to somewhere that simply does not exist on this computer?

So, I have two browsers, and the game works on neither of them. On Pale Moon, the game doesn't even start to load. On Brave, it seems fine at first... and then just as soon as I get past the menu, the game crashes, and looks like this:

This problem isn't exclusive to just this game, I have seen it a couple times before with games on other sites, so it's probably more of an issue with whatever engine the games were programmed in? So it may or may not be fixable, I dunno. No way to know on my end, though; this is one of the least helpful and informative crash screens I've ever seen.

Hmm, alright, a simple miscommunication over what the discussion was about; two sides were arguing over entirely different things without realizing it.

Anyway, I agree that it shouldn't be a big deal when it comes to sfw stuff (it objectively is a big deal, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation at all, but it shouldn't be). For nsfw stuff though, it is pretty important.

No idea whether what Jhaerik said above was actually homophobic or not; I can easily see it as another unfortunate misunderstanding. As I discovered earlier, there are at least 8 gay tags... and upon seeing that "yuri" was among them, I have checked and confirmed that there is a "yaoi" tag as well, bringing it up to at least 9. Even without any problem with LGBTQA people or games themselves, that level of redundancy seems a bit excessive... and when there certain noticeably missing tag options, seeing that redundancy concentrated all to one area can be a bit infuriating. Regardless of their motivations though, they did have a good idea about adding a Straight tag. Because again, in certain specific contexts it is important to specify that, and this site lacks (and more infuriatingly, refuses to build) the infrastructure necessary for us to not need to add it for filtering purposes.

From some of your other posts on here I am thinking you are probably just a troll, but I'll respond anyway for the sake of anyone else reading this in the future. To the overall points anyway; don't care enough to bother with the ad-hominem junk, this ain't about me.

When it comes to nsfw games, as in porn games, generally they're going to put a picture of a girl up front if it's for people attracted to girls, and a picture of a guy up front if it's for people attracted to guys. If they put multiple characters on, then you can sometimes narrow things down further depending on how they are posed; they could be together, or they could be different options. Also, justified or not, the target audience of any sort of porn tends to be men, even if the actual audience is much more varied. The end result is: if you see a male character  on a porn game's title card (and especially if you see two or more male characters together), it's probably gonna be gay, and if you see a female character and in many cases even if you see multiple female characters, it's probably straight, though lesbian is still a possibility, especially on this site. Yes I know the latter half is half of what you are objecting to, please don't hyperfixate on just that.

If we were talking about actually safe for work games, that's a different story. Nothing wrong with lgbt characters showing up, or being in romantic relationships on screen, I fully support that. Plenty of awesome characters out there who happen to be romantically/physically attracted to their own gender as just one of their many character traits. Being openly out there and having representation is outright vital, not just for public support to acknowledge and accept it as normal, but so gay people don't have to deal with random police raids and shit like in the bad old pre-Stonewall-riot days. But we aren't talking about safe for work games, we are currently talking about porn.

In the sort of games being discussed here, the characters are doing a whole lot more than just EXISTING. Doing a lot more than even just kissing each other, too. They are having sex with each other, explicitly, on screen. Often, that is like 90% of the game's content; just the characters having sex. Nothing wrong with that, but depending on the genitals of the characters, not everyone is going to want to see it. In circumstances like these, male-on-male, female-on-female, and yes female-on-male as well, are all basically just fetishes, no different from stuff like bdsm or ntr or vore or poop or whatever. Some people will be into it, a lot of others will be outright grossed out by the sight of it. It is the responsibility of porn makers to properly tag the fetishes within the porn that they are making. And, more relevantly to this overall thread: it is the responsibility of the hosting site to make it so people can actually properly filter using those tags, and itch.io is failing in that responsibility.

On a platform with a sane and reasonable search feature, sure, maybe. But that's not what we're dealing with; we're dealing with a platform where you can only filter content by adding more tags.

