1833: Sexy Puzzle Skills

I spent a significant chunk of time playing some more HuniePop today, and I’m thoroughly enamoured with it. It’s a game for which it’s abundantly clear the development team had an absolute blast making it, and it’s particularly refreshing to see a game put out without any regard for (or perhaps more likely, a wilful disregard for) the Professional Outrage Machine that perpetually whirs on the Internet.

HuniePop is rude. It’s even rude in its “censored” incarnation on Steam, but the uncensored version (available via MangaGamer or the game’s official website) is marginally ruder. (To be exact, the uncensored version features visible vaginas both with and without man-juice spooged all over them, while the censored version covers such disgraceful shame-holes with panties, but is more than happy to still depict women masturbating, boobs and posing in distinctly provocative manners.)

Naturally, the rude bits are what people have mostly been talking about with regard to HuniePop, but as with most games that happen to include sexual content, there’s a lot more going on than just a few (admittedly well drawn and rather erotic) pornographic pictures. A few days I talked a little bit about my first impressions of the gameplay; since that time, I’ve played a whole bunch more and got a good feel for the game; all that I have left to do now is seduce the love goddess Venus and two additional “secret” characters before I have 100% completed it… just in time for a promised Valentine’s Day update which is coming down the pipe.

HuniePop has evolved quite a bit over its development cycle. Originally pushed as a bit more of a “life sim” where you’d have to manage your time effectively, make money from part-time jobs and take part in numerous activities, it was gradually simplified into its current form. Part of me is a little sorry that the full-on life sim incarnation never saw the light of day, but having spent over 6 hours now playing the final release, I can say that I think they made the right decision. The gameplay is kept simple and enjoyable, and that is, at least in part, what makes it so addictive.

Even the match-3 puzzle gameplay has a surprising amount of depth to it. Match-3 is a hugely overused genre, but HuniePop puts enough twists on it to keep things interesting. There’s the need to avoid harmful tokens, for example, and the fact that each girl in the game has a “favourite” token that is worth considerably more points than others. The main depth comes from the items you can take into a “date” puzzle, though; these range from increasing the likelihood that a specific colour or type of tokens will fall when you clear space on the grid, to immediately consuming tokens of a specific type or in a particular area. Given that each girl has her own preferences — and according to how you play the game, your character will have their own strengths and weaknesses, too — it’s very important to take the right items in to a date, particularly when you’re attempting to win over the somewhat more hesitant girls, who require a much higher score in the puzzle game to advance to the next relationship level.

There’s another enjoyable twist on the match-3 puzzle gameplay once you get the girls up to 4 or 5 “hearts” of affection and take them out at night, too: they’ll demand to come home with you and that you give them a right old good seeing to. At this point, all nuance goes out of the window, and all you have to do is simply match as many tokens as you can as quickly as possible — no items, no preferences, no harmful tokens — while your partner for the evening moans and groans in what is, frankly, an exceedingly erotic manner through your speakers. It’s a complete shift in pace from the cerebral, strategic gameplay in the normal dates, and oddly, it actually does a pretty good job of reflecting the intensity and passion of a sexual encounter through pure gameplay. It’s difficult to describe; it’s something that will be very clear if you experience it, however.

I’m developing a real soft spot for the characters, too. As I noted in my previous post, there’s not a lot of plot development, though the developers have taken the time to give each character a distinct personality and relationship to the rest of the world. Porn star Jessie, for example, turns out to be the mother of college student Tiffany, though they don’t speak and they never mention each other by name; it’s something you’ll figure out by yourself as you learn the various pieces of information you can pick up about each girl. And while the game is essentially about making sure you say what each girl wants to hear rather than necessarily what you really feel, there is nothing stopping you deciding to pursue a monogamous relationship with your virtual waifu and shun all the others — or at least try and remain consistent in your responses. (Okay, you won’t get far and you’re arguably missing the point of the game, but the option is there.)

One particular highlight of the game is the love fairy Kyu, who introduces the game concepts to you at the outset of the game, and eventually becomes a dateable character in her own right once you successfully bed one of the other characters. Kyu is hilarious. She’s the main source of the game’s self-aware humour, since she’s written to be fully conscious of the fact that she’s a character in a dating sim, and that the whole situation is ridiculous. She also comes out with some brilliant one-liners over the course of the game and sounds a bit like Pinkie Pie, which makes it all the more adorable and amusing when she not-particularly-seriously berates you for buying her gifts “just because you want to fuck [her]”.

I’ve enjoyed the game a lot and, having come this far, fully intend to 100% complete it in the next day or two. Politically incorrect it may be, but it’s a whole lot more fun than getting mad about stuff on the Internet.