2532: Five Games You Should Get in the Steam Sale

Steam’s Winter Sale has rolled around again! As always, there’s a wealth of great games on offer. On the off-chance that you don’t already own some or all of these games, here are five of my favourites that you should check out.

Recettear (£2.59)

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I find it hard to imagine that anyone doesn’t have Recettear yet, but on the offchance you don’t, here’s the pitch.

Recette is a young girl saddled with an enormous debt. Fortunately, she has a shop with which she can attempt to clear said debt by selling items to the local community, as well as through making good use of the assistance of her fairy companion Tear (actually a representative of the bank keeping an eye on her finances) and the local adventurer’s guild.

Recettear is split into two main components. Firstly, there’s running the shop, which involves putting out items for people to buy, correctly answering their requests and haggling over prices. Secondly, there’s a significant roguelike-esque action RPG component in which Recette can hire one of the local adventurer’s guild to go into one of the nearby dungeons to fight monsters and acquire items that she can subsequently craft into more interesting items or simply sell as-is.

The closest comparison is probably Gust’s Atelier series, though there’s much less of a focus on crafting in Recettear and more on the dungeon crawling and customer interaction side of things. It’s one of the most charming games ever created, with a stunning localisation from the original Japanese by Carpe Fulgur, and is well worth your time.

Steam page

Binary Domain (£2.74)

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An absolutely wonderful third-person shooter, Binary Domain takes Gears of War’s po-faced, joyless over the shoulder cover-based shooting and ramps up the adrenaline to make something with a bunch more personality and drama about it, albeit with (arguably) a few more clunky edges to it.

In Binary Domain you spend a lot of time shooting the shit out of robots, all of which shatter into pieces rather satisfyingly. There’s a variety of upgradeable weapons to acquire over the course of your adventure, and some truly entertaining setpieces. The story is good, too, featuring a cast who are all much more interesting than the walking military stereotypes found in shooters that take themselves a bit too seriously, and the whole thing feels like it’s been designed on the understanding that games are supposed to be fun.

Steam page

HuniePop (£1.74)

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One of the absolute best puzzle games to be released in the last few years — hell, one of the only puzzle games to be released in the last few years that isn’t a free-to-play mobile phone-based Bejeweled ripoff — and a game full of endearingly cheeky humour designed by a team who doesn’t give a fuck about political correctness.

HuniePop is ostensibly a dating sim in that you build up your stats in order to attempt to woo the various girls on the cast, but the twist is that in order to have successful dates (or “intimate” encounters) you need to indulge in some mind-bending, highly strategic puzzle-solving using a combination of your pattern-spotting skills and the items you collect throughout the dating sim gameplay.

HuniePop is beautifully presented, highly playable, shamelessly lewd and an absolute pleasure to play.

Steam page

VA-11 HALL-A (£9.34)

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VA-11 HALL-A is a brilliant visual novel-cum-bartending sim in which you take on the role of Jill, a rather ordinary young woman who lives in a cyberpunk future and tends bar in the titular drinking establishment.

VA-11 HALL-A tells its story rather wonderfully through what it doesn’t show you — since the majority of the action unfolds from Jill’s perspective behind the bar, you tend to see the immediate prelude to and aftermath of important events in the game world rather than the events themselves, which allows you to develop a much more personal attachment to them by hearing firsthand accounts from people who were there.

There’s a wonderful cast of characters — effortlessly “diverse”, I might add, and without making a big song and dance about it at any point, unlike its spiritual predecessor Read Only Memories, which very much wanted you to know how progressive it was at every opportunity — and a compelling story to enjoy here, all beautifully presented in the style of an old PC-98-era visual novel from Japan. Except this masterpiece was put together by a couple of dudes from Venezuela over the course of the last couple of years.

Steam page

Assault Android Cactus (£5.49)

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One of the best shoot ’em ups I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing, Assault Android Cactus channels a variety of influences ranging from bullet hell shooters to Rare’s Jet Force Gemini to create a marvelously entertaining and meticulously designed twin-stick shooter for up to four players simultaneously.

