20260320_Ryona_Yuri_Jam_Roundup

As a slightly overdue update for this blog, my Ryona Yuri VN Jam entry, BDSiM has been updated with more CGs and minor QoL fixes for the Noise Jam 2 release. This is the last planned update until I finish Chapter 2, which is now detailed in the game’s roadmap.

Needless to say, the preface to this blog post of recommendations is about how I highly recommend that you check out the game I worked on, but I may be a bit biased there :p

Over the past month or so I played all entries to the Ryona Yuri VN Jam and had a lot of fun with it. After thinking about it for a bit I decided to write up this blog post, in the same vein as the one I did for the Toxic Yuri VN Jam.

This is in no way meant to be a critical review space, but more a place to shine a light on some art I think is Neat. Parts of this will be flavored by my personal opinions and are not intended as an objective “commentary”.

Disclaimer

First and foremost, many of these games contain heavy subject matter and/or adult material. Heed the warnings on each game’s itch page, eat only that which you can digest.

I should also note that there are three games¹ excluded from this process, because they wouldn’t run on the linux laptop where I play VNs. These games are: XxU, My Dear Mutt, and The Witch, and What Remains. I may come back and play these eventually, but do know that they are excluded from the following post.

Exclusions of games from this list does not necessarily mean that I think they are bad, but could be that I really did not jive with them or think that they’re too incomplete to earnestly recommend to others. The demos included in this list are ones that I feel have enough meat to them to be satisfying reads at the time of writing.

Now, the Recommendations.

Don’t feel obliged to go through and read everything from this list (unless you’re someone as hungry for ryona as I am), use this as a tasting menu to go through and find the works you think you might like.

Of Personal Appeal

While these are works that I found particularly engaging because they appealed to my interests, and are probably going to be some of the games I think about from this jam the most (alongside the games in the last heading).

• TEMPTING FATE: CHASING HIGHS is about two girlthings who meet and bond over their shared morbid interests, leading to a fateful night where they play Russian roulette.

My partiality to deathgames aside, I felt like this game did a really good job exploring the mindsets of both characters, with a really satisfying follow-through on both endings.

• The final entry in the Banality series, Banality 4 follows Maddie as she tries to (humorously) rationalize her way through her current living arrangement, where she is confined to the house of the witch who made her an eldritch approximation of a werewolf, and the existential dread of knowing the planet will be destroyed in ten years.

Like many in the toxic yuri jam-extant circles, I’ve been following this series since the first release, and this entry is a very worthy finale.

• Post Annihilation Playback is a lighthearted girlshonen following a professional assassin and the aftermath of a job that doesn’t pay out as well as she expects it to. When the sister of her last mark comes knocking, she is pulled into indulging in her own sadistic fantasies for cash.

I had fun with every moment of this game’s short runtime, and I’m always a sucker for works that show us what the sadist is getting out of it and works with sexually repressed weirdos (affectionate).

Grounded Explorations Of Bad Kink Practices

While a lot of toxic yuri can be over-the-top and melodramatic, these works choose to focus on realistic dynamics and depth of psychology of their characters.

• Hot Cocoa, Spoilt With Blood is about a loving relationship slowly falling apart as the main character tries to play the dominating role that her girlfriend wants and how this is at odds with what her own interests are and the kind of support her partner needs to have.

I feel like it’s fairly common to have Bad Kink Stories where the dom pushes the sub too far; it’s a very natural progression of power dynamics and lends itself well to conflict. Hot Cocoa is a very compelling study about a relationship where the boundary-pushing comes from the sub.

• Leave. is a short and visceral story about figuring out what you actually want.

This is easily the story from this jam that made me wince the most.

• While more fantastical than the other two games in this heading, MBD2 (ACT ONE DEMO) leverages a setting where fiction can manifest into reality, leading to the rise of tokusatsu-style heroes and villains, to tell a story about a friendgroup crashing out and how the warped reality of social relationships can lead to material harms, especially to marginalized groups.

The Denpa Corner

Mundane settings with themes of disconnect from society and isolation that cause psychological instability are a ripe playground for ryona scenarios.