On itch.io specifically, it seems pretty easy to find both, just sorta mixed in with each other randomly, especially among the highest rated stuff. But the problem isn't even really, ease of finding what we're looking for. It's a matter of, excluding what we are explicitly not looking for. Let's take a look at the current top two rows of highest rated free nsfw web games, and what we can guess from their title cards:

1. Max the Elf: Looks straight at first glance? Then at second glance, nope, you can see screenshots of the male player character on the receiving end of cocks. Did not want to see that, did anyway. LGBT is right there in the tags, coulda avoided that with tag exclusion.
2. Sileo: Tales of a New Dawn: Looks gay, explicitly states that it is. Okay, cool, that was straightforward! Not gonna click it.
3. Five Nights at FuzzBoob's: Looks straight, judging by how the title card is literally just a pair of breasts. Haven't played it myself though so I can't be sure. After a brief look at the description though, I see the phrase "her two girlfriends", so... lesbian, then? Not seeing any tags to indicate this, though!
4. Superstition S1: From the title card, I can't even guess. I was even on the verge of suspecting it was one of those things that gets called "nsfw" for reasons like, horror or trigger warnings or some such thing? In the description though, I saw "Play as male, female, or non-gender specific, along with transgender choices. Romance one of five characters, have flings, or stay single because life is hectic enough as is.", so... optionally LGBT, optionally straight? No way of guessing that without checking first, though.
5. Factorial Omega: My Dystopian Robot Girlfriend: Looks straight... and actually is!
6. After Years: Appears to be another obviously gay one.
7. Bad Ritual: Another where I can't even guess. Upon closer examination, LGBT and LGBTQIA are in fact in the tags (hey, there's a 5th gay tag!). No indication in the description whether it is gay, lesbian, transgender, or something else, but from a brief look at the comments it seems probably gay... unless it's actually bi and everyone is just focusing on the male characters.
8. The Forest of Love: Can not even guess from the title card. Or from the description. There is no LGBT tag in here. And yet, it seems that there is stuff with both male and female characters? So, this one is apparently bi, but just, poorly indicated in general?
9. Crown of Exile: No indication from title card. This one appears to have the ability to play as male or female, and romance male or female characters. No idea whether your own character's gender limits your options or not, though; there is no LGBT tag, but we already know that isn't completely reliable.
10. Some Sword/Some Play: Another with no indication from title card. Sifting through the description though, I see: "All three main romances are playable as any combination of M/F/NB with any configuration of naughty bits.". So, another that could be straight, gay, lesbian, or anything else depending on what the player chooses. No tags to indicate this.
11. He Fucked the Girl Out of Me: Can't guess from the image, but from the name, I would guess some sort of transgender thing? In the tags, I see: "Gay, Lesbian, LGBT, Queer, Transgender, Yuri". Wow that's a lot... okay we've gone from 5 all the way up to 8 gay tags thanks to this one. But: the description also states "Trigger Warnings are listed in-game.", and from the comments I am not even sure if this one is porn at all, but rather a deeper story which just happens to focus on nsfw subject matter?
12. Nicole's Risky Job: Would guess straight. Seems to actually be solo female though, no males involved, which means... would probably be equally fine for a lesbian as for a straight man. And would not be fine for a straight woman.

So, out of just these 12, that's quite a few incorrect guesses and stuff that is just poorly indicated without playing. Seriously, this is even worse than I thought, only like a third can be correctly guessed ahead of time without clicking on them. At this point, additional tags, even without the actual tag exclusion we all want, would be helpful for filtering for everyone.

If you do this, I suggest following the example of something like Succubus Stories; give the choice between 3D models, hand drawn 2D art, or no art.

If you can't get any 2D models, than still have the choice turning off the art, because for me, the majority of 3D porn art is worse than nothing.

Hmm, alright, considering that the game is a work in progress that is still early in development and is being constantly improved and expanded on, I'll be more lenient. I'll probably come back to this after another update or two, increasing my rating for the game if my issues with it are fixed. Have exported a save from just before the start of the rebuild festival, that I will import when I try this again. Just uhh, keep an eye out to make sure similar problems to this one don't crop up elsewhere in the game.

Yeah, I thought it might be something like that. I have 20 points, because of that flirtation dialog taking away 10. And I do get not being compatible with her because of her wanting lots of kids right away and the protagonist being at least uncertain because of an initial trait taken.

The real deal breaker here isn't even Usanna specifically, though. If it was just her, I'd be disappointed, but I could move on. The problem is basically a matter of, extremely poor communication in game design on what effect certain choices will have going forward, combined with having my choices taken away with no real justification. If Kristan doesn't have the right personality, that will lead to her being uninterested in Kristan... but, that's no reason for Kristan to suddenly drop out and not participate in the battle circle. It's even more annoying that it suddenly came out of nowhere, after Kristan and Usanna spent like half of their previous interactions up until that point flirting with each other, even having a single outright sex scene. If Kristan could continue into the battle circle, and then have Usanna still explain that even though she likes him she doesn't think they're compatible long term because of that first flirtation dialog, I'd be fine with that. If Kristan could do something to redeem himself in her eyes, that would be good too, but is unnecessary. It's the, having my own ability to even make the choice in the first place be suddenly gone that is the problem.

