Yes, "different" is definitely the best word for Play My Obsession On Repeat:  The Demon Lord Keeps Reviving The Hero Who Came To Kill Him!

So, to answer the question of those who have seen my work before:  No, this is not a new direction in which my games are going.  (In fact, my next game is going to be a sweet fairy tale.)

And to answer the question of those who haven't seen my work before:  No, none of my other games are anything like this.  (In fact, my previous game was a literal fairy tale!)

"Why does it exist, then?" you may well be asking.

Well...I had an idea for Yandere Jam! that didn't work out, so I thought I'd just not do the jam.  But then I was playing Persona 5 Strikers (sorry for the bad press, Atlus!) and got to the start of the second dungeon of the game, based on the cheesy, fantasy light-novel written by the person in whose mindscape the dungeon is located.  When the party can't immediately get into the castle, the only one who's read the novel explains that they'll probably have to do what the party of heroes had to do in the book in order to get in, and one of the two least pop-culture-experienced teenagers in the history of modernity asks why the demon lord wouldn't just install a door that didn't open, so that the heroes could never get in.  Neither the characters in the game nor I came up with any logical answers about how without a door the demon lord couldn't get his subjects and supplies in and out, of course.  My immediate thought was "well, the demon lord must be into the hero, of course!"  (I forget what the characters said, but it was probably something about the basic conventions of fantasy fiction.  Which is also valid as an answer, naturally.   More so, really, given the highly derivative nature of the light novel in question, in fact.)

Anyway, having had that thought, how could I not want to explore the idea of a demon lord who specifically let the hero into his castle because he wants to bang him?

And, yeah, since it was for Yandere Jam! of course I ended up making him get a sick thrill out of watching the hero die, too.  Because, y'know.  (Also for a challenge, since I don't normally write this kind of character.)

But he's not just into watching the hero die:

He's also just plain into him.  :D

And I made sure (just in case you're reading this without having played the game yet) to make it clear very early on in the game that the hero is also gay.  (Technically, the demon lord is probably not gay.  He's probably more...callisexual?  Hmm.  There's probably already a word for "turned on by beauty" without me needing to coin one, only I do not feel the motivation to go look it up right now.)

The main reason I made it a reverse rogue-like instead of a more straight-forward story is mostly to give the demon lord's yandere side a chance to get out and play.  :P  Though it did mean I ended up writing some really strange stuff that I would normally never write or even think about writing.

Would I say that "reverse rogue-like" was a good idea for this story?

Yeah, actually, I would.  I think the idea works well.

Would I say that I accomplished what I set out to?

Enh....not really.  I mean, I sort of did.  It is a reverse rogue-like, and the demon lord definitely enjoys watching the hero die horribly, while also eagerly planning all the ways he wants to boink him when he gets up to the top, and that's absolutely what I was trying to do.  But it's still got a lot of flaws, some of which I could fix if it wasn't for the game jam deadline (having only started the script like a week into the shortest month of the year did not help on that score!) and some of which are beyond my abilities and/or require an engine other than Ren'py (thus making them beyond my abilities, only in a different way).

The big thing that I could fix if I had more time is the random encounters the hero meets on his way through the castle halls.  There should be more of them (which is not really something I can fix easily, because I'm not good at writing combat or even thinking of combat situations) and they shouldn't be random:  the player should dictate what the hero faces off against.  Ideally, rather than the hero gaining stats when he's revived, he should get experience from the battles he wins and level up in the usual way.  All of this is stuff that I could do in Ren'py (though it would probably be easier in some other engine designed with things like stats and RPG mechanics in mind) if I had more time.

Another thing that I can't fix (not on my own, anyway) is the lack of visual variety.  In an ideal version of this concept, we'd get to see the fights...though that would mean it would hastily turn into a very NSFW experience in one way or the other!  In an ideal version of this game, the setting would  be something like this, where you're seeing the demon lord in profile the whole time...

...and there's a table in front of him showing a magical hologram of his castle hallways...

...and it's on there that we see the hero and his fights.

(Look, there's a reason I don't do my own art, okay?)
The player would get to pick and choose which monsters to set down before the hero, like Zeus in a Harryhausen picture...
...and you'd have your usual GUI elements in front of all that.

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Okay, now that I have horrified everyone with "art" much more terrifying than any of the descriptions of gruesome death in my game, I should sign off...

!!!

Oh, no, that's right!  I wanted to talk about the difficulty selection mechanic and why it exists!

Basically, what happened was that I was playing through to make sure it worked and I slowly came to realize that I wasn't able to see a lot of the hero's death scenes.  Looking back into the code I realized that when I was writing it I had forgotten that in initially setting up the way the revival process worked, some of the stats were tied to each other in growth.  (I had also originally made some of them go up by 2 instead of 1, but I'd changed that early on.)  If I wanted to make those deaths accessible to the player, then I had to restructure something, and the easiest way to do that would be to give five minion options, each of which only increase one stat.  But if I did that, then the game would take that much longer, and with so much of the text being repeated as it is...that didn't seem like a good thing to ask the players to put up with.

So, I decided to put in a difficulty selection, with the easier mode being the original version, thus cutting off the chance of some of the different death messages, but allowing the game to be completed slightly faster, and the harder mode being the one where each stat goes up individually, making all the death messages potentially accessible.  (Random chance may cut some of them off, though, and there's not a lot I can do about that without the massive overhaul mentioned above, unfortunately.)

I thought it might be useful to spell out what the various minions do to the hero's stats when you sacrifice them to revive him, though.  Here's the easy mode menu:

The ogre gives the hero one point each to vitality, strength and stamina.  The succubus gives one point of magic.  The kobold gives one point each to agility and stamina.  And there's a secret option to sacrifice an incubus hidden in the "let him stay dead" choice, which gives the hero two points of stamina, and one point each to vitality and magic.

And here's the hard mode revival menu:

The ogre gives strength, the troll vitality, the succubus magic, the incubus stamina, and the kobold speed.  That last choice is just a way to let you see what the hero's stats are.  :P  (Honestly, I needed that for testing purposes, especially before I reduced the insane requirements in the final battle.  But then I figured it might be useful/interesting for the players to have, so I left it there.)

If anyone feels they need one, I can provide a mini-walkthrough with all the stats the hero needs to get past the various encounters.  I tried to make the text make it clear what stat he died for lack of, but...what's clear to me is not always clear to everyone else, because my brain is the weird-space.