Guide to some choices which can have a large impact on difficulty in Karryn’s Prison.
Main Difficulty Option
Unless you haven’t started the game yet, you probably already know about the three difficulty modes: Secretary, Warden and Prisoner.
I don’t have much to add to what the game outright tells you but there a couple of points I’d like to make:
- This is one of those games where there is a large difference between difficulty levels. If you want to fine-tune the difficulty of Warden and Prisoner you’ll have to do through other options. Secretary is the exception because you get access to “cheats” which can be used to make specific aspects of the game harder.
- This game is much harder than most h-games, specially in a blind playthrough. If you’re used to the difficulty of the average eroge, and you like it that way, note that this game’s default difficulty, Warden, is much higher.
Reputation Starting Title
Despite what you may have read elsewhere, none of the starting titles are absolutely perfect or worthless. That said, it is helpful to understand how each one helps and hurts depending on your goals and on which part of the game you are.
- Skilled Manager: Subs+200, 1 Edict carryover
- Ambitious Experimenter: Income+300, Control-1, Subs-8%
- Hardline Debater: Control+3, Riot+2
- Cost Saving Supervisor: Edict-13%, Subs+8%
- Hardworking Tutor: Income+8%, Control+1, Fatigue recovery-12%
- Management Consultant: Fatigue gain-15%,Subs+50
Here’s my thoughts on each:
Skilled Manager
Not too exciting, specially in Secretary. In Warren and Prisoner, the “1 Edict carryover” can let you access 3-point Edicts without repairing and maintaining level 2 rooms. You normally want to do that anyway (to access research and specialization edicts) so this is very niche.
Ambitious Experimenter
This is one of my favorites as the extra income is handy through the whole playthrough, while the lower control and subsidies only hurt during the early game.
Hardline Debater
Never tried it myself. Control+3 is nice but it becomes less important during the second half of the game. On the other hand, Riot+2 will make one of the most annoying parts of the game even more annoying and during most of game at that.
Cost Saving Supervisor
This one will save you a lot of money and can be great if you’re going to get most edicts. Just keep in mind it won’t help much during early game, when edicts aren’t expensive.
Hardworking Tutor
Another favorite of mine. Extra income is always good, Control+1 helps during early game and finally Fatigue recovery-12% hurts very little.
Management Consultant
I used to love fatigue gain reduction but as I played more I realized that planning my days better made me need this buff a lot less. Also near mid-game you’ll get a title that helps with riot fatigue and one of the chef dishes gives you fatigue reduction every other day.
Extra Sensitive Body Part
After the starting title you get to choose a body part to be your weak spot:
- Breasts
- Nipples
- Clitoris
- Puss-y
- Butt
- Anus
- Tongue (Mouth)
- Whole Body
Roughly, there are three different difficulty levels here:
- Hard: Whole Body.
- Normal: Body parts that are easy to access (Breasts, Nipples, Clitoris, Butt, Tongue).
- Easy: Body parts that are hard to access (Puss-y, Anus).
Note that after you get good at managing your desires (using Will skills) the sensitivity increase chosen here becomes less important, since you won’t even be groped in the first place.
And if you go full sloot build you’ll end up with high sensitivities everywhere anyway.
Dormant Desire
Finally you’ll get to choose your “dormant desire”. This can have a huge impact in difficulty:
- Mouth
- Boobs
- Puss-y
- Butt
- Masturbation+2
- Sadism+2
- Masochism+2
- Sloot
There are three difficulty groups here:
- Easy: The first four options can be mostly mitigated by wearing an specific accessory. If you don’t want to be gimped much, Mouth or Boobs are the best choice since the accessories for Puss-y and Butt are more expensive.
- Very High Risk: the Sloot option is absolutely the worst for pure runs. Even for sloot builds I don’t recommend it for beginners since you need to min-max most encounters to ensure your strengths are growing faster than your weaknesses.
- VERY Annoying: While some builds can take advantage of having some sadism/masochism/masturbation from the start, all builds are hurt by how these options also make several desires harder to manage.
Note that you’ll be making the game quite harder for yourself if you pick the same body part here and in the Extra-Sensitive question.
Cat Advice
Finally I’ll include the advice you get when reaching an Ending (which, for newcomers, will probably be the Bad End):
- Order: The lower your order the higher your subsidies. That said, during late game, subsidies become less important than income. Also having some extra order can save you if you get hit with multiple riots on the same day. Finally, this is an unconfirmed rumor, but I read that having high order reduced the chance of riots.
- Specialize: Unless you’re going for a pure sloot build, you’ll want to choose either Strength, Dexterity or Agility…and use only the corresponding attacks. You won’t get enough warden levels to level all three attributes as high as you’ll want.
Speaking of attributes, Agility seems to be the best by far as it also gives you speed and higher dodge chance.
Extra tip regarding leveling only one offensive attribute:
In order to use only one type of attack, what I do is alternate between an attack of my chosen attribute and using a “defensive” energy skill. If I’m doing an Agility build I choose the Cautious Stance and in any other case I choose Defensive Stance.
As soon as I start a playthrough I make it my number one priority to get one of those.
