Lust Epidemic

NLT has been making a name for himself slowly and steadily ever since the 90s as a very talented 3D animator who specializes in the female form. He’s been making renders of hot, perfectly sculpted women and getting better at it for over two decades, and it shows. The quality of his renders cannot be beat. He’s basically pioneering the ultra-western influenced art style of 3D renders that you must have seen at least once if you’ve been around the porn block.

But you’re not here to learn about NLT in general, you’re here for Lust Epidemic. It’s certain he wouldn’t mind the segue as he’s been spending most if not all of his time on his Patreon, working hard on two video game titles that are both part of the same franchise, one continuing the other’s story. Today, you’ll be learning about Lust Epidemic specifically – the original title that started it all.

NLT’s Patreon has been exploding ever since the very first version of the game, since the public could tell quality when they first saw it.

Slow Start, Large Boom, Great Success

Lust Epidemic started out how most quality porn games do. NLT made it clear that this was a video game title for the masses, with no price tag or micro-transactions. He wanted people to truly enjoy his art, rather than make a quick buck and retire. That’s why he dedicated his focus to Lust Epidemic fully, rather than breaking it up into profitable installments.

Still, artists have to eat, so he made a Patreon as soon as possible and made sure to encourage the public to pledge with many promises of rewards that he has been delivering on like a pro ever since. If you pledge to his Patreon you get exclusive rights to the latest updates of the game, even ones that haven’t been pushed to public release yet. Plus, you get to submit your input regarding the game and it’s clear that NLT is taking all of this into account when improving the game.

As a story driven RPG with 3D models there’s tons of potential to improve the game over time and add new features without altering past work. It has made the game a bit episodic, when you think about it, but the updates are cumulative, so the public doesn’t mind. At worst, you still get new continuous content with every update so there’s not much to complain about.

Currently, NLT boasts a whopping 3700 pledges on Patreon and that number doesn’t seem to be dialing down. If anything, he’s gathering more pledges every single week. At a minimum of $2 per pledge and great incentive to sign up for the $23 grand master tier, it’s clear that this production team is clearly profiting off of public sponsorship without the need to sell out or bend over backwards to satisfy a corporate backing. The game has benefited greatly from this and the public has received a ridiculous amount of quality for it.

A Classic RPG with a Western Twist

Clearly this game is an RPG, but the somewhat ambiguous western twist does not refer to cowboys, mind you, rather, the ever-popular western art style of 3D modelling. It would appear that in recent years, two kinds of 3D renders have become staples for pornographic modelling. One of those is the hentai standard which, given the matte coloring of standard 2D hentai, is just an added dimension away. The other is a very original, so called western style in which the characters are a lot more reminiscent of real people. You’ll see realistic skin textures and body proportions, with the obvious increase to breast and butt size. Still, the girls look very true to life. They almost look like real-life sex dolls. So there is a bit of a plastic feel to their surface, but overall they do a great job of looking real. And when they’re animated, the action is almost lifelike.

The RPG side of Lust Epidemic, which is the core of the gameplay content is very reminiscent of the RPG Maker games of old, with a bit of a futuristic twist on the sprites – they appear to be of a higher definition than the backdrops. The background art style on the other hand might as well have been ripped from RPG Maker. If you had a gripe with this game, it would probably be about something in the art department of the RPG parts of the game. It serves the gameplay well, but it’s rather uninspired, especially when you compare it to the 3D portions of the game.

Speaking of the 3D portions, those are the sexual scenes that come as rewards for playing the game right. Seeing as how this is a pornographic RPG game, progressing the story and succeeding in solving some mysteries or finishing some quests invariably leads to high quality sex scenes. This is where the game starts to burst with quality. You get the aforementioned western 3D renders of high quality women having all kinds of sexual intercourse with your main character, and most of these scenes are even animated.

Granted, the animation is rather crude and short. They’re usually sexual loops – back and forth if you will. This works really well towards giving the scenes some life and giving them the feel of proper cutscenes. It’s unfortunate that they’re in a rather low framerate, however, when they really don’t have to be. It’s possible that the creator couldn’t handle renders of a higher quality, given how hefty the models are. Either way, it’s a decision that you have to live with.

The Story

Lust Epidemic’s story is unsurprisingly bland and unoriginal, because that’s what these kinds of games call for, to be honest. You arrive in a town that is seemingly suffering from a literal sex craze. The denizens of this town are suffering from a disease that is making them extremely horny and out of control. It’s up to you, the main character, to navigate these spaces and figure out the mystery behind it all.

On the more original side of things, the secrets that you uncover are actually quite fascinating and not at all cookie-cutter. That’s not to say that you should expect Stephen King levels of writing, but the game’s story is certainly far above the majority of similar sexual games. None of the dialogue seems to be filler and you don’t get a lot of superfluous conversations just for the sake of getting to the smut. The story is real and it matters. You’re not killing time to get to the smut – the smut is the bonus that comes on top of an already great game. It’s clear that this game was made by people that appreciate immersive gameplay.

Treasure of Nadia and The Future

NLT has officially moved onto the sequel of Lust Epidemic, dubbed Treasure of Nadia. On the one hand this game is more of the same. You can see the same type of gameplay with the standard RPG backdrops and sprites. There are no real improvements to speak of in that department, though, the story leaps forward quite expertly and you get a lot more content out of it.

It’s clear that NLT didn’t care much about changing the core gameplay. The RPG style seems to work quite well in helping him bring his ideas to the world. On the other hand, the 3D renders, which are NLT’s specialty have increased in quality tenfold. Lust Epidemic’s 3D renders were high quality and of a high resolution, but they were still rather raw and unfiltered. From the teaser trailer of Treasure of Nadia, you can immediately see a world of improvement. The 3D models are still pristine and impressive, but there’s a lot of shading going on. That shading goes a long way towards increasing the quality levels to the extent that the game’s cutscмenes now look like triple-A productions.

The most impressive change seems to be the increase in framerate as well as the increase in animations overall. You are no longer limited to brief back-and-forth sexual cutscenes. Now, you get proper full animations of people interacting with each other in a 3D space. And they seem to have implemented this change for the non-sexual encounters as well, not just the end of the line milestones.

Lust Epidemic is one of those rare porn games that are trying to push the limits of what smut gaming is capable of. It’s taking a lot of public funding and man-hours, but NLT is showing the world that smut can be a triple-A matter of serious dedication and quality. His models and renders cannot be beat and the sequel to Lust Epidemic seems to be leaping forward in terms of quality as well.