Frankly, this is a phenomenal piece of work. A unique and sophisticated engine, with a plethora of knobs, dials, and blinkenlights--although, what do all these fractional fetishes do, exactly?--studded with seering prose, and proferring a compelling fictional setting.

I absolutely love this, and it's hugely addictive, with a great variety of ways to explore the story and mechanics, and different approaches to take to playing the game.

This is a unique game with some very cool ideas and mechanics, but also some serious balancing problems that I hope will be addressed one day.

The Basic Structure of the Game and its Advantages

The only games that come close in depth are DoL (more on this at the end of the review) and TrapQuest. Yes, Secretary has much, much more story and variety of smutty scenarios and quests, but Secretary does not have the sandbox or near-invisible integration of story with game mechanics - it's not a comparable game from either direction.

I really like the seamless integration of story and emergent gameplay. GTA could learn some lessons from how well the core design of the game is executed.

The aim is to move around a "sandbox" city, interact with the NPCs, build up your skills, earn money, complete quests, and discover the deeper mysteries of the setting.

With each NPC there are stat-based interactions, including a well-thought out conversation system where social skill, reputation, and basic human tact and insight help you befriend allies, locate victims, or identify predators, depending on the situation.

There's a good variety of different people to interact with, and you can choose your own ways of doing it: seduce them, pick their pockets, help them solve their problems, buy their services, or simply punch them in the face, and there are more options than that. The quests, and your exploration of the city unlock information about the setting and help unravel the mystery of your character's unusual situation. This quest/story content is most impressive in how it fits with the mechanics, but it is interesting and creates stakes that can make things very tense and exciting at times.

This is a genuine game, not just a story, but it's not simply mechanical and repeitive either - as some people and places have quests that involve overcoming both social and world-based obstacles.

Howevever, it's not without some flaws... substantial flaws.

Weak Points

Artwork is mostly lacking. There are some small vector graphic portraits of NPC faces, and a paperdoll (which is quite new), plus a map. There are no full-length images of NPCs, and this is a pity, as the text descriptions of them are often very brief and the characters can be hard to visualize. The recent addition of the image for the MC is a great improvement, but even this is not quite complete yet - it doesn't show bondage or body-mod items visually, though the MC face image does show some info.

The main window layout has some annoyances and you can't have the lower part big enough to properly read the info and see the images without making the main window enormously wide - I think this would be easy to fix. Also, the window that shows stat changes is too small as the number of stats that can change in a single event are crazy and sometimes overwhelming.

The top menu bar layout and icons should be split up into groups for easier access.

The names of some of the kinks, and many of the stat changes are unintuitive and have a harsh learning curve.

The many, many, stat changes, in particular, are hard to follow, and currently no way to see the underlying stats for a lot of things, only the changes - the button for details on each NPC in the relationship summary does not work.

There are sequences of gameplay that are incredibly repetitious and grindy. If you start as a slave, for example, you will likey be stuck in a loop for a long time, completely controlled by bondage, with very limited options and no clear path to escape - and the actual path to escape is to mind-numblingly grind your stats up until you can escape/evade/fight successfully, etc.

There's an attempt at creating a helpful map of the city to navigate, but this is a lot less usable than one might hope and could do with some polishing. It can be hard to relate the "directions" you can go from a location to the map. This takes time to adjust to, and you learn to cope with it - eventually learning the city layout very intimately - but it takes time and is a steep learning curve for new players.

Stat System and Balance Annoyances

The other, more diffuse issue, is that the stats and stat-changes are not well balanced. I understand this is hard, as there are a lot of stats. A lot!

However, the game is very stats oriented, and I often find the way the stat interactions are designed can be more "simulation" and less "fun", with mechanics that are both unimmersive and also damaging to enjoyment, instead of doing what they should, which is making things more fun.

For example, and this is just one example, there are many other issues, pain and arousal reduce your escape skill linearly. Your escape skill is capped at 100 and can go no higher. This means that increasing your escape skill to the max doesn't increase your actual escape chance in a huge number of situations. Any time you are being hit by a fetish, or in pain, your escape skill drops to a minimum of 1% and is 1% regardless of whether you have almost no Escape skill, or it's maxed out to 100. This makes the skill itself all but meaningless in far too many situations where you really want to use it. It's the same with many other skills.

I'd suggest that modifiers should apply on a curve, scaled across a range, or some similar mechanic, so pain and arousal still reduce your escape chance, but don't tank it to -100 that's then floored up to 1%. Instead, it should scale down smoothly, so a character with 100 Escape but max pain and arousal should still have a something like a 3% to 5% chance to escape rather than 1.

In short, it shouldn't matter how much pain and arousal you have, 100 Escape skill should always give more escape chance than 10 Escape skill, even if it's not much more.

As it is, higher skills mainly impact easy situations, where it suddenly tips things dramatically in your favor. It should probably be the opposite - higher skill should make most difference in difficult situations.

The impact of these skill formula designs is even more obvious in combat, where small modifiers can tip a very easy win into a near certain loss.

It also feels that the skill cap is easily reached, and also too low. I think you should be able to take skills over 100, just way more slowly.

