Recent reviews by right_in_the_tockles

it's obviously the director's preferred version, so don't go around saying the creative changes are bad just because you don't like them. if you're looking to have your oldhead opinions validated this is not the review for you.

abe's odysee has a lot of technical problems that just make it too difficult to get into. i mean for one it doesn't even function properly by default because they didn't update the game for the new steam input. which to be fair i don't really like steam input's updates either but that's besides the point. quiksave and chapter select carry the experience a lot, but the menu in general isn't very readable because of all the graphical detail. this lead to me deleting my save a couple times thinking i was softlocked or i missed a mudokon permanently. im sad to say that i tried to do all of this in one go, so i really burned myself out on it and had an overall unpleasant experience with it despite being initially curious and excited about this quirky game i've never heard of before. maybe some day in the future i'll come back to it with what i know now but as is i just can't justify making time for it.

no big paragraph yet, just showing my support.

If you hate Micah Bell because he ratted the gang out to the Pinkertons, and that’s your only reason for hating him, you completely misunderstood the entire story from the very first mission.
RDR2 is a game about humanity. This is the game I would pick to show to aliens in the future if they wanted to know what we were like when we still existed. With any NPC in the game you have 2 options: Greet or Antagonize, of which you can chain together 3 times; totalling out to (technically) 9 different interactions you can have with all jsdnfkjdsn of this game’s NPCs (although antagonizing them usually ends the conversation, so this depends). But even inside this, it’s random what Arthur says specifically as the “greeting” or “antagonization”. It’s hard to count and even fathom how many different contexts those two dialogue options are put into. But it’s not like saying “Hello” is difficult, even if your possible methods of approach are enormous. It’s an easy thing to do, and it makes you and the other person feel better about the day. But life is short. You gotta live a little, and sometimes people get in the way. People that gotta die for your cause, or cause of someone you care about more. That’s what the Van Der Linde gang is all about in essence.

When you first pick up this game your first instinct is-
HELL YAE PARDNER IMMA COWBOY REACH FOR THE FUGGIN SKY WEEEEHOOO! The game’s mechanics are endlessly satisfying. It’s like a classic western rails shooter, only you control the rails. That’s not to say this is a cover shooter, if you know what you’re doing you can really barrel through enemies, but I mean in terms of pace and tone. Enemies flip out when you kill them. They clumsily fall off their high ground, and they’re easily agitated, naive, barbaric, distrustful, uneducated, untamed.
“Price [on your head] don’t matter if it’s idiots chasin’ it.”
“At a certain price, you don’t get idiots.”
That’s when Chapter III Mission 4ish kicks in. All of the sudden the adrenaline gets knocked out of you. It’s like hitting puberty. You have so much fun making a mess of things that you don’t realize the extent of your mistakes until it feels like it might be too late. In a brilliant twist, Arthur gets kidnapped while on lookout durring what is supposed to be an agreement of peace between the Van Der Linde gang and the O’Driscoll gang. Chapter 1 had set Colm O’Driscoll up as the main antagonist, but slowly introduced a far more ambiguous threat, the Pinkerton Detective Agency. While it’s true law men are notoriously pathetic, they had been getting more and more crafty, forcing your gang to relocate multiple times over. Colm isn’t scared. He believes the authorities will be satisfied with Dutch, and they’ll be content enough with that. Arthur barely escapes Colm with his life, his vision muddled on his ride back to camp. When you finally return, Mrs Grimshaw says, “You’ll be okay, Mr. Morgan… you’re home.” Humbled by the embrace of your compatriots, you now understand things much more clearly. Or at least that’s when I started to. But even if you’re never sucked in by this game’s story, and you’re convinced that the protagonist is always destined to win, so “all this morality talk is a bunch of hogwash. I either win the game, or I lose the game. And this ain’t Dark Souls so baby I’m winning eventually, guaranteed.” You will eventually be sucked in by the necessary evil of Chapter V: Guarma. From a gameplay perspective I hate this chapter. It’s not fun. But it leaves you with a very important impression and that is the importance of this game’s characters. Violence has consequences, and your lack of maturity will leave you broken no matter how little you care or how strong your will is.

