She Will Punish Them

My first honest thought loading this up was: who exactly is this game trying to be? The answer, after some time with it, is clearer than the marketing lets on. She Will Punish Them is a third-person action-RPG in the Diablo-lite mold, where you play as a succubus building out her dark dominion through a series of skirmishes, rescue missions, and occasional base-defense encounters. The real draw is character creation and gear, not story - and if you walk in knowing that, you will have a better time. The combat itself sits somewhere between a Dynasty Warriors button-masher and a light action-RPG. You have melee weapons in wide variety, bow and ranged options, a small toolkit of spells covering healing, fire, and ice damage, and the ability to summon minions to fight alongside you. Each level feeds you XP that gets distributed across vitality, strength, power, and agility, with two additional points per level going into passive stats like weapon skills and max health. Gear drops and castle purchases layer on top of that. It is not a deep system, but it has enough texture to keep you swapping loadouts for a few sessions. The combat feel itself has been a long work-in-progress - early builds were genuinely rough, with floaty movement and unreliable hit detection, and reviewers at launch were not gentle about it. The game has received consistent updates since its 2020 Early Access debut, and the gap between that original release and where it sits now is reportedly significant. The studio has grown with it. The palace hub is where the other half of the game lives. Between combat missions you return here to spend gold on upgrades, unlock cosmetic furnishings, and interact with your companion maidens. It is light, largely aesthetic, and clearly designed around the fan-service angle rather than any systemic depth. If you are coming for the hub social content as a primary draw, manage your expectations - it functions more as a reward gallery than a fully realized life-sim space. What the customization does deliver is breadth: facial features, skin tone, wings, horns, armor sets, and extensive outfit options mean your succubus ends up feeling genuinely personalized. For players who find that kind of creative expression satisfying, it is the strongest part of the package. The weaknesses are real and consistent across the game's lifespan. Mission variety runs thin quickly - the gameplay loop does not do much to differentiate encounters from one another over time, and environments have been criticized as bland and repetitive. There is no meaningful story, no dialogue of substance, and no narrative momentum to carry you between fights. The mod community on Nexus has stepped in with some quality-of-life additions, which says something about where the base experience leaves gaps. Technical polish has improved from the crash-heavy early days, but this is still an Early Access title that carries Early Access caveats. With over 18,000 Steam reviews sitting at a Very Positive aggregate, the game has clearly found its audience. That audience is not people hunting for the next great action-RPG - it is players who know exactly what kind of experience they are after and find that this one delivers it with a certain unpretentious earnestness. Reviewed-by-critics it gets punished; reviewed-by-its-target-players it holds a solid line. That gap is the whole story.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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