Shrift

H Scene Count- Lots. didn’t count, but somewhere around 40 loss scenes at least.

Created by DEVIL’s OFFICE, translated by a couple of people.

Length- 5-7 hours to beat, maybe shorter. Another 4 or so to finish.

Shrift is an RPG Maker monster girl humiliation focused thing. Basically, Monster Girl Quest with some touches of Undertale tossed in.

This was an old recommendation I got. I passed on it for the art style, but having played it the actual story was good. Worth checking out just for it, though using a save to do so is difficult… Just play on easy.

Story

You play as Kazuya(renameable). He’s going on a double date with his friends and boom, wakes up in a capsule. Panicking and searching around he eventually gets on a radio call with his friend Yuuma. Yuuma lays the truth out plainly. They got hit by a car, Kazyua entered a coma, and it’s been 5 years. During this time, demons have warred on humanity with the cult M.O.W. leading the sexual monsters to a mostly one-sided war, with humanity losing.

These demons aren’t mostly looking to kill humans, but any sexual contact will usually end with a human losing their soul in some way. After a quick encounter with a demon dog where Kazuya learns he has magic now, and to intro game mechanics you get your first moral choice, which play heavily into the game’s story and mechanics. It’s basically be nice to the soul eating monsters or kill them. Considering this is a porn game, which do you think is the “better” option?

Moving on, Kazyua finds a safe room and a mysterious door appears. Inside a talking cushion named Cushion-kun and his assistant tell Kazuya a few more facts. His soul is messed up and has been kicked from reincarnation, but as a bonus he gets infinite retries. This space is also a mental tool to help him out, a last life bonus of sorts. The assistant then introduces the bestiary, tied to some game stuff, and the Hell’s Indulgence. This piece of gear is a get out of scene card when you lose and is tied to dodging the corruption of Kazuya’s soul, kind of. Using it is helpful, but if you want scene unlocks you can’t use it and it messes up the true mercy ending.

From there on it’s mostly Kazuya coming into contact with a new monster girl and her atrocities each chapter, coming to understand them or kill them, while struggling to reunite with Yuuma and escape what should have been a safe place from the war far from the frontline. Lots of mysteries and lore to uncover. Also mutli verse stuff and time shenanigans. It’s a good read and worth going through just for that.

Gameplay

It’s a mix of Monster Girl Quest’s puzzle fights with actual RPG combat. Lots of status effects, bindings, 100% puzzle fights, and prep based stuff. Some fights are just slugging matches with dealing with binding and other sexual status effects (fuck ecstasy as an effect, having to punch yourself to heal something the enemy can spam was annoying, same with puppet), while other are completely choose the right option or die. The actual interesting stuff about this game exists outside of the combat. Like mentioned above, this is the Undertale of porn games…

Basically, the game uses its global save to track a lot of things, mostly related to your relation to the enemies. If you lose fights, you gain corruption to your soul, which translated as debuffs to fighting that girl. The main way to cure this is via winning fights from them, which can be made impossible via the corruption itself. When you win a fight, you are given the option to kill or spare your enemy. Killing lets you gain xp and level, but you are outright told that they will remember this through time aka your save. Choosing mercy and getting through the chapter, you can find that monster girl in your mental room where you can build a relation with her safely from the effects of her corruption or death. At max affection she can cure her corruption, a mostly pointless thing as you never have to fight a girl who has reached the mental rooms again. Even on NG+.

Choosing kill can disable the option to do mercy to that girl again, similar to how some endings in Undertale work. There is one other mechanic that deals with corruption, and that’s Hell’s guides. I mentioned the MC’s soul being special and cushion-kin above. As you use the item they give you to dodge lose scenes, you gain indulgence points to spend in their space, one of which options is to cure corruption. This is the fix a screw up option. This also dirties your soul, which affects endings. To get the “good” or True Mercy ending, you must get every monster into your mental Room, and never use the indulgence. A really easy thing to do in NG+, as endings wipe your soul clean and if the girls are all in their rooms, give cute scenes as they help you avoid fighting any other possible enemies in the game. I think only 1 fight is even possible in NG+ at that point without turning off NG+ bonuses.