Micah Bell represents violence without sacrifice. He is a nobody, a guy who joined the gang a month or two ago. It’s why he’s the antagonist. He can’t stand these “freeloaders” like Uncle, Swanson, and Pearson. And if it wasn’t for Dutch, he would shotgun them in their stomachs because to him they aren’t unfortunates in need of help, they’re dead weight. Sadie Adler is the antithesis to Micah. She begins as a shell of a woman, with nothing left but the clothes on her back, and she transitions from “dead weight” to “one of the boys” in the span of two chapters. But in Micah’s world everything is black and white. There’s only living and dying. Winning and losing. And this is where Arthur comes in. Arthur doesn’t kill because he hates, or because he dreams of something bigger. Arthur kills because he believes he has to. He owes his life to this gang, and he’s emotionally indebted to them. That obligation is challenged again and again and again until Arthur finally realizes that everything the gang meant to him is dead, and what isn’t dead was lost and forgotten. When everything is gone, the only purpose you will have left is to greet a stranger. And even though John was spared his tragedy, he still feels the guilt of who he used to be. Around New Austin you can find roaming NPCs trotting fast on horseback, their guns drawn. You can overhear their plans to reshape the world just as Dutch had promised you, and if you get too close these roaming NPCs will try, and fail to gun you down. John can hardly believe he was ever that pathetic.

Which brings us to Dutch. Again, if you only hate Dutch because he leaves John and Abigail to die, and lets Micah manipulate him until he’s a shell of his former self; leading to his role as an antagonist in RDR1, then you haven’t been paying attention my friend. Dutch has been far gone long before his brain injury and long before he stopped listening to Hosea. Maybe he was always like this, but as far as events go you should be able to recognize that it was pretty stupid of him to trust Micah’s judgement on the Blackwater Ferry when Micah had just joined the gang. It was risky, and the resulting massacre, the murder of Heidi McCourt, goes to show how truly foolish Dutch was. But you don’t have to turn to fan theories to talk about how Dutch is flawed beyond his mistakes, you meet the man that inspired his ideology, Evelyn Miller. Starting in Chapter IV, Evelyn Miller's concern leads to Arthur helping Rains Fall and Eagle Flies. Later in Chapter VI Dutch is appalled, “You helped this… feller?”. And it’s clear just from this alone how different the two are. Dutch completely misinterpreted Miller’s writings and warped them to pursue his own violent tendencies. And while this once provided niceties like racial equality and exemption from political corruption, Dutch didn’t know when to stop. Too afraid of the punishment to admit he was wrong, he’s speechless at the loss of his son.

Though I’ve never played an RE game before I must say I quite enjoyed my time with the most recent installment in the franchise. It’s short, but the polish makes up for that and while I don’t have strong feelings about the experience as a whole, the moment to moment gameplay is impactful and it’s three most prominent elements: Shooting, Exploration, and Puzzle-solving all blend together in specific ways and while it’s all the same ingredients the recipe is different depending on what part of the game you’re at. After some fine ravioli, the game will serve you some comforting pizza and then shake it back up with a plate of spaghetti. The metaphor isn’t one to one but you get what I’m saying.

The gun variety, customizability, and resource management is pretty vanilla. Even with the minigame-esque inventory menu, there’s just not a whole lot of depth to the weapons themselves, but aiming and shooting them is a whole different story. The way the enemies limp towards you and lurch into their attack choreography gives an incredible weight to the experience. It’s almost like the inverse of a bullet hell, especially in post game. And if we’ve learned anything from the Arkham series’ Predator sections, taking a common concept and inverting it onto the player is one that has an incredible effect on how the player perceives the situation. Going back to post game, having the option to try out other difficulty modes with a fully geared Ethan makes things very interesting. I’ve yet to beat Hardcore or Village of Shadows, but from what I can tell it is a basic number change which sounds disappointing on paper but as someone who’s into speedrunning it’s incredibly eye opening to what the rules are of individual segments. Finally figuring out that the Lycan horde at the beginning of the game was dictated by whether or not you loot a Crystal Skull off them was a great “Aha!” moment. But I ended up doing more Standard runs first in order to unlock more bonus weapons from the Extras menu before trying that again.

