From the same creator as The Last Saintess, we have Crawling Lab.

It’s a roguelite FPS with some interesting ideas and some jugs wandering around.

Story- 2

Story is told almost entirely through notes that aren’t great reads from the English quality. From what I can tell, basically bio weapons that looked like hot girls were being made. They went crazy and you are part of a unit sent to deal with this, but you were taken out but survived somehow and are now trying to escape. It’s all the Crawling Queen’s fault, she’s the boss.

Gameplay-7

I’m going to go over this in gameplay elements order of FPS, rogue, and then the elements that make it a roguelite to end. Just to keep this clean.

As a FPS, it works. You have a knife, a handgun, an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a sniper rifle. The main difficulty is getting ammo and maintaining it through the run as ammo is fairly rare without the right rogue stuff going in your favor. This makes some guns less useful then others and when you add enemy types that take 5 shots to them before you can do damage to them, the sniper rifle actually is the worst gun most of the time. You get perks as part of the rogue mechanics to make the guns better such as the shotgun leaving a flaming spot or the SR doing triple damage but only does headshots.

Overall the shooting is fine. The shotgun felt off and I never liked using it, but the AR and handgun worked great. The knife usually worked well and is probably the most interesting weapon. It has durability, when it empties you take damage if you land a hit with the knife. When you first start a run, you only have 20 handgun bullets and the knife and you have to kill every enemy on each floor to proceed. So the knife kind of auto becomes your best friend early in most runs. Later enemies make using it hard, but I always ended up abusing the knife even if sometimes it just missed for no reason.

As for rogue elements, you have a 40 floor dungeon to beat. Each floor is random with an assortment of enemies based on floor number. Later floors are also just bigger rooms. Clearing a floor gives you a list of perks, mostly ammo or gun damage. Every 5th floor gives a huge perk, like the shotgun fire thing above. Enemies rarely drop ammo or guns you can swap to that have usually vaguely better stats like 7% reload speed up. Weapon rarity jumps during the last 5 floors of the run after you fight off the final boss the first time and suddenly 40% buffs show up. Floors can also have pods you can insert dead enemies into trade for HP, ammo, or knife durability. Stronger enemy equals better trades.

The roguelite stuff is where this gets interesting. The first thing is runs get you points which you can spend on perks like most games of this style. But here you can pick clearing floors gives bullets for the guns. These are incredibly important. Harder difficulties cap point usage, making getting a lot of points kind of pointless, but then they added something to the gallery room that fixes this.

After a completed run you get a chance to save your gear from that run and bring 1 of them into the next run. So found a really good sniper rifle? You get to keep it. A later update added a machine in the test/gallery room where you use points from runs to roll bonus ammo per floor to your gear making saved gear really open up how you play and giving points a long-term use in the game.

Every time you clear a 10th floor, you can start on that floor in that difficulty in all future runs. When you chose to do so you can pick every floor clear perk and get every bonus for each floor clear, like the above ammo bonuses. But now you didn’t have to spend ammo to make it through those floors. This changes the game entirely from a 40-floor dungeon crawl to 10 floor sprints. The Trials you unlock after beating Crawling Queen removes this floor saving but by then you should be good enough to manage without starting at floor 30.

The other odd choice is in the trial room which is essentially this game’s gallery. You can find picture of the enemies here, notes on them for tips, spawn them to fight and then fling their bodies around and equip unlocked gadgets. These are mostly for silly purposes, like the hold gun that fixes the bodies of the enemies in place. Then you have things like the high jump boots or the disco gun that have actually in run uses, and if you turn these on in the trial room you get them all in the runs. These unlock as you floor specific floors and are one of the few reasons to actually beat the final difficulty. Also, the final enemy is in a special mode that only unlocks after beating the highest difficulty so for full clear you have to half replay the final difficulty. This mode has the random pods on floors spawn broken if the new enemy spawns making things a bit tighter. They added two other new modes that lock 5th floor perks behind clearing them and not new enemies. They are nice as extra content and you can do all the trials in a single run, which would be hell.

Lewdness-4

Outside of the test room, it’s just busty sex doll style girls as the enemies, or biodolls as the game calls them. They all give 2B impressions to me, with a lot of them wearing leotards and not having eyes. If not a leotard they tend to wear tube tops or dresses with one girl wearing a nun outfit. About half the enemies are also missing limbs.

The test room is where most of the erotic material really is and even then, it’s not a huge amount. It’s something of a playroom really. You have the silly unlocks from clearing the game which includes a disco gun to make the girls dance, a size up and down gun that just scales the girls’ full bodies, a hold gun that lets you stick their bodies in a spot, increased leg positioning that makes them do the splits and other such leg positions more often, and a power glove to toss them around. You can spawn any girl you have defeated. fight them, and then play around with them. The walls are lined with defeat images that each girl has if you lose to them, with the left side being their standard forms and the right being their elite forms that are rare spawns in the Crawling Queen mode. The elite versions tend to have different hair and dress changes but the same models.

All but the flattest have some jiggle and since a lot of them walk up to you once they detect you, you can sit there and watch them jiggle up to you.

Final Thoughts

Surprisingly fun? I like new takes on rogue stuff and this uses its few assets to good effect. I did get a few cheap deaths but overall, I like the idea of having to preserve ammo and choosing long term stuff to make the run work. There’s some build variety and the trials are actually hard and forced me to change how I played the game.

The lewd could have been a bit higher with the lose pictures but overall, this is solid. One of the better games I’ve played this year really.

Save for Crawling Lab

Everything unlocked. Perks, trials beaten, all enemies defeated.

Updates- September

The creator added two more trials, one with a dark room mechanic that was actually pretty hard and I had to use some perks I’ve never bothered with before and another trial that turned off all the test room gimmick items and jumping. That one was not that bad.

Gameplay: 7/10 Eroticness: 4/10 Story: 2/10

Completion:

Beat the game 3 times in the increasing difficulties, then beat each trial. You will beat every enemy on the way to the end which is the only other goal.