Seduce Me

[got_quiet]

Name: Seduce Me (The complete Story)
Status: Complete
Site: https://vamichaelalaws.itch.io/seduce-me-the-complete-story
Pairing: F/M and F/F
Description: You inherit a mansion full of incubi.

This is the third otome game I've played in the BLM bundle and I'm starting to see a trend. I go in, mildly apprehensive but willing to give the game a shot. Almost immediately a series of small moments is enough to squick me out and I think, ugh, ok, let's just get through this. Then, after playing for a little while those bad impressions tend to fall away, and the game becomes a little more interesting. Seduce Me fit that script closely, but it went a little further and I found myself actually enjoying my time with it once things got going, enough so that I started working towards completion without feeling obligated to do so. And the game is relatively large when you do this, so it's taken me some time to complete and move on from it. I'd say it's one of the largest games that I've played so far, with maybe Dry Drowning and Arcade Spirits beating it.

The story in Seduce me is somewhat cliche. There's a bit of a contrivance that results in the MC inheriting a mansion, and being pressured by her parents to inhabit it immediately. Upon her arrival she finds a group of wounded incubi, fends off an attack from a devil (not a demon, the incubi insist) and then agree to have the boys stay in return for basically becoming domestics. That's a pretty pat harem scenario right there. And the pathing is also pretty predictable. You need to go all out on the guy you choose, picking him every time you can no matter what or you won't get his final romance and sex scene as reward. This was a bit difficult for me because there are choices where you can be more independent, or protect yourself rather than calling for help, and it's just my nature to want to do those things, so the first couple shots I didn't get a full romance, just a almost complete one.

 

You can also fail to get any romance at all, at which point the game starts getting interesting, and gives you new options. One of them is to end up with one of your two close girl friends and turn one of them into a girlfriend. The other, and the one I ended up getting first due to my chronic inability to cry for help, is to end up with one of the antagonists of the game, a Succubus that shows up to take the boys back to the demon realm. Her path is almost a sort of secret bonus, because it only starts when you fail to romance anyone, and then you have to finagle your way into getting into her good graces. A potential human rival also seems to be a possible romantic option, but I haven't figured out what I need to do to get him.

The pathing in this game is as I said narrow, where you really do need to make all the right choices to get your preferred LI, but it does provide some assistance by giving you a brief flash of an appropriate colored heart in the lower corner of the screen whenever you make the right choice. And for most of the choices your options are obvious anyway. Each individual path is somewhat on the short side, and the romance paths overlap significantly in content, so it's not too hard to replay many times to catch them all.

The BLM bundle version of Seduce Me is actually a collection, where one game is an immediate sequel to the other, and if you get a successful romance, you'll essentially be asked if you want to continue into the second half of the story with your chosen LI. The sequel spends almost the entire time in the demon realm, where you've been trapped and need to find some way to return home. If you've romanced the Succubus this is a satisfying sequel, because you spend a lot of time with her, get to know her better, and can end up in a nice threesome. But if you romance any of the boys, you end up separated from them for a large portion of the sequel, and the focus is still on the Succubus. If you like her, that's great. If you have no interest in her, it kind of sucks because your actual relationship doesn't develop much. I was lucky because I liked her, but when I went through with an incubus LI I felt that there wasn't much content for him at all.

The second game is a little more ambiguous in what is the correct choice, and the pathing is no longer about just hard committing to one of a handful of LIs but feels better as a no perfect choices game, where you're navigating politics a little more, choosing to trust or not, and fighting in a demon war, but being faithful and trusting seems to be the ticket. There is also a gallery and "bloopers" and things like that. The bloopers are for the voice actors, and since I play all my games with the voice acting off, I didn't really bother with that. And after the second game there's a small collection of side stories that are short linear routes for each guy + the succubus.

Content wise, while I enjoyed the game overall I couldn't escape some of the cringe that seems baked in to otome games for me. For example, because the game is voiced and it lets you choose a name, the characters can never actually say your name. So they're constantly relying on terms like "princess" "miss" "beautiful" and so on and so forth, which set my teeth on edge the first dozen times I read it until the terms finally disappeared from my awareness thanks to oversaturation. The characters themselves also start out as something of a stereotype until you get much deeper in their romances. There's the serious eldest, the baby faced and innocent youngest, the lady killer, an empath, and your girl friends are a fire and ice combo of a hothead and a serious student. The lore and plot in the second game is an improvement on the first, even if the tradeoff seems to be time with your LI.
So while there were flaws with Seduce Me, I had a lot more fun with it than I expected and feel it was one of the better made games in the batch that I've played so far. However, if anyone is interested in purchasing this, a comment on the "Complete Story" itch.io page made note that it's cheaper to purchase each of the individual components separately than to buy the bundle.