The layout of most rooms in the game are essentially linear collectathons; finding valuable items and selling them to Duke. Among obscurities in the ceiling you’ll find Crystal Fragments. The various Wells dotted around the village you’ll find more significant items which would be overpowered, but in order to get what's inside them you need the Well Wheel which requires you to backtrack for said Wells. Every now and again you’ll find something a little more special which sells for a lot, but can be combined with other items later in the game to make said item whole and thus more valuable than the sum of it’s parts. So you have to decide if you want to utilize them as an investment or quick cash. Depending on your skillset you may need more gun parts and upgrades, but if you’re good at shooting you might wait until the game takes things up a notch first. All of these components make exploring the diverse environments that much more exciting and does a great job of incentivizing the player to move forward when they otherwise wouldn’t want to risk it. As I said before, I’m not particularly familiar with the horror genre as a whole, and if there’s any element of a game that subverts my assumptions about jumpscares and cheap deaths then I welcome it.

Environmental puzzles are where this game really excels. While they are more flavorful than they are chin-scratching, the contraptions you play around with are fun. The biggest difficulty spike was really timing out the collapsing bridges in the Reservoir, and I’m ok with that. What I tend to have a problem with are the inventory-based puzzles where you go to inspect an item, find a button prompt on the back of it, and use that to transform it into an item that’s actually helpful. First of all, there are a lot of these in the first section, and then basically nowhere else in the game except for Winged Key upgrades. I guess learning how these work segways into the items you have to combine in order to sell for more money, but I feel as though the mechanics used to carry this don’t gel well together. While it feels like they tried to help the player learn how these work, more often than not it’s just unintuitive to go into your inventory, scroll to the key items page, find the specific item you’re looking for, select it, scroll it over to the backside, and select the prompt. If they wanted it to be efficient, then this mechanic would be better off automated into oblivion, but if they wanted it to be mysterious then they ruined that by making it too easy; So something like this: When you collect a key item, a preview of it pops up as a notification, inside the pop-up the item preview rotates so you can see all sides of it and you can catch a glimpse of what you need to interact with on it, maybe it’s even lined with that yellow tape that the environmental puzzles have. Then you allow some way for the player to interact with the item without having to ruin your immersion by pulling up the inventory. Maybe when you try to use the Maroon Ring on the eye socket, Ethan automatically pulls the eye out of the ring and that’s that. It would make sense to yadda yadda these details because Ethan has matured since RE7 and already dealt with things like this. If you want something a little more in-depth, maybe examining items puts it in Ethan’s hands and you can see him hold it. You could give inner-monolog voice lines for hints, but having straight-up button prompts is too easy. Having a mechanic like this would make things like the Mia doll flow a lot better. And this “examining items in Ethan’s hands” could also apply to weapons and treasure too for flavor purposes. Sure it’s more motion-capture work, but so what? People love that ♥♥♥♥.

As I said before, these 3 things are used in tandem to give the Castle, House, Reservoir, and Factory personality. Castle Dimitrescu is a familiar microcosm of what you expect from a horror shooter, which fits well for a tutorial area. The Village itself gets it’s own sections where you climb around and through what’s simply a combat maze. House Beneviento is a puzzle gauntlet practically dripping with subtext that ends with a stealth section. Moreau's Reservoir is a maze filled with puzzles that caps off with Ethan transforming the maze into a combat arena. Heisenberg’s Factory mirrors this by combat into a maze and capping off with a more cinematic boss fight. When I try to think about all the game’s elements in retrospect they feel homogeneous, but then when I go back to replay moments from the game it ends up feeling robust in it’s variety.

Fun yet challenging! When I saw LPs of this I knew I was going to have fun with it but what I didn’t realize is how cohesive all the game mechanics were between both RPG and puzzle elements. My only real issue is that the difficulty can be a bit unwieldy at times.

