Succubus Farm is a rare animal in the visual novel, eroge, game space. It has a unique concept, its relationships are exclusively flavors of femdom — that’s the domination of a usually male protagonist by female characters — and it has gameplay that isn’t just some type of reworked RPG mechanics. All of which makes Succubus Farm hard to review without spoilers. So fair warning, I’m going to spoil the story minimally, and the game’s mechanics quite a bit in reviewing this game. This article is also not safe for work, even compared to other ero game reviews.
Gameplay and Design
Succubus Farm has straightforward gameplay: run away. You control protagonist Lan as succubi chase you through a maze-like farming facility, and escape is your only goal. You have no weapons, only a hiding mechanic that lets you hop into pixel art locations that will make succubi chasing you reset after a little while — assuming you aren’t visible to them when you hide, in which case they just find you. When you’re caught, you fornicate with succubus illusions they inflict on you instead of draining you dead, and you can resist and try to escape and start running all over again unless you run out of hearts.
Succubus Farm‘s best mechanic is the save system. Arriving at a succubus statue recovers the resources you need to survive being caught, and acts as a waypoint you can return to after your next bad-end. The statues make it possible to lose on purpose to experience the scenes, without things beginning to feel frustrating or slow.
The escape mechanics are a good idea, a breath of fresh air compared to the typical RPG mechanics that appear in many VNs, but they lack polish. Going into a succubus’ visual area alerts them, and they chase you, but they’re mostly easy to escape. If you get caught in a tight area, you can spam the escape button during the pixel art molestation, and then you’re invincible for a few seconds — which you can exploit to literally get through any number of succubi. There’s supposedly a charm mechanic as well, where you spam a button to escape being drawn in by a succubus, but it’s used so sparingly I wasn’t sure if it ever showed up again after the tutorial that demonstrated it. A big part of the lack of polish is because of barely used systems like the charm, and an item system the game introduces to you with a lantern at the start of the game and never uses again.
The only frustrating mechanic is trying to see the pixel-art game overs. Losing actually takes so long, even with skipping, that I gave up after a couple of tries and waited until I could unlock them in the recollections room.
The pixel art and CG scenes are well drawn, big on detail, and highly erotic. The explanations of mechanics, as pictured above, are clear. The backgrounds are shockingly detailed for spaces you aim to just run through. And the different level mechanics that make your escape difficult make most levels feel unique, and provide the only challenge in the game — I actually really liked a few, and died a couple times by accident because of them.
Story and Characters
Succubus Farm starts off with Lan offering to help a girl find her missing brother. Into the woods he goes. Very quickly Lan goes from exploring the forest at night to strapped into a succubus dairy stall having his dick milked by a succubus running a basic test on him. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the game, wherein Lan is logically seen as a cow by a large cast of succubi who will capture him and milk him for all he’s worth. For a nukige, the tone and theme of femdom is refreshing in a market saturated with male power fantasies that often lean to the abusive or coercive, and anyone with the appropriate interests should pick up Succubus Farm.
Story-wise the game doesn’t get complex. Lan escapes very early, and the entire game is his running from succubi. Most of the scenes are dead-ends, resulting from direct capture by one of the two general enemy types, or even caused by hiding in the wrong spot (the game does warn you that these are end-points). Escaping is possible, and an endpoint, but it’s sudden — a single screen that explains you’ve escaped before the credits roll. I found the less-bad ending — where Lan stays behind willingly — more satisfying, if only because there’s a scene to reward me for choosing it.
The story is carried entirely by tone and themes, which it sells with its characters. The main reason for people to pick up this game is because of the broad cast of aggressive succubi, each of whom caters to specific fetishes and is both attractively drawn and has a voice actress who brings the succubus to life. Every succubus oozes eroticism.
Rapti is the first boss. Want to be dominated by being shoved under her clothes and spoiled rotten with pure skinship as she milks you for her pleasure and sadism? Yeah, that’s a fetish, and she’s your gal for it.
When you meet Est she just uses her onahole tail to make Lan’s penis more sensitive and sends him on his way. Her whole thing is transformation and her nurse/doctor fetish getup, to the extent that one of her CGs has her milk Lan with the help of a pair of her succubus nursing staff.
Lulu is tiny. She uses succubus magic to shrink Lan, or to turn him into a dick-in-a-box. She’s super playful and literally makes Lan her toy.
Luna is a slave trainer. A severe task-mistress who tries to get Lan in shape to be sold as a personal food source to her peers. The most purely dominating succubus.
Kuluka. Motherly mad-scientist. You meet her early, but her main scene is near the end when you choose to stay with the succubi instead of escaping.
Conclusion
Succubus Farm is well-made and interesting, but I can’t help but feel it could have been better. The lack of polish and the sudden ending made it feel interrupted. Given its rare role in the eroge game space though, its flaws are easy to overlook, especially since none make the game unplayable or the voice work any less erotic. It’s available digitally now from JAST USA (NSFW).