But what makes me want to stop playing completely is, I am now expecting more of this problem to pop up in interactions with other characters everywhere else. Not even necessarily just in romance stuff; for all I know, I could say something to, I dunno let's say the mayor for example, and then a few hours of gameplay later this turns out to have locked me out of even attempting to pick some option in a major plot event over how to resolve some life or death crisis.

So, I've gotten pretty far along Usanna's route... or at least, I thought I did.

In one of the first interactions with her, just before the mission to defeat Ghorza, by choosing to flirt, my character unexpectedly said something that Usanna didn't like, decreasing her Love stat by several points. I continued on anyway. I assumed that, I'd be able to make up for those lost points later on; that it would either take longer, or there would be enough opportunities to get points that doing perfectly would be unnecessary. Had no reason to suspect this was not the case. Everything appeared to be going well. Just continue with the various sidequests she gives for her village, and things slowly progress further and further with her.

Then I get to the rebuild festival for her village, and... going into the battle circle, it says "You can get into it if you want a good chance of having Usanna for yourself", except, for no discernable reason, no I can't.

The choice to join in is greyed out; mousing over it simply says "Your relationship with Usanna is not strong enough". The only other thing I can click at this point is "Just watch". If I click that, her Love stat goes down by 50 points; as it says, I'm locked out of her route. Might as well have taken those 50 points away during that first botched interaction with her, I guess! Because, that's the only thing I did wrong? Have done every other possible interaction with her that I could see, with positive results every time. But what really pisses me off is: in terms of what my character is doing, there is no logical reason for this. I'd totally join if I could, and if she then still says she isn't interested (which would be baffling considering there was a scene with her in our previous interactions, but whatever), that would be fine. But no, the choice is just, randomly taken away from me by the interface without warning or explanation.

If I continue playing, is this going to be like, a recurring thing that happens? With other girls, or any other events? You do one thing wrong, and this results in you being forever locked out of choices in the far future with no warning and thus forced to completely shoot yourself in the foot for no reason at all? Because if so, that kinda, completely breaks my trust in the game's writing and design, and makes me want to just stop.

So, there appears to be a place to start a scene in the library, on the far left... but no way to start it. The only one who is ever there is Caroline (only in mornings), but you can't trigger it with her, unlike the character-specific location scenes for Sherryl and Caitlyn. And unlike the location at the beach, you can't bring anyone there on a date to trigger the event either, since the library is not one of the date locations. Is there something I'm missing, or is this a bug, or is it an unlabeled patreon exclusive thing, or what?

That... is literally the problem? Straight is the default, so it is not included within the tags, so you can not search for it to use it for filtering stuff. Which might be fine if you could exclude the various gay tags (19 might be an exaggeration, but I can think of four common ones: Gay, LGBT, Bara, Lesbian). But we can't, so we're trying to come up with a new workaround that does work within itch.io's ridiculous framework. And you're objecting to even that???

Oh, and just so we're clear: there's nothing wrong with all the LGBT stuff, I am glad that it exists and that this can be a platform to host it, so that gay players have stuff to enjoy as well. I just don't want to see it myself. And guess what: they don't want to force it down our throats either; during one of the ten thousand or so previous times this topic was brought up, the author of one of the many gay furry visual novels came in and made it clear that they are just as annoyed by the lack of tag exclusion as straight people are.

As far as I can tell, there are no permanent stat ups, but there are temporary stat buffs and equipment to increase stuff for just as long as you are using them. For intelligence, the ones I know about currently available to you are Easter Beast Omelets (hunt Easter Beasts in Bomb Pit and occasionally when travelling between towns, hope they drop an egg in addition to the meat, Cook it with an Unglow Pill from Doctor Choppy) and Black Rollies (bought for 30 Gunpowder each in Last Elysium). Together, these will get you 2 more Intelligence. There is one more source of Int available that I know of, but... it's inside the suitcase! I'm not sure the exact target number, I think it's 6 or 7?