Part of my struggle with this game was the learning curve of utilizing date gifts and actually interacting with the RPG side of this game. I was under the impression that talking to the girls before the double date wouldn’t be important and I was rightfully punished. But sometimes the game seemingly refuses to give you good matches. I started failing in dates only a little bit past the introduction, I had to start a new file in easy mode and I still get stumped sometimes. The game’s scaling is not the issue, the transition from doing dates with 500 affection to 2K affection feels smooth, it’s just that the RNG of the board can put you in an unfair position. For reference, the best puzzle game I’ve played before this is Pokemon Shuffle and I got up to stage 198, conkeldurr. The insane difficulty of that stage is in how far it limits your options in the early game and still gives conkeldurr like 18K health. Luckily there’s nothing like that in this game.

Much of this game’s story relies on self deprecating/referential humor and if you can turn your brain off, it is enjoyable. The story structure itself is a little broken. Kyu only shows up when you’re first visiting the island, for every time you meet a new girl, in the hotel room, and when you go to fight the Nymphojinn. Mid-game it feels like Kyu doesn’t even exist, I don’t even like Kyu that much. I just know that she’s part of this game series’ iconography and it’s a shame they didn’t do more with her. The individual girls and dates are good enough to make up for this lack of focus though, and are full of sensible chuckles and a cheesy eye roll or two, which is my kinda thing. I’m a huge Scooby-Doo fan. Sarah is my favorite example of this. I’m just going to refer to one of the funniest moments in the whole game. It speaks for itself.
“Sometimes my friends say I'm annoying, but I'm not! You don't think I'm annoying, do you?”
(Your answer is nebulous)
“I'm NOT annoying! I'm not, I'm not, I'm NOOOOOT!”
Pop Up: Sarah's "Annoying as F-ck" BAGGAGE LEARNED!
15% chance Sarah will leave behind a Broken Heart token after a match that was directed at her.
Funny enough, you meet Sarah for the first time with Lilani, by far one of the most flawed characters in the game. Her stereotype is the petite shy girl, and as far as personality goes she never grows outside of that. It's rare that you learn a single thing about Lilani, and when you do it’s almost always a footnote. Compare that to someone like Brooke, whose unhealthy marriage comes up often, and her relationships with all the characters pertain to how she basically owns the island. Lilani is just an employee, a doormat, and that’s her entire character. Generally speaking, the characters are stereotypes that have plot justifications for being said stereotype. They all play into and off of this very well, and the game’s dialogue and voice acting is spot on. But the best thing about the characters in this game is that their visual design reflects their personality, and their personality reflects gameplay mechanics. Let’s go back to Sarah again. Look at her fake tan, overdone hair accessories, and THAT POSE. It tells you everything you need to know. You start to process these stereotypes, not just by rolling your eyes at the “predictable and over the top story”, you also mentally prepare for new baggage to reflect how you’ll need to accommodate them; both in what gifts you give them and in how you respond to them in the puzzle sections. It sounds complicated but it feels seamless.

The match-preference-synergies are fun, sometimes you’ll be trading between which girl likes a match more, or if they both agree on a preference you’ll be spending more time on generalizing with multipliers and bonuses. The best dates are the ones that demand you to do both, and I’d say 30% into the game when you start seeing the affection meter demanding 1,0000+. I find myself invested in this game, and even outside of the main puzzles there’s quite a bit to chew on here. In fact, to understand the puzzle elements, you really have to understand the RPG aspects of the game first.

While fun, it’s merely preparation for the puzzle ahead; and I don’t mind that so much. Baggage spices the game up considerably, giving you unique debuffs specific to the girl while expanding her gift inventory. While the gifts themselves are all great, the currency to buy them at the shop is way too complicated, it never felt rewarding. Sometimes I could never run out of money, and other times I was randomly broke. The way the game presents baggage makes it seem as though you’d ALSO gear your gifts specifically for the girls, but there are enough general purpose gifts that you can have a game where, especially late in, you simply hoard up a bunch of overpowered gifts and take them everywhere you go which feels like “the wrong way to do it” but it kind of works anyway.

