Right off the bat, the thing that sticks with me about The Goblin's Brides isn't the smut, it's the goddamn lighting. There's this one CG early on, Yharnam is just sitting on a log, and the way the firelight hits the side of her face while the rest of her is in shadow. Spent a weird amount of time staring at that before remembering what kind of game I was reviewing. The artist clearly gave a shit, which is almost annoying because the writing is so aggressively mid. You got three battle hardened adventurers, Yharnam, Morgana, Nax, coming back from a botched mission and they're all mopey. The dialogue feels like it was run through a translator that had a stroke halfway through. Morgana says something like "the failure is a heavy cloak" and I snorted my drink. But then you get to the goblin camp and suddenly nobody cares about sentence structure anymore, least of all me.
The domination route with the goblin chief is where the VN actually wakes up. The corruption arc isn't subtle, it's like a brick to the face, but the CGs during the harem scenes are filthy in the best way. There's this one shot of the elf, Nax, getting double teamed that has this gross, wet sheen to it. The sound design is weirdly sparse though. You'll get a looping campfire crackle and then absolute silence during a hardcore gangbang, which is jarring. A squelching sound effect pack would've cost like ten bucks, come on. The voice acting is nonexistent, obviously, but my brain filled in some truly unhinged goblin voices. Wish the fantasy setting was used for more than just window dressing. You got elves and goblins and the kinkiest thing they do is a basic spitroast? Missed opportunity for some real degenerate monster stuff. The gallery mode unlocks everything after one playthrough, which is merciful because I'm not sitting through the "we are sad warriors" opening again just to see the one good anal scene.