Reviewed work by Ukinedoko_P · View on DLsite
Ukinedoko_P’s first attempt at melee combat casts you as Nekono, a mysterious animal-eared sister collecting “pages of desire” hoarded by monsters, in a dark-fantasy 3D action game where one wrong read of an enemy’s swing ends the run. It’s a tense, high-stakes combat loop bolted to goblin-heavy defeat content, plus an unusual sandbox mode that lets you stage the aftermath yourself. If your tastes run toward interspecies scenarios, restraint, and heroines losing badly, this is squarely aimed at you — with some real caveats about visibility and polish.
What works
The combat is the headline, and the circle clearly committed to it. Nekono’s attacks have genuine weight — big, deliberate motions that you have to plant and time rather than mash — and outside of bosses, both you and the enemies die in a single clean hit. That turns every encounter into a short, sweaty exchange of spacing and dodge timing rather than a stat check. Crucially, retries are fast, so the one-hit-kill rule reads as tension rather than punishment. For a circle’s first swing at close-range action, the fundamentals — commitment on attacks, dodge windows, reading the enemy’s range — are the right ones to focus on, and the game backs it up with voice work and a proper soundtrack.
The adult content is integrated into play in a way that’s smarter than the usual gallery-unlock structure. When Nekono goes down, the scene plays out in-game, right where she fell, with the enemy that beat her — and that enemy stays occupied instead of resetting to hunt you. On a fresh attempt you can actually use your own downed body as a decoy while you pick off the rest of the room, which is a bleak but genuinely clever piece of design that makes the defeat content part of the level rather than a separate reward screen.
Then there’s the “Director of Doom” mode, an evolution of the circle’s older free-walk mode: you take the fields from the main game and freely place defeat-scene prefabs wherever you like, building your own goblin feast from scratch. There’s no placement cap, and the 2.0.0 update expanded the object list with things like a downed-Nekono pose, a goblin campfire, and writhing tentacles. People who’ve spent time with it report that you can assemble genuinely elaborate scenes, and as a screenshot-and-staging toy it’s something very few games in this niche even attempt. The circle has also been actively patching — two substantial updates since release, fixing softlocks, colliders, and lighting — which counts for a lot at doujin prices.
What doesn’t
The launch version’s biggest problem was that you often couldn’t see it. The game shipped extremely dark — dark enough that in the opening cave, players struggled to locate their own character, let alone the enemies, and the in-game brightness setting didn’t help much because whole areas simply lacked light sources. A camera light exists, but only during the fixed animations, not during normal play. Squinting your way through a game where any unseen enemy is an instant kill is exhausting in the wrong way, and it shows in the reception: community ratings sit in the middling range, roughly split between people who love it and people who bounced off. The 2.0.1 patch specifically reworked the lighting and toned down screen effects to make it playable, which is the right response, but be aware the first impression for many buyers was a black screen with occasional death.
Two smaller issues. The Director mode’s freedom comes with an explicit warning from the developer: there’s no placement limit and no recommended count, performance degrades the more prefabs you drop, and heavy scenes can crash the game outright — you’re expected to self-regulate based on your PC. And the content itself is narrow by design: it leans almost entirely on goblins doing terrible things to a small-chested heroine, with restraint, squirting, and wetting in the mix. Fans of the circle’s previous work who preferred the quieter, gentler defeat imagery will find much less of that here — this one is more explicit and more grim, with Nekono sometimes ending up as dinner in a very literal sense.
Who should buy this
This is a Japanese-only release with no official English support, but it’s one of the easier types of game to import blind: it’s an action game, so the moment-to-moment play — combat, exploration, the defeat scenes, and the entire Director sandbox — needs no reading at all. Menus and the story framing are in Japanese, so run them through a phone camera translator if you’re curious, but you can genuinely play and enjoy this without any Japanese. Buy it if you want tense one-hit-kill melee action wrapped around goblin/interspecies defeat content, or if the idea of freely staging your own 3D scenes appeals to you. Skip it if non-consensual goblin scenarios aren’t your fetish, if your PC is weak, or if you have zero patience for doujin-grade rough edges.
Verdict
6.5 / 10. An ambitious and mechanically interesting first stab at melee action, with a defeat system and staging sandbox that do things almost nobody else in the niche is doing — held back by a launch so dark it was literally hard to see, performance caveats the developer openly can’t bound, and appeal that lives or dies entirely on whether goblins are your thing.
This is the Japanese-language store. International credit cards and PayPal are accepted. The game itself is in Japanese.
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