Written by Otaku Apologist
Narborion by Night, developed by Liber Primus Games. A dark fantasy text-based free to play browser RPG. This game, thank God, breaks the formula of other browser titles on Nutaku. I haven’t played anything so refreshing in years. This game has sex, boardgame style combat, great music and sound, and a Tolkien-style world. If the developers keep iterating on this, I believe it can become one of the best free sex games out there.
The current build of Narborion by Night is not perfect. We’re gonna go over the good and the bad in this game, I’m sending my review to the developer, and hopefully they will pick up some of my notes. With just a little bit more polish, this title could be so damn good.
STORY
You are a simple goat herder, chilling on a field of grass. Then, a magical sword falls from the sky. The sword is alive, and it’s got a name: Limpblade. Suddenly you’re fighting the sword’s owner, an evil witch, that appeared from absolutely nowhere. You go over the combat tutorial, and ta-dah: You are now the chosen one of the legends!
You fuck two witches that give you a quest: fuck lots of women, become a sex wizard. You travel the lands conquering various obstacles on your path to magical (and sexual) prowess. You don’t have any specific route to travel, you just wander around, encounter new creatures, usually with a fuckable hole in them. If you can’t fuck it, you kill it. At the end of some of these quests, you will unlock a new magical rune, that allows you to cast spells you couldn’t before.
The story is just a bare-bones premise, that contextualizes your adventure of sex and ultra violence. It’s divided into chapters, that usually involve you going to an inn, cave, or a village, and fucking somebody’s wife. Sometimes the husbands join you, and a happy consensual threesome ensues. The chapters are not exactly connected with each other, as the game is somewhat non-linear. There’s references to your past fucks in later chapters, but in my playthrough, no characters have joined my party, nobody important has died. This kind of drama has been missing. It reads more like a collection of “meet and fuck” stories, with a little bit of table-top combat, than an epic story full of character development. As a game, it works, but let’s not sugar-coat the fact that the main character is the most braindead wandering gigolo, with no real character flaws that would require him to overcome a personal trauma, or limit. Seriously, whenever he talks, it’s like he has no history.
This male protagonist is nothing but a soulless biological fucking and killing machine.
The story of Narborion by Night is set in a Tolkien-style world, that reads like erotic fanfiction. There’s elves, gnomes, trolls, vampires, orcs, goblins, many with restless genitals. In my playthrough I haven’t fucked anything like a werewolf, or an orc, but I won’t be surprised when I do. It must be said, while I enjoy the story, nothing about it is amazing, original, or unexpected. There are some typos, and bad sentences, and sometimes a lack of synonyms – it often seems like the only other words the writers know for “vagina”, are “pussy” and “cunt”.
I get the feeling, especially looking at the abundance of wife swapping scenarios, that the developers are cucked male nerds with feminist spouses, who get together for weekly dungeons and dragons sessions in a secret basement, to play naked. The sex scenarios never go over the top, like people who haven’t experienced sex, tend to write about their fantasies. The realism is notable. There’s something going on here.
The sex scenes are generally vanilla, in that you fuck women in the pussy. No crazy bondage, insertion of objects, piercings, or animals. That said, there are scenes where animals are involved, just not in the penetration. I would expect some more creativity in the sex scenes, from a game set in a fantasy world, where alchemy, and sex magic are possible.
I’m most disappointed by the lack of creampies. Why stop halfway with the realism? As we all know, women love to be creampied. Somebody needs to get pregnant in this!
SOUND EFFECTS AND VOICE ACTING (SFX)
The sound effects are great, but lacking in variety. The sword strikes sound the best, along with the clinks of armor when somebody misses a hit. Every kind of strike, and spell cast, sounds great. It’s awesome that most of the audio is not cheap, cartoony stock content. Everything sounds like they recorded it in a professionally run studio – very rare in western hentai games. I commend the developers for going through so much effort. Hopefully they can add more death screams in future patches, as right now, there is not much variety in sounds, which becomes an issue when every enemy lets out the same “uhhh” yelp when they die. Killing dogs, wasps, spiders, golems, you get the same damn yell. That kind of cutting-corners-bullshit makes me feel like this game isn’t quite finished. There’s a small list of details like this, that are off, that should be addressed by the developer.
There’s also a lot of missing sound effects. You don’t hear much when clicking things in the menus.
The game has no voice acting. But it doesn’t detract from the erotic reading experience. You don’t need audio to enjoy a novel.
