Kagura Games has recently published the game Holy Road, which is available on Kagura Games on Steam and from our friends at JAST USA (adults only). Developed by peperoncino, Holy Road is the first game Kagura Games has released that I wouldn’t label an RPG. You take on the role of a corrupt priest forced away from what he knows due to a vaguely detailed sex scandal involving newlyweds. With the help of a trusty nun, who is just as lewd as the main character, you will build up a village from scratch. Along the way, the main character will use his position to prosecute beautiful women as witches and take advantage of their bodies, and he will take the virginity of beautiful brides on their wedding nights.
The game is separated into two phases, a building phase, and an action phase. During the building phase, you can build as much as you can afford, from houses to brothels, also limited by certain prerequisite resources. This is a simple technology tree, where you build a pasture that provides meat, the meat lets you build a plaza that provides trade goods, the trade goods are needed for a market, etc. . . The only other limit on your tech tree is population, with fewer buildings available until you grow your city. Buildings can’t be rotated, not even walls and the building prerequisites are linear, so there’s no mechanical depth here.
Then there’s the action phase. This is where you’ll earn all your money in the early game. It’s also where you recruit military protection, increase faith, and enhance your town’s order. It’s also where you save your progress, and trigger scenes. Confession, and punishing a witch always trigger scenes when they’re available, and I found preach can often trigger scenes, but here’s where the problems start to show.
According to the gallery, there are thirteen women in the game with scenes. Women appear during certain stages of your town’s development, and it’s by choosing the correct action that lets you meet them. Since there’s no indicator of where to look, and you only have 3 actions per phase, you have a pretty good motive to save-scum until you find all the women available. Unfortunately, you don’t know how many there are so you have to check using every action you can.
I provided a windowed view of the game above in order to show off the entire UI. Most features, from display settings to volume controls, are accessed through the top bar rather than through a menu. Combined with the basic font, a phase-specific save/load feature, and a bare-bones textbox, this game’s UI is functional, but mediocre at best. One character, a foreign trader, has awful grammar in a heavy-handed emphasis of her foreign status. Along with a handful of other grammar, and translation errors, including a kanji character, this game has the worst localization of any Kagura Games release I’ve ever played.
I also encountered something strange, a non-standard game over that seemed to be based on the decisions made in the action phase. My priest upgraded his town and then told his nun he liked helping people, which caused me to lose the game. I assumed this was because I was doing too much charity, not enough negative actions like persecution, so I reloaded a save to avoid the ending. There was no hint leading up to this that there was any mechanical difference between actions. Even though I avoided the ending, there’s no clarity in the game, and for all I know all my assumptions about what caused it could be wrong.
Let’s move onto bugs. The most straightforward is that sometimes I couldn’t build where the game said I could, except it would randomly let me do it if I tried again. A dozen or more clicks and mouse moving could fail before it finally worked. If it ever worked.
Unfortunately, not all bugs are clear. The wedding button doesn’t cause weddings, it shows a scene where you learn the prerequisite for a wedding, like selling a certain number of items or building three of a specific building. Weddings actually trigger automatically as a scene after leaving the building phase. The problem here is that I’ve had weddings triggered without ever using that action. The event just happens. You’re also supposed to have heard a character’s confession to know how to blackmail them before their wedding, but I’ve had weddings trigger before my chance for that either, yet the priest still blackmails them into sex using the knowledge he shouldn’t have. None of it feels like it’s working as intended.
I also built up my town so fast I found a couple of women, but before I could hear their confessions I had a bigger city. After that, I could punish them as witches, but I couldn’t hear their confession, their wedding plans, or encounter a scene with them using other actions. The worst part is that I can’t even tell which of these are bugs, and which are intentional, because of how inconsistent it all is.
This game is a boring building game with no depth and a series of annoying hoops you have to jump through to trigger scenes with no hint about what to do, in what order, or how quickly. The scenes are barely worth it, using the same couple images for each of the half-dozen or so scenes each character has. Ruining progression, and missing characters are way too easy for a game with such lightweight gameplay in the first place. I’m sorry to say that I don’t suggest this game for anyone except maybe the biggest Kagura Games fans. Consider trying Treasure Hunter Claire instead.
