EARLY ACCESS REVIEW

Demonheart: The Cursed Trial is an amazingly well written otome where you play as a woman with a demonic heart who is thrown together in a group of suspicious individuals who are all hiding their own dark secrets. Who can you trust and will you find romance along the way?

The Story
You play as the female lead with two potential male love interests in the game, Ran and Kaisar. The game utilizes an alignment system (your choices will shift your alignment with one of four (or a mix of) personalities; Evil, Defiant, Good and Tactful) and impact the direction the game takes for you. Raze (from previous games) does make a welcome appearance but is not, at this time, a romance option. It is still enjoyable however to see more of him ;) The story is full of secrets, twists and turns. Who can you trust? I recommend saving most times when options come up that change the direction of the game. You have lots of save files and you will be using them and reloading the game quite a bit.

Game-play & Features
The settings at the moment include text speed, audio volumes, turning off and on ambient animations, to show or hide alignment notifications and to show or hide relationship notifications when available.
You can not rewind your choices. You can view a history log but not go back. So when you make your choice it is made unless you bring up the menu, hit save when the choices appear on screen and reload if you don't like the outcome of your choice. For screencap lovers so far you cannot hide the HUD. Hopefully future updates will include a gallery and the option to hide the HUD for taking captures.

Graphics & Sound
The music chosen lends itself well to the atmosphere of the game without being intrusive. The main characters are not voiced for the most part and that is always a positive for me. I think for the sake of immersion it is better to hear the voice you imagine the characters to have in your head when you play. However I think they are planning to voice them fully in the future. There are sound effects to add to the ambience, such as falling rain, water splashing and sounds of movement. The graphics of the characters are gorgeous. The characters are illustrated in an anime style with the characters having subtle facial animations to convey their moods such as smiling, frowning and the shifting of eye directions. As for the backgrounds, some are in a more realistic style than all of Rolling Crown's past games, I am guessing more CGI with some particle effects added. I personally love and prefer their older style, where both the backgrounds and characters were done by hand in the same style but some may prefer the newer look.

Overall Experience
This game has depth and great character development. A novel with some meat to it. Not just romance and eye candy but substance. So far only 3 chapters are complete but it is enough of a taste to get a feel for the story and the characters. I have really enjoyed my game experience so far and look forward to future updates of the game and seeing where things go forward. It does end on a cliffhanger so expect to have to wait to see how things turn out based on your last few decisions. 🖤

Otome Lovers wishes to thank Rolling Crown for providing a free review copy for this game.

Review originally posted on Steam

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