My only trouble with this game is that, despite the rewarding nature of the stereotype-based characters leading into fun gameplay mechanics, there are times at which I feel like this game could have taken itself seriously. Long story short, HuniePot has proven that they can write characters without them making fun of themselves every 5 seconds, and if they made a game where the entire roster was like this I would be very excited to play it. This is no more prevalent than with Polly Bendleson. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Yes, the juxtaposition of this character…. “Attribute” is something I have a physical preference towards. That doesn’t mean that I fettishize transpeople, and no one should. That’s creepy. In real life, people have to go to great lengths to persevere through an identity crisis and the bravery it takes to go against other people around you, and sometimes even yourself and make that transition should never be discounted. But, this is a video game, not real life. And in this video game, I find Polly to be a shockingly honest and sweet portrayal of a transperson (if you can get past that she’s just as promiscuous as everyone else in this game, which is kind of a necessity for this genre). Polly’s portrayal isn’t oversexualized, and they also don’t beat you over the head with some boneheaded social commentary. Polly feels like a real person more than any other character. Your dates with Polly & Ashley revolve around her career as a “beauty tuber”, and yes there is a large part of her personality that parodies people like Jeffree Star and James Charles. It’s not necessarily for everyone, but I find it to be among the more unique stereotypes. The first date is a vlog (I think), and the second date is a sex tape. Your dates with Polly & Candace show a much more sensitive side to Polly, about how she used to babysit for Candace. And between both of these there’s hints sprinkled in. Kyu notes that the HunieBee had trouble identifying Polly and Candance says that Polly looks different. At the end of Polly & Zoey’s first date, Polly says this: “It… wasn’t always easy growin’ up. I got bullied a lot. People just… didn’t understand me.” This moment is heartfelt and earned, and it’s totally not what you would expect from “a funny porn game”.

If you take anything away from this review, know that you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover. This isn’t my favorite game of all time or anything, but it’s a pleasant surprise in a sea of trashy and oversaturated steam games.

This is the first visual novel I’ve ever played, and it is horrible.
The first time I reviewed it I uninstalled and never thought I’d play it again, but through morbid curiosity I decided to pick it up again. Long story short, don’t buy this. Emily doesn’t have balls, and the writing is “so bad it’s good” at best.

For one, this game is incredibly simplistic. You just pick all the most sexual options, and then you win. No alternate routes, no bad endings, just small text variations and a black screen that says “Neutral ending.”

The first 3 girls aren’t actually that bad. Emily, your protagonist randomly woke up packing one day, so now she’s nervous around her coworkers. The first issue I have is this game has a ton of missing art. Characters can pop into the story without any visual representation or even a name, take “Clover’s friend” for example. It’s really jarring that such a simplistic game can just blatantly leave out so much. Most of the sex scenes aren’t even animated, just a picture for action and maybe 2 pictures for the aftermath. When they are animated, it’s incredibly simple and can even stutter when they’re trying to loop. Even something as simple as the expressions are really lazy, they just swap out some preset mouths. And the UI will disappear when changing scenes and when dialogue options appear, so you could be fastforwarding, but accidentally skip too far. Anyway, onto the individual girls/dates:

Rachel is your dominatrix boss. Pretty standard trope, but honestly it’s played well and is probably the most competent campaign in the entire game. Clover wants you to do yoga with her and you find out that she’s actually packing too. There’s some interesting lore about how both of them got their “meat dragons”, but it’s only touched on in this story, and the finale. Cindy’s a party animal and she eventually gets you involved in an orgy with yet another faceless character. Also they get married in their ending.

