1829: Life with the Hunies

I took a gamble a while back and Kickstarted a game that looked potentially interesting. Dubbed HuniePop, it promised a Western take on dating sims combined with an anime-inspired aesthetic, and the team behind it appeared to be taking it seriously as a project. I tossed them my money and watched the development with interest as the team provided regular updates on what was going on and how development was going.

HuniePop finally released this week, and I’ve been playing it a bit. And, although it’s the sort of thing that will make the social justice dickparade froth at the mouth (and indeed already has been, from what I’ve heard) it is, in fact, a whole lot of fun.

Unlike many “dating sims”, which typically go down the visual novel route, HuniePop is a combination of mechanics from Dead or Alive Xtreme and Puzzle and Dragons. In other words, you move from place to place, buy gifts for characters and interact with them in order to build up your relationship values and other stats, then play an enjoyable little match-3 puzzle game to determine how successful your date with the girl you’ve been interacting with was.

It’s a simple idea, but it’s handled quite nicely. There’s not a lot of ongoing plot throughout the game, but the girls have all been given their own distinct personalities, and are all introduced through a short, amusing scene where they interact with one of the other cast members. The “Western” angle comes in when these distinctly anime-esque characters open their mouths: rather than adopting the usual anime tropes seen in this sort of thing (tsundere, imouto, kuudere and so forth) the characters are… well, very Western. And very human. And not necessarily immediately likeable.

Take the character Audrey as an example. Audrey is quickly set up to be the Queen Bitch of the cast when you’re introduced to her by witnessing her yelling at her hairdresser (also one of the game’s dateable girls) with a string of obscenities and frankly rather unreasonable behaviour. Then once you start chatting to her she continually puts you down as some sort of colossal douchebag that won’t get out of her way (largely because, well, you’re pestering her with inane questions, so it’s sort of justified) and threatens to “punch you in the dick” any time she gets too hungry to even think about doing anything else.

The other girls are a little more approachable than the rather abrasive Audrey, but they each have their own interesting quirks, and their personality traits affect the puzzle part of the game to a degree, too. The coloured tiles you’re matching in the puzzle sequences represent different character traits such as sexuality, flirtatiousness, talent and romance, and each girl responds particularly well to one and not particularly well to another, with bonuses to matches made in those colours you’ve spent some “Hunie” (acquired by talking to the girls and saying the “right” things) building up the relevant stats for. Later “dates” with the girls — the ones that have the potential to lead to naughty picture shenanigans — have very difficult target scores to obtain, so you’ll have to take full advantage of these systems to be successful.

HuniePop is charming, cheeky, lewd, rude and a whole lot of fun. It doesn’t give a fuck what people think of it, and I think that’s great — although in a pleasing nod to inclusiveness, you can play the game with your character as either male or female, with the girls becoming homosexual if you choose the latter option. While it may not have the narrative depth or character development of a more visual novel-style approach to the dating game, it’s a solid and enjoyable game in its own right, and I’m glad I Kickstarted it. I can see it providing a good few hours of entertainment yet.