So, what benefit does mercy have? Behind each girl in their room are 3 chests. The fight to open gives you a refight item, which lets you grind drops and money from that girl or get missing loss scenes from the h gallery. It can also be a magatama, which is the same idea but also has the entire event for more complicated scene unlocks. The second chest is a piece of gear, usually very useful. The final chest is stat points, which is how mercy runs get stronger. That and the book chests. Unlocking the bestiary(which also includes girl poses for h scenes) lets you open boxes with money and stat points in them, which are a nice incentive.

To open said chests in the rooms, you just have sex with the habitant. You can get about 25% of their points per visit and then have to wait for the MC to recover, each girl needs 100 and starts at 25. You can also give gifts, but money farming is a pain so h grinding it is.

Beyond that, it’s mostly a kind of linear puzzle scavenger. You hunt for the stuff to progress while finding gear, items, and the next safe room while dealing with foes you in no way should be beating. Rarely you use the fact you can chapter hop to achieve no death goals to situations. You can strengthen yourself using capsules in safe rooms, where you can put your earned points into stat passives and skills. Stat passives require an item to respec, skills can be reset as wanted. Safe rooms are also the only place to save and rest so they are true to their names.

Ending note, the game is stupid hard on higher difficulties. Like depending on RNG, a lot of fights can be impossible. If you want a challenge play on normal, things are more stacked against you, but it is manageable. Hard is a pain and is truly for masochists.

H and Other stuff

What if the guy who threw women’s torso’s onto animal bits in Monster Girl Quest(generally the most iffy designs really) drew a whole game? That’s the art. Sometimes the girls even start decently attractive then become actual monsters even. To animate it, it gets stretched around. This is not a good looking game to me. That’s what kept me from it for a long time. That and I’ve grown out of the reverse noncon stuff for a while.

It does have vaguely consensual stuff in the My Room. So, each enemy has loss scenes you can replay from the main menu. You just actually have a bad end happen to unlock it and have defeated the girl so for a lot of these you want to go back and lose to the monster using the two replay options. Boxes for fights, magatamas for events. Once you’ve unlocked the girl the game will tell you the unlock conditions for the missing scenes. Some of the dlc/ex girls either unlock by beating their bit, or have special rules and honestly are kind fo a pain since a lot of them are one time only per overall save.

Then you have the room scenes, which are basically animation players. You get a bit of justification text and then boom, animation loop. Each girl does have a bond scene, which usually is more text heavy and can be almost romantic. Almost, then taking a giant swerve to force.

As for scene types, the whole set is here. Chapter 3 of the game throws in vore, I think all four girls from that chapter have at least 1 scene of that type. Beyond that you have the usual tentacles or similar, hand, feet, tits, actual sex, mouths and such. Brainwashing and just extreme arousal are common. Not a fan of the scenes using the animation loop to slow down skipping through them. Honestly none of this was really for me so I didn’t read any of it.

Verdict

A good read with thematically appropriate annoying fights. I’m glad this got a series as the world and the battle is interesting and the monsters and their relationships ending up being adorable. Any interaction that wasn’t about sex was actually pretty good, not sure if the sex was good since I just don’t have the right fetish set for this game.

Definitely a recommend for story. The rest is hit or miss depending on taste.

Save for Shrift

Contains- Haven’t done DLC 4, it wasn’t translated. Or maybe just the intro area wasn’t? Anyway, everything else is done. Haven’t done genocide ending either, I doubt any h scenes are unique to that run.

Main folder has saves before DLC. 1 is prepped for the dlc. 2 is before beating the game, this one is for using the engagement ring to marry one of the girls in the My Room. 3 is just before I NG+ for the sake of it.

DLC saves only the PublicData and Save 1 matter. Save1 is done with the first 3 DLCs. PublicData is the lose scene galleries.