ART
Narborion by Night uses 3D art assets. The images work great for the purpose of illustrating what’s happening. In my opinion though, the pictures are often not good as standalone pieces, unless you have a massive hard-on for 3D sex art. Especially the characters’ facial expressions get really distracting sometimes, like when there’s two male characters banging a girl, the men might wear an ogre-like mugface while cumming on her. It’s not sexy.
The art has a weird layer on it. Sometimes the characters’ skins look kind of golden, their skins shine oddly. Maybe the lighting is off? I’m not sure what the purpose is, of making people look like they’re oiled.
I can see why the developers chose 3D art. The game has so much imagery that it would’ve taken years, and cost a small fortune to commission the art. I’m currently dabbling in hentai game development myself, and will attest to you, the longer the project goes on, the greater the risk that your artists disappear to a sudden driveby cancer nuke suicide. Epic shit happens in game development. With 3D assets, it’s easy to keep the art consistent, even if you have to change your artists.
The background art is very awkward in some scenes. If there’s any vegetation on screen, the background can look completely unreal, like from beta versions of early 2000s computer games. The worst case of this, I wittnessed when fucking some sort of swan lady. The background was nothing but blue sky and white feathers.
MUSIC
The music is quite epic. The opening tune sets a powerful mood for this dark fantasy world. It sure gets me going every time I boot up the game. Based on that track, you’d actually think you’re about to play a really epic dark game, like Witcher 2, where no good deed goes unpunished. It doesn’t quite get there, but we can pretend.
I’ve grown to be annoyed with the tracks that play in the maps, and the battles. All the music is good in itself, but the issue is the lack of variety. The battle music in particular gets repetitive after a few weeks of playing. Routine battles, where your chance of failure is basically zero, tend to last up to 10 minutes. You feel the effects of overexposure very quickly, you start projecting your annoyance with the slow pace of the combat, to the music. A couple variations for tracks that play in battles would do wonders for overall enjoyment.
GLITCHES AND ISSUES
Narborion has some bugs that hurt the experience. For example, the game constantly updates you about things like “you recovered mana”, “game was automatically saved”, etc. These updates can’t be cleared by clicking anywhere on the screen – you have to hover over the text, and then click. It’s a minor thing, but creates a constant annoyance.
The combat has some bugs as well. I’ve had instances, where my summoned minion died, but was still able to move, and attack enemies. The minion simply turned invisible, I don’t think that’s intended.
Another bug triggers in magic duels when I cast “death touch”. Death Touch is a powerful damage spell, that can only be cast next to enemies. If your enemies are farther than one square, you can’t finish casting. You have to reboot the game to unstuck yourself.
Another major issue is how stuns are handled. When you’re stunned, you’re unable to perform any actions for 3-4 turns. That’s a long-ass time not to be interacting with the game. If you have a large number of summoned minions, they can’t do shit when you’re stunned. Worst of alll, you have to end each minion’s turn individually. When fighting battles with enemies that can stun, you can spend 15-20 minutes totally stuck. Really, suffering through 3-turn stuns in a combat this cumbersome, is a fucking annoyance.
I also visited several dungeons in beta testing phase. They’re very awkward at present time. I didn’t find any glitches, but the concept really needs to be thought out better. How your character moves, is so damn laggy and awkward.
BUSINESS MODEL
As a free to play title, Narborion by Night has an in-game store. The premium currency here is called power gems. You can buy many things with it, like powerful items, potions, boosters, repair durability, etc. However, when I finally figured the combat out, I had no issue harnessing vast amounts of power gems from arena victories, to satisfy all my needs. Something needs to be tweaked here. The game needs more items to buy, that cost power gems. There should be powerful gear and enchantments to shop for, some that are affordable, others that virtually break the game. It’s fun to save up premium currency and work towards those super powerful buys.
From the perspective of a player, some of the most fun I have, is juggling with my resources, trying to avoid spending real money into my free to play entertainment. When the game is properly balanced, I often throw a dime to it eventually, to get a boost through a time-consuming part. When I’ve enjoyed a game for months on end, sure, I’ll buy something.
The item durability system is a good sink for power gems, but then enchanting items shouldn’t completely eliminate durability loss. Don’t let your players accumulate too many gems; keep them gaining, and spending the gems, to condition them to want more. This constant mental battle between the players and the developers is part of the free to play experience!
