At the Mountains of Friendship is an autobattler taking inspiration from games like Hearthstone Battlegrounds or Super Auto Pets. You play as an ancient, unknowable, eldritch entity doing the thing such beings do best, making teams of magical girls.
Fighting!
Recruit magical girls to help contain the damage you're doing to their reality. Sure it might make them go crazy, but what's a few ruined lives compared to saving all of time and space? Saving it from you, but that's not important.
Friendship!
Form bonds between your girls to make them stronger in battle. Different pairings have different potential for how good friends they can become with each other, up to and including being lovers. Each girl has two others she can form a romantic bond with, sex scene included! With the power of friendship, anything is possible!
Fucking!
This first release has 40 sex scene CGs, with each girl having her own storyline about her descent into corruption. The more she fights and is exposed to your eldritch energy, the hornier she gets.
Fetishes!
Each girl has her own sexual theme and aesthetic. Build a team based on who works best together, or who you just want to see have sex. One may be more optimal, but the other might be more fun. Fetishes themes include bondage, femdom, free use, tentacles, cuckoldry, gangbang, and more!
Full Game!
At the Mountains is a full game with a finished gameplay loop and 10 recruitable girls each with their own abilities, set of sex scenes, and voice acting. This game has been in development for almost two years at this point, it's a fully fleshed-out experience
Future Content!
Some of the plans for new content and features include:
If you want to support the game's development, get early access to content, and vote on the characteristics of new girls, consider joining my Patreon. You can also vote for new bonus scenes, even without joining. Join my Discord if you have comments, questions, or just want to discuss my games in general.
This game is also posted on the Hypnopics Collective if you'd like to talk about it there too.
1.4:
Special first anniversary update
1.3:
Added Aliana for $10 Patrons and bumped Avery and Sarah down a slot
Added Maya's bonus scene
Added 4 new items
1.2.1:
Fixed clicking a girl's portrait on the relationship matrix still trying to trigger a scene
Fixed the cumshot images in Avery's scenes not displaying
Fixed the game trying to show non-existent girl pairing scenes, bricking the game
Fixed one of the play scene buttons instantiating a copy of the leader frame instead of the splash screen
Fixed the game not remembering you were in sandbox mode when loading a game
Fixed some visual bugs related to your current leader going insane
1.2:
New Content
Added Avery for $10 Patrons and bumped Lydia and Sarah down a slot
Added Emma's bonus scene
Added the sanity mechanic.
Added 6 new items
Added animation to one of Sofia's scenes
UI Improvements
You can now watch full scenes in the gallery
Triggering girl scenes is now done on the main recruit phase screen instead of in the girl info window
Added a setting to stop scenes you've already seen from triggering
Got rid of the scene gallery and replaced it with a sandbox mode
Removed the "X" button from the girl assignment screen. Girls can be removed from a team by right-clicking them
Changed the interface for when you buy a duplicate of a girl
Added new details to the tutorial
Balance Changes
Buffed all of Emma's abilities slightly
Reverted Cynthia to keeping half of all permanent buffs
Friendship bonuses now have higher caps
Friendship points now increased by 1 each time girls fight together
Flamingo item now gives +2/+2 (Up from +1/+2)
Lowered game length by 1 turn to 15 turns
Releasing girls from your party no longer adds them back to the recruit pool
Swapped the abilities of the early game monsters that care about pet type
Bug Fixes:
Plenty but omitted from the changelog because it's long enough as is.
1.1:
New Content:
Gameplay changes and other fixes:
1.0.1:
New items:
New monster abilities:
Other additions:
Fixes and changes:
My initial review was : This game has two sides to it, a battle system and corruption stories for the girls. At first I couldn't see anything in this game as the battle system was basic and characters were odd, but as the corruption increased it made more sense. I think it's worth a look, but it has to be a long enough look to see the storylines progress.
My updated review is that yes, the battle system is a little basic, but it can still be fun and it is far more of a game than most on this site. The magical girls start quirky rather then sexy so you need to play through to an endgame to get the story and art for the fetishes. Each girl has a story of sexual corruption and a few have physical transformation too (inclduing male to female). I'd recommend this for anyone who actually wants some game in their TF game.
The Good:
Nice art and voice acting. I don't usually go for voice acting in porn games, but it works well here.
There's a nice variety of characters, each with their own sex scenes that center around a nice variety of fetishes.
