Entwined Roots Preview

When you accepted your first quest as an adventurer, you probably didn’t expect that it would lead to meeting a dryad who totally digs your vibe. Well, that’s Entwined Roots, a visual novel with pared-down tower defence battles.

You’re tasked with protecting a single tree, because the dryad who lives in it is away fighting the advancing hordes of undead. Except for the ones who slip past and head directly towards you, that is. You’re a summoner, so you keep the skeletons at bay using fireballs and dire rats, but you have limited mana, so can’t just keep throwing rats at your problems!

To progress to each next level, you have to bond further with the dryad, Olivea. Since this is an adult visual novel that involves getting intimate with her, a sacrifice you’re more than willing to make. After a bonding, it will increase the recharge time of your mana, allowing you to fight off more waves of undead.

And that’s the gameplay loop: fight undead, see Olivea’s breasts, upgrade your summoning spells, repeat. The main event is, of course, the dryad and what she enthusiastically does to you. The loop itself is fine and serves its purpose.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of issues with the visual novel portions. The main one is that the music loops (lots of piano) aren’t really long enough to cover them. It wouldn’t be as noticeable if they didn’t fade as they ended, only to return at full volume a moment later. I’m quite a quick reader, and even then it faded at least once in every scene.

Then there’s the text box, which obviously has the “novel” part of “visual novel”, covering most of the sexual content. It’s partially transparent, and you can hide it, but at one point I didn’t even realise that the image had changed, because the change was behind the block of text.

Graphically, Entwined Roots looks pretty good. The visual novel parts are well realised, and the defense levels are in a simple 8-bit pixel style, except for the tree, which is 16-bit for some reason. The menus are a bit basic, but this (the demo at least) is playable on Android, so I assume that’s why.

While I only got to play through two levels and two bonding scenes, it was good enough to show off the game. While it could do with a proofread or two, it’s certainly worth a look if you want to have sex with a dryad.