Unfolding across some beautiful-looking dynamic levels, Cactus will challenge your shooter skills to the limit if you want to attain the best scores and grades, but the game also remains accessible to newcomers who just want to blast their way through to the end to say they’ve beaten it.

The whole package is capped off with an amazing soundtrack and some brilliant old-school Sega-style “EX options” that can completely change the way the game plays, and is an absolutely essential purchase for anyone who enjoys a bit of quality arcade action.

Steam page

2267: HunieCam Studio: Private Time Management

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Remember “time management” games? Diner Dash and the like? They were a large part of what constituted “casual games” before free-to-play mobile shit entered the marketplace and ruined everyone’s fun with microtransactions, throttling and “fun pain”.

HuniePot, developer of HuniePop and now HunieCam Studio, clearly remembers the good old days of casual games before free-to-play. Not only have they made an excellent puzzle game in the form of HuniePop — a game that successfully puts an interesting twist on match-3 and doesn’t just clone Bejeweled — but now they’ve made an enjoyable and surprisingly addictive time management game in the form of HunieCam Studio.

HunieCam Studio describes itself as a management/tycoon game, but set aside any thoughts of the complex ’90s/’00s-era tycoon games here: this is a game that is extremely simple to pick up — thanks in part to an amusingly well-written (and skippable) tutorial starring Kyu, the perverted fairy from HuniePop — but challenging to master. And it’s a game that’s designed to be replayed and experimented with, too; both to beat your own high score and to tackle some of the challenging achievements on offer.

But what is HunieCam Studio? Well, let me rewind a bit and give some context. HunieCam Studio’s predecessor HuniePop was a Kickstarter success story, promising a Western-style dating sim with anime-style graphics but a distinctly foul-mouthed Western comedy approach. It changed a little from its original brief, but maintained its core formula of using its puzzle mechanics to represent how well your dates with the game’s various lovely ladies were going, and incorporated some resource management as you upgraded your character’s abilities and bought the girls gifts.

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HunieCam Studio takes much of HuniePop’s cast along with some newcomers and puts them in a new context: the seedy underbelly of the Internet, specifically the “camgirl” industry. For those far too innocent to know what a camgirl is, you can probably work it out; just in case you really have led a sheltered life, though, a camgirl is an online sex worker, putting on shows from her bedroom (or studio) for the gratification of horny people who want to watch some live porn. Camgirls make their money through a combination of tips from the audience (delivered electronically) and particularly amorous punters who pay for some private one-on-one time with the girl.

In many ways, camgirl work is the “acceptable” face of the sex work industry, if such a thing exists, since many camgirls work independently for themselves, and the natural barrier that the Internet puts between them and their audience means that it’s a lot easier for them to stay safe from dangers such as STDs and punters who get a little… overenthusiastic.

Ideal video game fodder, wouldn’t you say? No? Well then, you’d be wrong.

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HunieCam Studio’s gameplay takes place on a static town map. Beginning with just one girl in your camgirl empire — HunieCam Studio’s take on camgirls has you working for Kyu, who in turn wants nothing more than to roll in big piles of money obtained through the sleaziest means possible — you assign your charges to various tasks, each of which takes a varying amount of time, but which can be sped up by clicking or holding the mouse button down on it. This has led many people to arguably erroneously describe HunieCam Studio as a “clicker” game, but it differentiates itself from popular clickers such as Clicker Heroes by having a clearer structure and goals in place rather than just playing endlessly for the sake of it.

The tasks the girls can take on include putting on cam shows (which earns money), doing photo shoots (which earns fans, which equal more money when doing cam shows), training their talent (which improves the money they make per fan during cam shows) and style (which improves the number of fans they acquire per photo shoot), shopping for booze and cigarettes (both of which cause those with varying degrees of addiction to either or both to remain somewhat more stress-free than their clean counterparts), fucking punters in a sleazy motel (which makes money more quickly than cam shows, but which carries a risk of the girl catching one of several STDs, each of which has its own negative effects that restrict her actions), shopping for accessories (which carry passive bonuses) or resting at the day spa (which alleviates stress built up through all of the above activities).

