The Catgirl’s Grimoire (The Nekoronomicon) — Honest Review

The Catgirl's Grimoire (The Nekoronomicon) — Honest Review

Reviewed work by digital onahooole · View on DLsite

A side-scrolling action game where a cat-eared mage fights to reclaim a stolen book of magic, and where getting pinned down is built into the comeback loop rather than just punished. This is aimed at players who like their exploration-action with a heavy interspecies-rape angle, a forgiving difficulty curve, and game-over content that leans hard into pregnancy, birthing, and breeding themes.

What works

The Catgirl's Grimoire — highlight scene

The core combat has more going on than most h-action doujin titles bother with. Lulier swaps her attacks between Flame and Ice to deal with different enemies, and holding the button charges a stronger shot, so there’s an actual rhythm of reading the enemy and picking the right element instead of mashing. The fact that you can aim magic upward and downward is a small thing that matters a lot in practice — it means tall or low-slung enemies aren’t just cheap damage sponges, and it gives the exploration some verticality since the same magic doubles as a tool for triggering gimmicks and clearing obstacles. For a work that’s primarily a porn delivery system, the designers clearly cared about the platforming-and-puzzling skeleton holding it up.

The standout design choice is how it folds the erotic content into the failure state without making failure a dead end. When Lulier takes too much damage her clothes tear off, and a naked Lulier who gets grabbed falls into H attacks — multiple enemies means a gangbang. But she converts semen into magic, so being worked over actually charges a special-move gauge you can spend on a comeback or on healing. That turns the usual h-game tension on its head: getting caught isn’t purely a tax on your progress, it’s a resource. The description is upfront that this is a deliberate accessibility crutch — players who aren’t great at action games can essentially heal-and-special their way through the rough patches. It’s a genuinely smart way to let weaker players see the content without a difficulty wall, while still keeping the loop coherent.

The Catgirl's Grimoire — highlight scene

On the content side, everything in the H scenes is animated, and the touch-another-monster-to-escalate-into-a-gangbang interaction means the sex reacts to the same positioning you’re managing in combat. The game-over screens get their own exclusive situations and animations rather than recycling the in-stage loops, and they go where the tag list promises: seedbed, forced birthing, cumdump. The cited 2,500 frames of H motion (variations included) point to a project that prioritized animation volume, and there’s full voice work from AsagiShiki plus a dedicated music credit, so the presentation isn’t bare-bones. The fetish spread — interspecies sex, milking, breeding, pregnancy/impregnation, the “sharing” angle of being passed between monsters — is consistent and clearly the whole point, not a side garnish.

What doesn’t

The Catgirl's Grimoire — drawback example scene

The same comeback mechanic that makes the game approachable also flattens its stakes. If getting raped refills your meter and your meter heals you, the loss condition stops feeling like loss, and a player who just wants to brute-force every encounter can mostly ignore the element-swapping subtlety the combat was built around. That’s a fair trade for accessibility, but it means the action layer is shallower in play than it looks on paper, and anyone hoping for a real challenge will find the systems undercut their own tension.

A couple of practical caveats are worth flagging. This ships as a standalone Windows application built on DirectX 9 and Pixel Shader 2.49-era tech, and the developers themselves recommend confirming compatibility through the trial before buying — that’s an honest heads-up, but it also tells you this isn’t a modern, frictionless engine. The frame count is also the kind of number that flatters itself: “2,500 including variations” means recolors and minor state changes are padding the total, so temper expectations on how many truly distinct scenes you’re getting. And the note that scene-adding version updates are “planned” cuts both ways — it’s nice for longevity, but it implies the launch build may feel a little thin until those land.

Who should buy this

The Catgirl's Grimoire — target audience scene

If you specifically want catgirl-protagonist action with a breeding/pregnancy and gangbang focus, and you value being able to actually finish the game over a stiff challenge, this is squarely your lane. It’s also a good pick for people who like their h-action to weave the sex into the mechanics rather than bolt it on. Players chasing demanding platforming, or anyone cold on interspecies and forced-birth content, should look elsewhere — the design and the fetishes are both pulling firmly in one direction.

Verdict

The Catgirl's Grimoire — final verdict visual

7 / 10 — a competently built exploration-action h-game whose rape-into-resource loop is its cleverest idea and also the thing that saps its difficulty, carried by animated content and full voice that deliver exactly what the tag list promises.

Buy on DLsite →

This is the Japanese-language store. International credit cards and PayPal are accepted. The game itself is in Japanese.

Tip: If the DLsite page opens in Japanese, use the language selector at the top-right of the page (globe icon) to switch to English.