When I first came up with the idea of Fanbox exclusive reviews for eroge and nukige, I just kinda expected to be talking about smut and going into detail about how turned on I am in a way that I might be hesitant to do on a publicly available setting. This mindset was on display in my previous Fanbox exclusive review of Mage Kanade’s Futanari Dungeon Quest. I choose Malcatras’s Maiden as my next game because of the then relevant censorship of eroge on Itch.io, and because developer Nadia Nova got hit the hardest.

I had already been looking into Nadia Nova’s library of releases prior to that, but now I had a reason to single it out. And Malcatras’s Maiden seemed like the most well received of her work. Going into this visual novel, I expected something akin to The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, but with actual sex involved, and with all girls. Translation, I was expecting this to be something that fetishes toxic, incestuous relationships and power dynamics, and for it to be purely fap fuel. While there is certainly no absence of sexual themes present, what I read was a far more serious and subversive work of fiction, a work consisting of the type of brilliance on par with titles like Mouthwashing. In fact, I genuinely feel bad that this review will be a Fanbox exclusive for six months, because more people need to read this visual novel.

Malcatras’s Maiden stars Liliana, a trans puppy girl who works as a maid for wealthy estate owner Francesca Malcatras. Liliana was initially a poor street child who was adopted by Lady Malcatras, alongside many other children. At first glance, Lady Malcatras appears to have pure intentions, but there’s something off about her from the beginning.

On of the earliest scenes in the game has Liliana being “disciplined” by Lady Malcatras for accidentally dropping a teapot. Said discipline is her being spanked. Keep in mind, Liliana is a grown woman, and Lady Malcatras is her adopted mother. Right off the bat, Liliana’s relationship with Lady Malcatras is unsettlingly intimate and bordering on incestuous, made even more so by the fact that none of Lady Malcatras’s other daughters kept getting spanked after they became kids.

Any typical eroge would take the obvious route of turning this into some incestuous love story that would be shallow in substance but high in smut. While I am certainly not opposed to this approach, I was surprised to see that Malcatras’s Maiden took a more realistic approach in its portrayal of both abusers and victims. Throughout the entirety of this visual novel, there is something off about Lady Malcatras, but also something warm and welcoming. You’re never entirely certain about her until the stinger at the very end, and that’s what makes Francesca Malcatras one of the most terrifying antagonists in any visual novel.

Creating a blatantly evil figure like Marie Mamiya is one thing, but to create a character so compelling that even you, the reader, can fall for her allure takes a much greater amount of writing talent. I also have to give props to Nadia Nova and not going for the low hanging fruit of “this older, predatory woman preys on children” and instead going for the much less commonly known abuse of “grooming vulnerable kids to become dependent, traumatized adults and then preying on them.”

Additional credit needs to be given to a sex scene that terrified me in a much different way than rape scenes in visual novels usually do. The scene in question is less a “innocent girl is held down by a bunch of ugly bastards and forced to take cock,” and more so “someone with no sense of self simply decides to not put up any boundaries because she doesn’t believe she deserves to have them, and the other person never realizes it.” There is equal emphasis on carnality and physical and emotional pain in this scene, and it left me in a state of shock like very few scenes can… precisely because it’s the way I’m most likely to experience sexual abuse myself.

It demonstrates the core of what Malcatras’s Maiden is about, a bunch of dysfunctional lesbian adults with sexualities that have been warped by years of abuse and grooming (both sexually and non sexually), stemming from both Lady Malcatras, and from each other. It paints such a nuanced and vivid picture of abuse that is so often eschewed in favor of fetish baiting shock value even in games I have praised, and it does so with significantly less run time AND less budget.

One other aspect that deserves its praise is the music, I simply cannot imagine this visual novel with any other soundtrack playing over it. Special mention goes to eerie yet intoxicating h scene track, “bath lesbomb.” Much like the scenes it plays over, this track emphasizes the feeling of “so wrong, yet so right.” And I know it’s just a ten second loop, but holy shit is it an effective one. The artwork is also well drawn, but it also has a few stills that remind me that this was made by a small team, and that could have been touched up, though it gets the job done very well.

I suppose I should also talk about the ero factor, since I mainly discussed story and characters thus far. There was not as much smut as I was expecting, but what it had was some damn good stuff. Moreover, it was good precisely because of the setting and tone of visual novel, and the context set. That being said, I genuinely don’t think the smut is the main appeal of Malcatras’s Maiden, and that it’s doing a disservice to this beautiful work of art to dismiss it as mere jackoff fuel.

Malcatras’s Maiden is free, meaning it will have cost more to read this review than it will have to play the game (unless you’re reading this six months in the future where it will be posted publicly). I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

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