2359: Purupurupurino

I took a chance on a peculiar-looking game on Steam the other day. It wasn’t a completely blind purchase, since the developer Front Wing were the creators of The Fruit of Grisaia, my favourite visual novel to date, but this looked like an altogether different sort of affair.

Purino Party is a puzzle game with a lightweight visual novel plot, loosely based on Front Wing’s Japan-only straightforward visual novels Pure Girl and Innocent Girl. (Indeed, Purino Party reuses a number of event images from both Pure Girl and Innocent Girl, much to the chagrin of those who have read said works, but as someone unfamiliar with them but very much in love with the work of artist Nanaka Mai — who also designed Grisaia’s characters — I didn’t mind at all.)

The plot is lightweight, stupid fluff straight out of a nukige, which is unsurprising given the source material. You come to a town for a vacation, but are quickly accosted by mysterious local landlord Kei, who decides that your clearly godlike puzzle game skills make you an ideal person to help the girls in her charge realise their potential. (And shag them.) Thus begins a series of eight short stories, each focusing on one of the girls — first the four Pure Girl heroines, then the four Innocent Girl cast members — punctuated with increasingly difficult puzzle game challenges, with your reward being the advancement of the story and a picture to add to your gallery, most of which are lewd. (Most of which are very lewd if you install the optional X-rated patch, which Front Wing have been ballsy enough to link to on their Steam Store page.)

The puzzle gameplay may initially seem to be straightforward Bejeweled-style match three, but it’s actually more akin to popular mobile game Puzzle and Dragons in that you can grab a piece and then slide it around the grid as much as you like, displacing other pieces along the way to shift them into advantageous positions, until a 10-second timer expires, at which point you’re forced to drop it if you haven’t already. Each level gives you a point target that increases with each episode of each girl’s story, and a limited number of moves in which to accomplish this score. Later episodes also present you with a time limit, though this isn’t normally too much of an issue.

The puzzles are really fun. The way in which you can move pieces around allows you to set up enormous chain-reactions of pieces, and indeed to meet most of the point targets in the game and progress, you’ll need to do so. The fact you have ten seconds to move the piece around and displace the rest of the board as you see fit allows you to be strategic and methodical about arranging the pieces to your advantage rather than it simply being a challenge of spotting matches as quickly as possible. There’s a touch of randomness that can sometimes screw you over a bit — if you start a round with a bad board layout, there’s not a lot you can do — but you can usually mitigate this to a certain extent by taking advantage of the few special mechanics. Firstly, each girl has a “favourite” type of piece that loosely corresponds to their personality or interests, and you get more points for matching or chaining these pieces. Secondly, matching three or more “heart” symbols puts you into Fever mode, accompanied by some thumping cheesy J-pop. During this time, the points you gain are considerably increased; combined with the favourite piece bonus, this is generally the best way to score a lot of points quickly.

Meanwhile, the story is also entertaining. Don’t go in expecting an emotional rollercoaster on the level of Grisaia, but each of the characters are endearing and appealing in their own way, and they all have their own personalities and stories to tell. A lot of it tends to descend into sex humour, particularly given that a number of the girls are total perverts, but amid the smuttiness (which, it has to be said, is amusing and curiously charming rather than weird) there are some genuinely funny jokes and some really likeable characters; it’s just a shame we don’t get to spend much time with them. Though I guess there’s always Pure Girl and Innocent Girl to see more of them after the fact — assuming you speak Japanese or can find a suitable translation patch.

Purino Party isn’t an amazing game or an amazing visual novel, but it does what it does well. It’s lightweight, enjoyable fluff, not meant to be taken seriously in the slightest, and its bright colours, cheery music and immensely endearing characters make it just the sort of thing you can relax with for half an hour when you don’t want to do anything too strenuous.

Kanae best girl. And not (just) because she looks a bit like Amane from Grisaia.