HENTAI
The game is divided into chapters that don’t really connect with one another. This makes the sex scenes one-off “meet and fuck” scenarios. Much of the time, you’re banging somebody else’s wife. And then his daughter too. Sometimes the husband joins you, and a threesome ensues. Sometimes you fuck three women at once. There’s a sex festival in like every town! Every innkeeper has moved beyond the concept of panties. Bribes cheat on their husbands on their wedding night, widows fuck their sorrows away. The women initiate the sex, and enjoy it. Relationships of power switch, someimes you’re the dominant, sometimes the girl. Rape scenarios seem to be omitted entirely, which is something to note.
The average sex scene lasts about five pages. The scenes progress very fast, from undressing to a blowjob, and then intercourse. You sometimes get to choose positions for fucking, but often don’t. The overall quality of writing in the sex scenes is fine, though like I mentioned earlier, the overuse of “cunt” and “pussy” is a little jarring.
GAMEPLAY
You have three modes for play: travelling on a map, story sequences, and battles. The stories have simple gameplay, like choosing from a list of dialog options. This is not a “choose your own adventure”, it’s not a visual novel with branching storylines. The choices have minor effects to the outcomes of a chapter. The more significant choice affecting your progress, is which rune you pick at the end of a quest.
The map is a simple, clunky visualization of a quest log. You have freedom to move anywhere you want. It takes 40 minutes to travel to a new area, unless you buy hay for your horse. With hay, the travel is instant. Despite freedom to choose which order you complete quests, take note that the enemies you face in the quests, increase in power the further you’ve moved.
Once you’ve completed a quest, you can travel there instantly. Keep in mind that you can’t craft items while travelling, though. I thought this was a glitch, when I couldn’t move on the map sometimes. If you’re crafting a Dragon Sword, cancel that. You can move on the map again.
The combat system is turn-based. You have six moves per turn. You can spend your turns to summon minions, to move, attack, and more. You can also swap gear, and drink potions without losing a turn. After your turn is done, every enemy unit makes their move against you. You can tuck yourself in a corner, and summon minions to block enemy access to your character. You can summon minions next to enemies, to try and draw their attention. The combat is very tactical, as you’re often fighting enemies that can stun you for 3-4 turns, destroy your enchantments, and overwhelm you with sheer numbers.
Personally, I just rush into the crowd, double strike fuckers with my enchanted bastard sword, then cast “death touch” to murder two more sorry fucks before they strike back. The enemy ogre force in the below screenshot, I wiped out in four turns.
In addition to normal combat, there are also “magic duels”, where you cannot cut your enemy with a sword. You have to cast projectiles, and rely on summoned minions. I’m still exploring the tactical aspects of magic duels, because so far, my low level tactics have boiled down to summoning an army of succubi around the enemy wizard, rushing for the kill. It feels like a broken strategy, but could easily be something that doesn’t work against more powerful foes.
The combat suffers from a few things. The biggest problem is that it’s paced too slow. There’s no button to speed up the enemy’s turn. When fighting enemies that attack 2-3 times, like Swarm Constructs, you’re waiting several minutes for your turn. Every attack takes like 5 seconds. When swarmed by such enemies, you’re waiting easily 2 minutes without interacting with the game. The game desperately needs an option to speed up the enemy’s turn.
Let’s talk about difficulty. Narborion by Night was very challenging for me, the first few days. There was so much information to absorb, I was making mistakes using my resources, and building my character. My weapons and armors kept breaking midway to the battles. My helmet could only take 12 hits before it broke! I eventually figured out how things work: Just enchant your items. Your armors and weapons stop losing durability when enchanted. It only costs 2 mana to engrave a rune. Simply unequip an item, select “enchant”. These runes last for hours, they increase your stats an incredible amount. After learning how runes work, I started crushing in battles. I soon found myself carrying so much gold, I bought the best items in the store. I started summoning entire succubus militias, chugging potions to keep fighting more, and more battles. I reached level 9, and maxed out my Spellcraft.
The game has multiple playstyles, involving cossbows, summoning of minions, magical projectiles, etc. I haven’t explored things like crossbows at all. I’m having too much success with my brainless melee playstyle.
CONCLUDING WORDS
Narborion by Night is the most unique game on Nutaku. Narborion has decently written sex scenes with lots of visuals per scene. The combat is engaging, and you can easily die. The world is an actual adult fantasy world, instead of some cartoony children’s faptime bullshit. Despite a small list of pretty significant flaws, I have enjoyed this game immensely.
NOTE: This game has been discontinued on Nutaku.