Meanwhile, as Kyu’s assistant, it’s your job to manage the girls’ time effectively and upgrade the overall operation using the money they earn. As you progress, you can unlock more slots to hire more girls and consequently perform more simultaneous actions, and you can also improve the pace at which clicking on things speeds things along as well as automating the collection of the resources actions produce. This becomes particularly important later when the girls start earning large amounts of money and fans with each action; clicking over a thousand times to collect all your ill-gotten gains isn’t going to work.

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You also have to manage the overall budget. The girls have an hourly rate of pay that increases as their talent and style levels increase, and at midnight each day you have to pay them. If this puts you in debt and you’re not back out of debt by midnight on the next day, you lose. There are no other consequences to getting into debt, however, so sometimes it can be tactically advantageous to quickly blow all your money to get your operation in a good position, then spend part of the next day recouping the deficit you’re left with after paying the girls.

The overall aim of HunieCam Studio is to have as many fans as possible by the end of a 21-day period. Once this time period is up, your final fan total is totted up and you’re awarded a trophy according to how well you did. This, in turn, provides you with coins that can be spent on unlocking new hairstyles and costumes for the girls, with a mildly lewd picture on offer as a reward for each girl if you unlock all her variations. (Interestingly, during the game itself there’s no explicitly lewd content whatsoever; everything is implied or mentioned in text. This is not a game to fap to.)

HunieCam Studio appears simple, but there are some interesting things going on under the (clitoral) hood, particularly with how the “fans” system works. Each girl starts catering to two specific fetishes, usually relating to their physical appearance — “MILF”, “Teen”, “Latina” and suchlike. Fans you acquire have specific tastes, meaning that girls who have a greater share of your total fanbase will make more money doing cam shows, and more money means faster upgrades. Ideally, you’ll have multiple girls with overlapping fetishes, and this can be partially manipulated by purchasing accessories from the shop — buying butt plugs and giving them to a girl allows her to cater to fans who enjoy bum fun, for example, but this won’t do you much good until you attract some fans of bum fun in the first place through photoshoots or paying for advertising to a particular audience.

As the game progresses and you get more girls in your little harem, things get surprisingly hectic if you want to keep things running as efficiently as possible, and STDs can throw a real spanner in the works, particularly if they’re one of the serious, incurable ones — AIDS, for example, prevents a girl from doing anything at all because she’s so depressed about the situation, making her completely useless to your operation. There is, sadly, little time to feel sorry for her, though; not if you want to make money and attract fans, anyway. Such is the way of a capitalist society.

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I enjoy HunieCam Studio a lot more than I was expecting to. Its controversial new art direction — taking a distinctly more “Western cartoon” approach than the anime-inspired art of HuniePop — actually looks pretty good in the context of the game, and it’s enjoyable to play. A full 21-day game only takes about an hour and a half tops, too, so it’s easily replayable, and for those with little free time, you can save and come back at another time. You can also continue playing the game in “endless” mode after the 21 days are up, but you can’t achieve the better trophies in this way — you’ll need to start again for that.

A lot of people describe the people making consciously “arty” indie games as the punk movement of the games industry, but I have to say, I feel a bit differently; while I have nothing against the art-games movement and indeed encourage it in many cases, it’s a very cliquey little part of the industry that has very specific ideas about what is and isn’t “acceptable” or “good”, particularly with regard to controversial and/or progressive themes.

HuniePot, meanwhile, don’t give a shit what people think of them and deliberately set out with their games to be as provocative and offensive to those with delicate sensibilities as possible — while taking care to ensure that what they produce is also actually technically proficient and enjoyable to play. That sounds pretty punk to me — and they’ve set out to achieve what they wanted to twice now. I hope we see more from them in the future.

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.

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.

This is Kyu, the magic fairy who's going to make you better at talking to girls. — This is Kyu, the magic fairy who’s going to make you better at talking to girls.

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.

HuniePop's characterisation gives its characters some very human, relatable flaws without exaggerating too much. — HuniePop’s writing gives its characters some very human, relatable flaws without exaggerating too much.

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.