Pleasure Delving
Skip Straight to the Horny Parts
Synopsis
Goblins, Gear, and... idk Goo?
Pleasure Delving is an automated dark-fantasy dungeon crawling game developed and produced by Cheruboom. It was released to Steam on December 11, 2024, and near as I can tell is the first completed game by this developer. Though I was able to find a game-jam submission for some sort of engineering game, as well as an interesting tech demo by someone going by the same name on Newgrounds.
You are a noble gentleman mage exploring a dark dungeon in search of treasure! As you explore deeper into the dungeon you meet new allies in the form of a Goblin, a Lizard-Woman, and a Succubus. Your bonds grow as you explore the dungeon until there's nothing left to do... but each-other.
Story / Characters
Story
There's honestly very little story to be described here so I'm just going to list a few facts that we can infer.
- You play a blonde male mage who speaks very gentlemanly.
- You are exploring a dungeon in search of artifacts.
- You find various girls at the end of various floors
- As you explore the dungeon together, your bonds deepen and you start boning down.
That's about all there is to it.
Characters
None of these characters are given names as far as I can tell, so I made some up for them.
Goblina is the first character you come across. She's stuck in a treasure box when you find her, and she decides to join up with you. She seems eager for romance right out the gate. She attacks with 2 daggers and her ability seems to have something to do with poisoning enemies.
Lizzy is the second companion you come across. She's a blue lizard-woman who speaks very propery, and definitely has some kind of a foot-thing going on. You find her tied up with some vine tentacle things. Her ability seems to freeze enemies.
Suki is the third and final character you unlock. You find her stuck as well, this time in a wall somehow. She's haughty and tsundere and has a great outfit. Of the three I think she's my favorite. I have no idea what her ability is
Gameplay
The amount of things that you actually do in this game are incredibly limited. Your character moves through a dungeon all on his own, no paths to choose, no puzzles to solve. Every room of the dungeon looks identical.
Every once in a while you stumble upon treasure chests, which provide equipment, or stone tomb-looking things that provide artifacts. Equipment is just that, equippable items that adjust your stats, whereas artifacts generally grant some sort of passive effect. All artifacts and equipment are lost at the end of each dungeon.
There are also the occasional random events, but most of these events are either based around upgrading a piece of equipment, picking a relic, or restoring HP/MP. None of them have any sort of graphics applied to them.
Combat is also (almost) fully automatic. You sit there and watch your character wave his arm and see health bars go down. You can't pick targets or defend or do anything like that. The only interaction is casting the occasional spell.
The core game loop revolves mostly around monitoring your health, and leaving the cave when your life gets too low. This allows to you upgrade your stats and try again. Eventually you'll be strong enough to defeat the boss at the end of the dungeon and unlock a new girl to fight alongside you.
Overview
Pleasure Delving charmed me when I first installed it. I really like the 2000s era low-poly style. It's so common for games going for a retro look to just make some pixelart and call it a day, but Pleasure Delving is really evocative of 07 Runescape which I like a lot. The style even makes the super low-animation fights kind of work. Of course you just stand there and swing your arm once in a while, what else would you do??
Unfortunately the charm starts to wear off as soon as you hit the "oh, this is it?" stage of experiencing the game. Once I had finally made it through the first dungeon and unlocked Goblina, I was excited to see if the next dungeon would be different at all, but it's not. It's the same walking loop through the same cave with the same enemies over and over. You find the same relics and the same equipment each time, and the outcome of pretty much every single run is determined completely by RNG. This fact technically makes it a roguelike, but there's so little gameplay and so few choices to make that it honestly just feels like a timer that spits out loot every once in a while. With no choices to make while walking in the dungeon, it serves absolutely no purpose other than to pad out time between events.
Each of these events can ultimately be reduced to shifting around equipment. That's only fun in games when there's a lot of differences between options. Here it seems to be alternating between restoring 1 mana a minute, or 2.
The payoffs live at the bonfires scattered throughout each dungeon (generally 2 per run it seems). When you're alone these bonfires let you choose to heal your HP or your MP, but when there is a girl present in your party, you can also socialize. The first few socializations are just light getting-to-know-yous, but before you know it you'll be unlocking sex scenes. You get 2 per girl, generally one outer-course and one inter-course. In the 3 person dungeon you get 1 3-way scene per character combination. Unfortunately no way to have a 4-way.
Horny Parts
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Character Portraits
I don't think it would be unreasonable for me to claim that most of the copies of this game that have been sold, were sold due to how cute this goblin girl looks in her portrait image.
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Dungeon Models
Each girl has a distinct "walking in front of you" animation and they're all pretty good.
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Foot Stuff
She said it better than I could have!
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Stuck
Each girl you find starts out stuck, but the MC has enough decency to not take advantage of the situation.
Horniest Part
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Sex Scenes
I was initially going to say the horniest part was the 3-ways specifically, but they're single position animations with no cum so I'm kinda just lumping them in with the rest.
Rating
Neutral
Pleasure Delving has good bones. It's got heart and style that a lot of games can't pull off, and the characters are cute and funny. Unfortunately it just feels kind of unfinished. Both from a content standpoint and from a coding standpoint. I lost my save and had to restart 3 times total.
Additional Things of Note
I really like how Lizzy talks about how lizard-woman anatomy is different from human anatomy. I love lizards with big tits but that doesn't stop me from thinking every time "since when do lizards make milk?"
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