The equippable items and the ability to change character abilities adds a neat level of depth to teambuilding. For example, I can give a girl the item that permanently boosts her stats everytime her ability is changed, but what if she already has her 'optimal' ability? Are the increased stats really worth having to gamble to get her best ability back? Likewise, the way that different girls develop over time adds anothe level of strategy: should you pick a girl who starts strong and stays that way, or take a chance with a girl who starts weak and becomes super strong in the late game?
The relationship system provides a nice degree of characterization, and makes it easier to get attached (for better or for worse).
The Neutral:
The fact that each character has a distinct playstyle and a distinct fetish means that players have to balance their team's combat potential against their desire to see certain fetishes, and vice versa. Example: people who aren't into cuckholding will stay away from that girl, but all of her abilities make her into an absolute beast if you take the time to build her up. Likewise, I want to see more of one specific girl's content, so I keep picking her, but I always end up having to sacrifice her in order to save girls whose power will be needed later.
The Bad:
It feels bizarre that in a game where runs can end up lasting over an hour (if you take the time to read all the dialogue), there isn't any kind of save system. If I have to walk away from my computer for any length of time, I'd like to be able to tab out of the porn game and then come back to where I was without losing all my progress.
Related to the above point: if the RNG for enemy generation screws you and you have to sacrifice one or more girls in order to save the run, it would be nice to be able to go back to the start of the turn, before you spent your energy on upgrades, and make better choices in order to save your team. Is it cheating? Maybe, but I'm tired of having to restart entire runs just because there was no way to keep Dominique or the foot lady alive, when the entire reason why I started the run was so I could see the Dominique/Emma scenes, or the foot lady's scenes with the bisexual.
Conclusion: It's rough, but it's good. The combat might be simplistic, but the combat isn't really the point. The point is the slow corruption of the girls, and how it changes their interactions with each other and the world, and as a vehicle for showcasing that transformation, this game does that pretty well.
Also, Emma is best girl.
I guess the game really need a better tutorial. For a player familiar with auto-battler/chess games like hearthstone battlegrounds, the tutorial is fine after some trial-and-error. However ppl may actually ask what to do, or how to beat tougher boss in later phase of the game. I would also appreciate having a in-game wiki listing the possible traits of all characters and monsters for better planning.
Overall the game is solid, but some polishments in minor aspects are expected. Keep up the great work!
Excellent art, great character and costume designs, fantastic porn scenes and great variety of fetishes... gameplay that amounts to doing basic math, and a UI that's opaque at best. I finished one run and I still don't understand what some of the buttons on the interface are supposed to do. If you're after something with solid gameplay this isn't it, but if you're after some good porn content set the difficulty to -1 and go wild.
This game unfortunately has all of the hallmarks of a typical Unity game. Which is a more polite way of saying that it barely works.
Despite being incredibly simple and basic (pretty much just 2D images and text) it somehow takes up 3GB of hard drive space and 1GB of RAM. The maximum resolution is set to your monitor size, so if you have a multi-monitor set-up the game will be so small that the text is difficult to read. Unity is a fine engine when used well, but when it isn't it can make any game look and run terrible.
Technical issues aside, the tutorial is vague and confusing and I'm not really sure what the game is or is trying to be. It says it's an autobattling RPG, but the battles are incredibly simple. If you've ever played something like Yu-Gi-Oh it's bascially the battles from that, minus traps and spells. You just pick a character and ram them into another character until one of them dies. That's fine for Yu-Gi-Oh as it has a deckbuilding component to add a strategic layer; without that it feels very shallow and lacking.
All of the other autobattling RPGs I've played before have a button you can press that lets you interrupt the combat in some way, so that there's more to the gameplay than setting up the tin soldiers and watching them fall down. I think something like that would be a good addition. Really I think the combat would benefit from added complexity in any form.
I also wanted to point out what appears to be an annoying bug I ran into where despite the fact that you can't recruit two copies of the same character, characters you have recruited still show up in the recruitment pool. While I understand that this is the first release and issues will exist, I couldn't shake the feeling that this is one of those "publish now, fix later" mindsets that is so very common in video games today.
Usually when I don't enjoy a game it's because I realize it isn't really for me, or because I think it's poorly paced. With At the Mountains of Friendship I'm not even sure who it is made for or why that person would enjoy it. Theoretically that person should be me as I love magical girl anime and have enjoyed ApolloSeven's previous games, but this game in its current state doesn't even parse correctly for me. It feels like it was made by an alien who had a magical girl anime described to them but has never seen one. It's baffling in the negative sense.
Although I had a lot I wanted to criticize I hope that I haven't been discouraging, as I can clearly tell that a lot of effort has already been put into this game. I do however feel that much of that effort has been misdirected and AtMoF has a long way to go before it becomes fun or interesting.
