What better way to start off Spooktober than to play a super questionable horror game. Given how many people were helped by my review for Lust from Beyond – I thought I’d give this one a look as well.
Alright, so I had a bit of a journey with this game. It started out strong. I was thrown into this hellish setting with demons everywhere, people being tortured all around me, and a whole lotta pixels censoring the more inappropriate stuff. Don’t worry though – the censorship is optional, I just had to do so to get footage for YouTube. I also tested the uncensored mode and yup, it’s pretty much the same thing, but with no pixels.
I will definitely give the studio credit for going all out on the production values. There’s a ton of detail to the game world, tons of options to customize your character, and really, the visuals are surprisingly good – better than I was expecting even if I wasn’t running at max settings.
I ran the game at 1440p on a mix of high and some medium settings to maintain that high fps – hovering anywhere between 70 and 120 or so. It fluctuates a bit, but with some tinkering – I did manage to get it to a point where it did not drop below 60. Once I did that – it was smooth sailing outside of the occasional hitch when loading new areas. Again, I was impressed – the game looks good and runs better than I was expecting on my aging 1070 Ti.
And that is unfortunately where the good points mostly end. Because after that initial impression, I was subjected to the game’s combat – a mix of some good ideas, but not so great execution. Like, the different weapon types, attacks, and special abilities are cool, but the core combat is just boring and repetitive. Hits don’t have any weight behind them, enemies are not varied enough, and the hitboxes can be a bit wonky too. The movement is at least responsive, but the rest unfortunately does not compare.
Now, this is normally where I would go on to comment on the story – which the game does at least have – but unfortunately, I was unable to beat it. Not because I didn’t want to, but because the game would not let me. Hours into my first playthrough, it crashed on me during a loading screen and would not boot back up again without crashing – leaving me completely unable to play.
I tried: restarting my computer, verifying integrity of the game files, running the game as an administrator, completely reinstalling the thing (60GB mind you), and even analyzing my own crash dump file using Windows Debugger. What ultimately fixed it was a complete wipe of my save file and settings.
I figured – okay, that’s pretty bad, but I still want to give a complete review for the game – so I started up another playthrough and began speedrunning to get back to where I left off. Unfortunately, the game had other plans and shut down that playthrough too – giving me another crash in a completely different area and preventing itself from opening again. Once again, I solved the problem by wiping my save, but at that point – I had given up on finishing the game. My save got corrupted not just once, but twice and my interest in playing it completely vanished with that second save.
I mean, sure this is something they can probably patch – but I’m left wondering just how many other unknown issues there are if I ran into so many on what was supposed to be the review build of the game – ready to go for launch.
So no, I cannot recommend Succubus. Putting aside the whole save corrupting issue – it’s still just a mediocre experience at best, with clunky combat and all. I’ll give the studio some credit for going all out on the setting and really selling the game’s demonic theme, but that is unfortunately not enough to save the experience. Of course, the save corrupting and crashing issue makes it an automatic no to begin with.
Quote: Succubus is a mediocre experience at best and a broken one at worst. The setting and production design may be good, but the combat is clunky and there are numerous crashing and save-corrupting issues.
Succubus retails for $25 USD on Steam.
I was provided a review copy of the game in order to write this review. Read more about how I do my game reviews here.
cublikefoot 