As if I thought the writing was bad with the main 3 girls, after you date everyone at work, the writing literally falls apart.
Kate’s story has exactly 1 option in the entire campaign. Emily’s at the store to buy new underwear, and Kate, the salesclerk, decides to peer pressure her into trying on an item she didn’t even want in the first place, and then she bugs her in the dressing room. Eventually, Emily straight up rapes her and then immediately leaves. At least their scene was well animated? The next day Kate SOMEHOW finds where Emily works, and only then does she actually express that she was into it.
So you go from 1 dimensional stories to completely contrived nonsense that actually play up how much nonsense it is and they actually think they can get away with it by calling it “hot”. A lot of the time Emily thinks to herself that a “cosmic prank” is being pulled on her, but what’s worse is that the writers are pranking their audience.
With the next two girls it’s literally the same. Linda the bartender’s drink gets you blackout drunk and you just wake up in bed with her. At least it’s not as bad as Lilly’s campaign though. Lilly is Clover’s sister, and a regular where Emily works. There’s multiple continuity errors here. For one, most stories start out as if they all branch out after the introduction, meaning none of them pick up off one another, but this one seems to leech off Clover’s story despite Emily claiming to have not been on a date in years. Despite seeing her name on the menu, she starts out in the story as “Tanned Lady”, which is just strange. The narrative in her campaign also goes all over the place. One minute she’s a coffee snob, the next she’s a Twitch/OnlyFans star. There’s a ton of missing art in this campaign: Emily has this contrived scene where a random nail on an alley wall tears her pants clean off but she looks fine, and then later when she visits for a livestream, Lilly is “already dressed in something skimpy”, but she’s just in her usual outfit. The alley isn’t even that small, like how did this random nail in the brick wall even touch her, let alone fully strip her?
The game only gets lazier during these three campaigns, both Linda and Lilly have typos (need I remind you this is a steam game?) and there’s a lot of zoom-ins on their stock artwork where you would normally have more dynamic shots. Also sometimes Emily’s “shy-play” pops up right before one of the now scarce dialogue options, and it can border on out-of-character when you choose the sexual options, which, as I said earlier, are required for the good ending.

I do have to say that this game isn’t all bad. Emily’s shy nervousness is really cute most of the time, and even if it breaks the narrative in the poorly written stories, I’m kinda into it. There’s something interesting about that juxtaposition. She daydreams and thinks about her labido a lot; at first I thought this could have turned into a gameplay nuance where you have to balance it somehow or just make her really pent up but nah, there’s no depth to this game. The backgrounds are really pretty too, I like that you see most of them in a day and night setting. Even small areas like the alley where Emily rips her pants get their own background. The music is fairly unintrusive. The narrative loop can be quite comfortable, there’s a lot of breaks where Emily goes home and thinks situations over in surprisingly interesting depth. And for as cheap as the art is, the anatomy is on point, like the part where Rachel ties Emily up.

The finale is extremely weird. At first, it pretends as if all the campaigns happened, even though you can unlock it after just 2 of them, and again, all the other ones act as if they chronologically begin on the same night. It’s nice to see more than one other character involved, but they don’t exactly interact with one another, they just wait in line to talk to Emily. Turns out, both Clover and Emily’s new genitals were created as some curse created by Nyx, a cat lady from another world. She gave them packages to collect “mana”, but she’s angry because neither of them went out and got laid; even though Emily’s interactions with everyone prior implies she banged all 6 other girls in the restaurant? WHAT? So as punishment, she gives Emily a second rod and then Nyx bangs her, but she doesn’t do anything with Clover for some reason. After they bang, she gives Emily the ability to remove and regrow (both?) of them at will and then she says something about planetary conquest... right before leaving? Some futa shadow beast spawns and then the story just abruptly ends. On the whole, this game’s “lore” has to be one of the worst parts about it, because it plays it so half-heartedly to the point where, when it is there, it never matters. You can tell this game tried to do some sort of Sonic Adventure type thing where you’re drip-fed major developments in different perspectives, but it’s blatantly unsatisfying, especially when they don’t even conclude it. It’s not like you can even go back through the other stories and play with a meatless Emily either which could have been cool for all the people who were gifted this game as a prank.

All and all, this game sucks, and not the good way. 1/10, prank the hell out of your friends, but don’t buy this if you’re actually into futanari. Even if you’re curious about this kink, you’d have a better time seeing it literally anywhere else.

This game has multiple issues but they don't effect my enjoyment because I adore what this remake represents. Liscensed games are here to stay, don't call it a comeback.