Happy New year people who come here! Hope you made it out of 2018 well enough and are ready to march into 2019. I’m mostly going to talk about the steam stuff that happened this year as well as my reasons for why the unfinished stuff I played this year was almost all better then the finished things. First though, what is coming next year?

From Mangagamer we are almost certainly getting Rance 7&8 as well as Escaslayer, which for the most part is a decent lineup. Quest is the second biggest Rance game in the series so if that makes it out I’ll at least be busy for a while. 9 probably won’t happen and MG don’t have any other games in their current announced lineup.

For Sekai/Denpa, we have Re;Lord 2 and maybe(but unlikely) Baldr Sky. I’ve lost almost all my hype for Baldr due to the wait plus the drama around that release, and Re;Lord is an episodic release that spoils its ending in the first scene of the first game, so playing that is going to feel draining, though it will be funny at the least.

Kagura Games, the big upstart with almost 10 English releases already, seems to have a lot in the pipeline. To many to honestly talk about, a lot of them look to be about the same as what has already released. Corruption themed RPG/Wolf Maker. Nothing really stood out when I looked last but who knows, they might surprise me and in fact I hope they do.

Finally we have Lilipalace’s sequel from Frontwing of all companies. It’s a bigger game in all ways and something I am looking forward to.

A lot of Vn companies showed up this year, but this isn’t a VN blog so I won’t go into that stuff in detail. Just know that next year and the future of VN’s in general will be heavily decided by how Steam handles more VN’s and so let’s talk about that massive change this year, porn on Steam and how that is handled.

So at first I was skeptical the new feature was going to last even a month. Way to many countries have widely different sex laws that trying to have a system that sold to them all crazy enough on its own, not to mention moral outrage people and how scammers and asset flippers were going to throw whatever they wanted around. It was only a matter of time until a loli was featured chest face on a game’s icon on Steam and someone forgot to tag it was adult only and now things are dead. That didn’t happen, yet, but we do have a ton of get rich quick machine translations and asset steals going around so if you found a great steam game and I didn’t cover it, tell me. I don’t really want to search that sewer but if there is gold to be found I want to know.

Anyway, for the first three months of the adult service being live things were amazingly fine. A couple good translations came out and some decent game were released that didn’t have amazingly bad press around them. Even right now, gameplay focused porn games are actually in a pretty good spot on Steam. Unlike VN’s, which if they have a loli and are set in high school are likely boned. Which is most romance VN’s. Surprisingly rape and corruption seem to be allowed for now, which I doubt will last for long. The main things to likely kill a release seem to be loli, bestiality and blatant incest. Things most gameplay porn games don’t have. So overall its been a net positive for releases which I can only pray continues.

Now as for what I played this year… I mentioned how episodic and unfinished things were the best stuff I played, right? I beat 40 games this year and of that number 3 were good experiences I wouldn’t mind going through again while the episodic and patreon projects I would play through most of them repeatedly. Of course that list includes Last Sovereign and Monster Girl Quest Paradox, things I would love to replay if I had the time and are in my favorite games of the year list easily. As for why this is, maybe because these games have more creativity to them? I’m honestly guessing but the patreon projects and episodic releases seemed to just be stronger experiences with more unique concepts all around, though not all of those hit their mark. I really wouldn’t mind dropping support for Town of Passion and My New Life though I intend to keep up with those for a bit longer. I don’t know though, this year was really weird for games. Way to inconsistent throughout.

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. I have work to do playing more things so go enjoy yourselves. Have fun!!