• うららで五月 Urara in Satsuki asks philosophical questions about god and worship as the two leads further complicate each other’s lives. Neither woman is as their outward appearances would lead one to believe, and the gradual reveal of what the titular Urara is like makes the situation all the more strange.
• the slow process of pulling out my guts follows a shut-in woman who struggles with taking care of herself and her mental manifestation of a parasite, who tries to get her life back on track. Now, as to whether the parasite’s idea of helping is actually beneficial or not…
• Moon Illusion is about an office woman’s totally normal infatuation with a high school student. She’s waiting for her at home every night, so memorizing every small detail of her when she encounters her on the train is normal, right?

Exploratory Indies

Some small, experimental games of a type that you don’t really find outside gamejam environments like this one.

• Bleeds Real Blood tells a story about yearning and jealousy, as a doll waits for her owner every night, hoping that she will take it out of the closet and drink her blood. This leads to friction when her owner fucks other girls in her bed instead of playing with her.

This entry is on the shorter side, and makes great use of minimal visual assets and conveying mood with an original soundtrack.

• Lead Coffin is a noisy, short poem about two women desperate for something good. Fully voice acted and very raw.

For the Right Audience

These are games that didn’t really resonate with me on a personal level, but I can appreciate the artistry that went into them and think that there are people out there who would be very passionate about them.

• PeriPetEia is a story about revenge and resurrection– or rather– molding the rebirth of someone else. A woman abducts a woman and a man, and the abducted duo gradually learn their relationship to their kidnapper. Definitely one for non-con forcefem enthusiasts.
• The Feeble Unicorn is about a woman who encounters an enchanting unicorn in the woods, and, desperate for her companionship, agrees to both let her stay the night and partake in an ancient ritual to help restore the unicorn’s powers. Give this one a read if you enjoy second-person accounts of being the sub in terato eroguro.
• Request Behind Classroom Doors (demo) is about how a high school student who struggles to make friends has her life turned upside down when the girl she likes confesses to her. They start dating, under one condition: that she indulges in the girl’s masochistic fantasies, something that teach her about both the girl and herself. Fans of superficially “normal” high school romance with a dark undertone and nostalgic visuals will love this one.

The Big Hitters

If you’ve heard much about this jam, it was probably centered around these games. These are high “production-value” games made by experienced VN devs with an established fanbase and/or large teams with the additional man-hours needed to make polished works.

• senescence follows an android suffering from system errors and how things go very wrong when she hires a sketchy scientist to handle her repairs. After a rather mechabre ‘medical procedure’ sadistically breaks her into pieces (and her subsequent re-construction), she finds herself at the center of the scientist’s research into the three laws of robotics.

Ugggghhh yes 😩 This is exactly the kind of thing I was excited for when this jam was announced. Even outside my interest in robots/cyborgs, this VN is absolutely sadistic & delicious.

• erm,,.,,. honeydewcomplex: SLF is about a college student and how being told to kill the invasive lanternfly ends up changing the trajectory of her social life. She could never hurt an innocent bug, but if she imagines it as a girl…

More than any other entry in the jam, this game feels like a celebration of collaboration. This is absolutely a work that is more than the immediate sum of its parts because of its combination of very different styles (and mediums).

• Codename: TYPHOON, tonally, is like if Disco Elysium was a take on James Bond flicks instead of a take on buddy cop movies. In an alt-history setting where psychic powers are real and the Korean war diverged from our own, the egocentric Agent Typhoon is sent on a mission to set of a nuclear bomb in the heart of Moscow and do irreparable damage to the USSR, where her former mentor (and US defector) will do anything to try and get her to change her ways.

On the ryona front, I really liked how the portrayal of psychic interrogation plays with perception of pain in a way similar to how a dom setting up a scene might roleplay such a scenario.

• Glow of Honeydew follows a tech-savy shut-in and her roommate. While the protagonist enjoys being the voyeur in their thin-walled apartment, her concerns quickly change when she does a deep dive on her roommate’s social media accounts and the company that’s been sponsoring her.
• Last, but certainly not least, Excision of Cancer is the entry made by the judging team– a group with a strong grasp on what ryona is. In what’s effectively a game-spanning torture session, a toku villain (and her chorus of underlings) peel back the layers of her captured hero, and show her just how beautiful she actually is.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy some of these games! 🙇 I have a small list of other VNs I’m planning to read in the Near Future:tm:², but other than that my plans for the immediate future are to get back to working on BDSiM for Major Update Jam: Queer Edition, and I’m also being tagged in for a Daydrinking Jam game where I’ll be doing character designs + sprites, so please stay tuned.

Footnotes

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