If the current increase rates were all kept, a skill cap of 200 would be reasonable, and would offset some of the problems with the current modifier formula too.

Reputation is King

Another stat niggle is how reputations work. This is initially hard to unravel and read the stats for, and suffers from the same linearity issues as the stats ... but gets applied to all social interactions in that same linear way, which is highly unimmersive.

For example, if you're talking to another prostitute you shouldn't suffer social penalties for being a prostitute! 

Some scenarios can easily lead to you racking up > 100 prostitution events and this tanks your social with so many people so fast that it basically removes your social options from the game entirely. This is not in any way fun or interesting, it just feels silly. Prostitution shouldn't impact reputation at all IMHO, it should only impact personal one-on-one interactions - only people who had sex with you as a prostitute should care about that. Also, there should be more impact from clothing style, with way more access to slutty clothes etc. that might be a job requirement, and that could impact your social... but even then, it shouldn't always be negative, it should depend on the type of interaction. Lack of nuance in the reputation system and how it's used is frustrating, unimmersive, and highly exploitable once you get your head around how it will play out.

Minor Bugs

Another niggle, which I noted when the game first released, is that the "Change Position" option in sex is exploitable and can easily be used to consistently grind NPCs into exhaustion so they fall asleep on you.

A small bug in sex is that you can have your arms bound behind your back, but can still use the all fours sex position - this doesn't do much harm but is a bit silly.

Style and Influences

DG clearly owes some inspirational ideas to Degrees of Lewdity and a shorthand description of the experience would be a dystopian cyberpunk version of DoL.

To digress, DoL is a game that hamstrung itself by adopting a "school" framework and using artwork that - while claiming to represent an 18+ aged character - looks creepily youthful.

The creepy feel that DoL has could easily have been avoided, so we must conclude that DoL's approach was a conscious choice - a very poor one - and is a serious turn off for playing the game.

DG avoids any of the DoL age-related creepiness, but it does retain the incredibly brutal violent, and inherently rapey nature of DoL's world. This definitely lands poorly with some players. Also some players are turned off before they can give the game enough time to understand that the DG world does a lot more to support believability of such a harsh environment. Nevertheless, there is perhaps such an excess of sex and bondage in DG that any scenario that doesn't involve sex or bondage can sometimes seem like a breath of fresh air in relief.

I think that DG would likely benefit from toning down the baseline bondage and violence a little so that it feels more impactful when it does show up. It could be a little easier to live a less extreme life if you want to; I don't think that would hurt the game.

Finally

For a game that has a strong focus on bondage and slavery, DG has a suprisingly minimalist implementation of bondage and body-mod mechanics. I really hope the creator will do more in this area of the game as time goes by.

DG is not for everyone, but if you have a high tolerance for dark themes and violence, then it's really a standout and well worth investing a lot of time and effort in exploring. Unlike (say) Accidental Woman, it delivers on its promises, in fact, over-delivers. There is a lot to discover here, and it takes effort to get to the story content, but it feels worth it.

It's well-written, interesting, and ridiculously expansive for how early in development it is. It's much darker than most of the stuff on this site, but if you're into this kind of thing, definitely give it a go!

This game surprised the heck out of me and I wanted to write an honest opinion on it. Something I've not done in a few years as there was a lot of the same stuff flloating about. Suddenly came this game,  on the surface some of the same tropes but well written. However, the depth of gameplay - if you look for it, made me double take. Seriously, knock a door, as it's an option, and next I know I'm someone's ponygirl? I was so delighted I had to put it out here. This game has several such semi hidden story lines and it's nowhere near done. I wanted to praise the sort of non-linear way this was done. Give it a go, even someone more surface oriented won't be disappointed.

The best thing about the game is probably the writing. The author "gets" what makes dom/sub interactions hot in a way that not many do. There is plenty of extremely good content revolving around the player's humiliation and corruption in an unbelievably harsh world. Even better, despite being early days a lot of it feels somewhat "organic" from the conditions the game sets up. The game world feels well thought out and has quite a lot of depth in some areas and throws plenty of surprises to keep the player engaged. 

Overall I really enjoyed this game and would definitely recommend it.

There is also some room for improvement though. For example- even though the game is set in a harsh world, sometimes the character interactions are a bit "much", even for the setting. For instance, over about three gym sessions Holger moves from insults to skullfucking. It just moves way too fast. Ditto for the cafe and maid storylines- phenomenal writing but the characters have a distinct lack of chill that kind of breaks the immersion. Also in personal interactions, even your flatmates will jump straight from asking your name to full on sexual assault. (The insult mechanic is amazing, by the way- though it rarely seems to trigger). The scenes themselves are great and I know the author is probably still working on the pacing but generally I wish there was a bit of a slower burn. It would also be good if there were a cue to let you know that you'd come to the end of content in an area. 

Currently there isn't really any feminisation content in the game. Transformations are implied but AFAIK cannot happen to the player (though there is the groundwork for them to be implemented soon). Personally I didn't really notice the lack of images- the descriptions are good enough.