Sinners Landing Preview

Sinners Landing, an erotic RPG from Flexible Media, sees you play as Tristan Lamprey, a magical apprentice in a fantasy world. Well, he’s more like a former magical apprentice, considering a powerful archmage tried to pulverise him after he slept with the frightening mage’s daughter. Thankfully, said attempt at pulverisation didn’t mix well with a strange crystal Tristan chose to rest against at the same time, resulting in the young man getting teleported to the middle of nowhere: a small mountainside mining village by the name of Sinners Landing. Less thankfully, when Tristan’s unconscious body arrived, he inadvertently destroyed a sacred altar. Now, he’s got to find a way to make some money if he wants to repair the aforementioned very expensive altar — or even just afford a room to stay the night in! Eventually, that takes him into the mines, where terrible monsters and treasures beyond his wildest imagination lurk… and also into the beds of the many beautiful women in Sinners Landing.

If you’ve played Flexible Media’s last NSFW hit, Paradise Lust, a lot of the basic mechanics will feel familiar: most of the game involves Tristan moving to different areas and clicking on characters to initiate visual-novel-style dialogue or clicking on objects to start doing a simple puzzle. The puzzles are a fun distraction, and the dialogue is often rather funny; plus, talking to people also involves making various decisions as to what to say — beyond having scenes play out in slightly different fashions, this appears to also increase Tristan’s stats, like Charisma, Magic, Stealth, and Piety (Piety basically being magic that stems from the gods rather than one’s own power). I can’t say yet if these stats will actually ever come up in the full game, but in the few hours I played Sinners Landing, I can’t say I noticed any changes depending on Tristan’s stats, nor any method of confirming what values they were at.

Theoretically, however, those stats might come into play in the other half of the game: turn-based combat and dungeon crawling. There are a few fights to get into during Sinners Landing’s first couple of hours, and I also got to experience one (rather short) dungeon. The combat here uses a deckbuilding system, where Tristan has a variety of moves available to him in his deck. Every turn, he draws five cards that represent his moves — however, he also only has three points of energy to spend on each turn. Most cards take only one energy, but some take two. Then, all cards, whether played or not, are sent to a discard pile and are unavailable until Tristan has exhausted his deck and can reshuffle.

Most of the available moves focus on dealing damage, blocking incoming damage, or making later damage hit harder. I do particularly enjoy using one attack that makes all future versions of that attack more powerful, as it can severely ramp up over time if I get the chance to keep using it. Additionally, progressing in the story also unlocks new cards to use, typically helpful buffing spells that Tristan remembers that he knows. Combat isn’t very complicated yet, but it’s fun enough, and I can imagine that potentially seeing the plot decisions that the player can make could impact this side of the game in very fun ways! Who knows, maybe all those stats might lead to different playstyles? Personally, though, I’m hoping the ladies Tristan’s trying to woo will join him in fighting monsters. Having a party in a turn-based RPG is way more fun for me than going solo.

Beyond that, the non-combat scenes were quite enjoyable. The dialogue is strong, with each character having their own presence and feeling like a unique person (though Tristan does feel very similar to Paradise Lust’s protagonist), and that even extends to the flirting and the sex scenes. Additionally, I found the game’s world to be very lived-in! There are many moments where characters discuss things in their pasts that really add to the overall feeling of the setting and show that there was real care in crafting the story here. I particularly enjoyed the detail that magic stemming from the gods depends entirely on the strength of the caster’s belief; it gives extra weight behind all the rituals some of the characters do. The visuals were quite pleasant, too, with mostly simple animation — certainly enough to make those erotic scenes look nice, though. I did particularly like the music as well; despite it being similarly simple, there was a great “adventure” feel to it that perfectly fit the fantasy world Sinners Landing is going for.

I admit, however, that some of the starting quest details before getting into the dungeon-crawling aspect of the game felt like they went on for a while. That might perhaps feel less boring or overlong if there were more to do in these early stages, as appears to be planned, but the main culprit of my frustrations was the way that I couldn’t gain access to a necessary area (the library inside the temple), even though a quest required me to visit. I understand that tying new locations to quests makes sense so as to avoid overwhelming the player with locations, but the fact that two different quests both direct you to the library, but only one of them actually gives you the ability to enter the darn place is more than a little frustrating.

You also get to smoke magic weed. And give said weed to a llama. A magic llama.

Putting that sole frustration aside, Sinners Landing is an enjoyably erotic time that seems as though it’ll get both more enjoyable and more erotic as it goes on. I, for one, am excited to see where it goes!