Carnal Instinct is an adult-oriented open world Action game set in a world with various similarities to ancient Egypt. A key difference here is that reptilian and feline humanoid creatures exist, alongside a dark force called the Corruption freely roaming the lands outside of cities. We start off as a mere slave, set to become a sex object for a priest. Meeting the servants of our prospective new master, they are rather unimpressed by your looks, threatening to send you to harsh manual labor instead of being a sex slave. Thus you are sent to complete some tasks for these henchmen to prove your worth and are let loose to explore the world at your whim.
An important thing to note right off the bat is that this title is currently at the pre-alpha stage of development. There is a ton more lore stated within the store-page we are never privy to if we don’t read that. In its current state, you’ll find it feels more like a tech demo to let you explore the slice of the world they’ve built and complete simple fetch quest-like missions. And what a beautiful world this is. I’d be lying if I said the graphics aren’t what caught my eye when I stumbled upon Carnal Instinct. This looks like a big-budget game, as well as has the ambition to be one in other ways. Whether that pans out is anyone’s guess, yet the pre-alpha we have here already accomplishes that on the technical front. From the smooth animations, to the good asset placement that avoids objects floating or clipping further aiding the already stellar graphics.
With the graphics out of the way, let’s get to the gameplay, shall we? If you are familiar with the Assassins Creed series, you’ll have a pretty good clue as to how the movement works. This system focuses on sprinting around the environments and using parkour-like skills to agilely make your way towards your destination. In its current state, I haven’t found any structures to climb or anything of the sort. Climbing is used to navigate the surprisingly vertical world terrain, whether it be you need to get on rocks or stalls to make your way onto higher grounds. Most of what you’ll be doing is going from one point to another. There is combat, but you’ll find you can easily outrun anything and at no point ever have to fight. You can just rush in to get what you need, then quickly get back out. That is likely not how it is meant to be played. It’s just that in its current state, the fact that you can open chests while in combat and easily evade foes makes it easily abusable.
We have access to a single melee weapon throughout that gives us a taste of what they have planned for the future. You have access to both light and heavy attacks, which you are able to string together in a short combo. Enemies can occasionally power through your damage and retaliate, so button mashing isn’t always reliable. Neither is blocking, interestingly enough. If you don’t want to get hit, your best bet is to learn how to make use of the dodge button and sidestep attacks. With AI problems, among other issues, fighting is too jank to be enjoyable now. There is, however, definitely something there just brimming with potential. From my time slaying random mobs found around the map, I’ve only seen them drop a few cosmetic items I already had. There is no reason to engage in combat other than for the fun of it currently. This is very likely to change in the future, one would imagine.
I started off calling it an Open World Action game, which it is, but they’ve yet to include any of their RPG or alchemy systems. There is already a tab for abilities and other features that would further flesh out the game. As it is now, nearly every item is entirely used for cosmetic reasons. You can change your skins to be scaly, furry, or human. Swap out your head to combine the looks of different races, so say having a cat head and a human body. Change your outfit to have some clothing instead of walking around butt naked, which is actually the norm in this world. Then you have the ability to equip yourself with a functioning penis. Your character may have been born female, but that isn’t stopping her from packing a giant dragon dick to become the talk of the town. On the subject of the male genitals, they are all humongous. Do not go in expecting natural-sized schlongs here. These could probably serve as another melee weapon.
When it comes to melee, you can also use your fists. I’ve found no use or advantage to doing so. Maybe in the future it could be used to perform none fatal take-downs, but it should be ignored for now. Your character also carries around a bow for long-ranged attacks. These contain limited arrows, which you’ll have to find or buy more of if you plan on heavily using them. In its current state, your bow does too little damage to seriously use. To confuse matters more is that an enemy’s health-bar is not shown with ranged attacks, leaving you clueless to how wounded they are and making target prioritization much more difficult. One more issue stems from the fact you can only switch weapons with the mouse’s scroll wheel. It is quite clunky switching weapons in the middle of a fight, and the useless fists option clutters it further. Adding the ability to choose the one you want with the number row is hopefully something they plan on doing, as well as including a radial wheel for controller users.
Currently, you’ll find that to save or load the game you have to press Tab and can’t rebind it. The problem is that it doesn’t work. In order to actually save the game, you have to press ‘P’, while ‘O’ is to load the game. That is a very strange issue to have, more so because these functions actually work, but they fail to tell you about them. You can enable autosaving up to every 60 seconds, though you’ll find that it doesn’t function at the moment. With you being able to see everything on offer in around an hour, these flaws aren’t a huge deal, just something to be aware of and hopefully fixed soon. On the technical front, it is relatively stable from what I have experienced. There were no crashes throughout, and glitches were minor things, such as grabbing onto thin air when climbing up a surface. An unusual and kind of funny thing I’ve noticed is that the most demanding section of the game is the main menu. With its high res character model and roaring fire filling the screen with embers, I was getting 32fps, while being in-game saw me at the low 70s most of the time. Don’t fret if it looks like you won’t be able to run the game until you actually load into the world.
Some of the quests are voice acted while others are not. I wasn’t expecting voice acting, so that was a pleasant surprise, if a bit uneven about when it occurs as of this time. The actual objectives of these missions are less of a positive. As previously mentioned, they are all uninteresting fetch quests with no surprises or substance to them. Where the real content starts is after you complete them. Some NPCs may reward you with gold, that you have no use for unless the need for more arrows arises and you are willing to run across the entire map to the single vendor currently in the game. Others may offer you their bodies as a reward for a job well done. The latter will take you into a cutscene containing a unique sex animation between you and the character in question. There is zero interactivity on our part other than advancing the sex scene to the next stage, yet it is high-quality stuff. They seem to up the character model detail substantially during these scenes and like the main menu, are the most demanding on your computer.
Not all of the sex scenes feel complete, mostly just the main mission ones. Others are still high quality, but are prone to randomly cut to black and finish the animation without having an ending when you advance the cutscene. We are able to repeat the sex scenes with characters indefinitely just by talking to them again. Aside from sex when completing quests, you can also hire a prostitute to lay with. Most of her options are currently not included, yet there seems to be quite a large selection planned for the future. At the moment, there are no humans. Everyone is either a feline or a reptile which may not be to everyone’s tastes. From what I gather, humans are planned to be included in the second quarter of 2021. Considering the rather high entry price of $30, having some kind of public roadmap available would likely ease in potential buyers. A bit unrelated, but the Steam forums are pretty entertaining. On one end, you have someone asking how to hide the fact that they’ve played this title from their profile, while on the other end of the spectrum you have some guy/gal asking if there are going to be futa on futa catgirl sex battles. I love the internet.
Carnal Instinct is a pretty ambitious title and is surprisingly well put together for a pre-alpha state. It feels like a mix between Assassins Creed and Kingdom of Amalur with the added flair of having adult content. The keyword of that last sentence beings ‘feels’. There is around an hour’s worth of content currently and is too bare-bones to truly compare them. What is on display here is the developer’s aptitude to possibly reach that state in the future. Whether that is worth buying into or not is up to the reader, but it is at the very least worth keeping an eye on. Carnal Instinct is definitely one of the most interesting adult games to come out as of late, and one that I hope lives up to its potential.
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