For room A5 and B6 in the bunker, the target Dexterity is 8, but having it that high just... lets you avoid the damage. Unless I'm missing something, you can't actually go inside or there is nothing in there.

Game crashes during the dialog where you give the paper to the statue behind the curtains. Not right away, but I am assuming it is right before the sex scene starts that it crashes. Playing the Linux version, if it matters.

(only seeing this game now because this is the update making it playable on web)
Seems like a pretty good start, the graphics for the girl and the scenery are good (though the cock graphic is a bit weirdly shaped), the customizability is a big selling point. However, I feel like it is missing some rather obvious additions.

Recommendations for things to add:
Presets for the girls
Ability to cum inside, and do it without clicking the button on the lower right
More color customization (or, a clearer interface for it, since it is possible that I am just not understanding how to do it right)

Also, upon right clicking to change the angle, is it supposed to... suddenly snap the angle to the side like that? Seems like a bug.

I actually did use save to disk a couple times... a long while back. My last save to disk was just after I had first left Nogas, which was a long while ago. I stopped using it since the in-game save system appeared to work just fine and this is slower and less convenient, would have used it again if I closed the game down to pick up later.

Did not clear cache, or do anything different between this and my most recent save or load; saving had worked fine before, I had saved just before this (because, as I mentioned, I was expecting a high chance of game over), I had reloaded several times (also just recently, because I had game over'd from something else), not sure why everything suddenly disappeared without warning this time.

I would be completely fine if, instead of this happening, I had gone to save and found that everything had suddenly disappeared. Because then I'd just know to use save to disk all the time. But instead it all suddenly disappeared right when I most needed to load.

Just so we're clear, I'm not expecting to get my save back or anything; I fully understand that the data is gone. I just want whatever caused this in the first place to be fixed so this doesn't happen again, to me or anyone else.

So, I went to Babili, threatened the guy at the arena, immediately got enslaved (without even a fight first!) and then game over'd when I disobeyed orders, and... well, up until now, I was fine, things were about what I expected aside from not getting a chance to fight. But. When I went to reload... all my saves and backup saves, including the autosave, were suddenly gone! What the fuck. Yeah, that kinda, killed my motivation to play.

Holy shit I did it.
Beat the secret Insanely Hard Mode.
That was just... ludicrously bullshit hard, occasionally even unfair during the final bossfight (mostly thanks to Azure), but hey, bragging rights!

Protip for anyone else who wants to try this: Regeneration is your best friend. Even though you only start to get even a single Stamina per turn at 3 stacks, and don't get an extra point per turn until 5 and 8 stacks... that is enough. And the Health regeneration is actually enough to let you survive a single Sigma Attack, despite it doing as much damage as your default max health on this mode! And even 3 Stamina per turn can let you keep Stunlocking on opponent every turn for quite a long while (which you will need to do a lot, again mainly thanks to Azure).

But uhh... the reward feels a little... lackluster? A mere 5 bonus commands, plus some extra thing that can only be accessed externally, via emailing a secret phrase to the author. I love most of what this game does, and am at least willing to tolerate the parts I don't love, but... external rewards, especially ones that would get my email involved, are kinda... how about no.

Yeah, I just got this bug too... in the final boss fight. On Hard Mode. Kinda put a damper on my victory (no triple subjugate for me). Especially since, Hard Mode apparently only gives a mere 4 bonus points (plus a hint for something extra), which is just 1 more than Normal Mode, and... this time around, I had to spend that 1 extra point just on stripping Olive.

Incidentally, on the subject of Olive and ridiculously hard to get extra secrets... what exactly is the thing that you get if you tie her at Rock Paper Scissors and then get a 10? I stumbled upon that as well somehow, but never got any sort of explanation for exactly what the secret I supposedly unlocked was.

The blue one's 3x damage attacks are dangerous, yes... but also, they can easily be turned to your advantage, via the damage-converted-to-healing skill. Generally pretty easy to get a full heal from that.

But despite this, the blue one is still the most dangerous... because of her ability to randomly seal off a third of your skills.

However... I actually don't recommend going after her first... or after anyone first. Try taking them all out at the same time, or at least within a few turns of each other.

I know it says Alt+Enter for fullscreen, but on the Linux version at the very least (don't know about other versions), this does not work. At least, not for me. In later versions, even if you figure out how to fix this, could you implement an in-game button somewhere as an alternate method of toggling it?