HuniePop — Jewel Matching After Dark

After several months of Final Fantasy XIV, I figured it was time for a change of pace.  So here’s HuniePop, pronounced “honey pop.”  HuniePop is a game that was successfully Kickstarted in October of 2013 for a total budget of $53,536, not counting PayPal donations.  It’s currently available on Steam and I honestly forgot when I purchased it, or why, so I decided that now was as good a time as any to play it.

The very first thing I did when I started the game was to choose the gender I wanted to play as.  The way the choice was presented to me made me wonder if gender was as fluid as water in this game, and it turns out that it is, at least for me: I can go into the settings and change my gender whenever I want.  The girls in the game will always be into me no matter what I am, and all that I really did was decide what the girls’ sexual orientation is.  I started as male in save slot 2 (I always like saving in the second slot, call it a slightly OCD habit of mine), and away I went into an experience I never thought I was going to write up.

The game opens on Sunday night in a bar.  How sad is it that my character is alone on a Sunday night, drinking himself to death?  Or is he?  A girl dressed in red named Kyu introduces herself to me and right from the start, the voice acting in the game shows off how impressive it is.  Also… Kyu kind of sounds like Fidget from Dust: An Elysian Tail (I checked later and it turned out to be a different voice actress).  She makes some vague statements and then leaves me to my drink.

Upon returning to my bedroom, suddenly I’m greeted by a fairy!  Gah, since when can a guy not find solitude in his own room?  What the heck?  It turns out that the fairy and Kyu are one and the same.  Kyu reintroduces herself and explains she’s a love fairy.  She claims to help men with their love lives.  It was at this point in the game that I began to have Catherine flashbacks.  I fully expected to get turned into a sheep right then and there.

There are no block puzzles to be solved, however, but HuniePop is a puzzle game.  Instead of Catherine, think more like Bejeweled.  When taking a girl out on a date, said date is played out like a round of the popular match three puzzle game.  An affection meter is filled by matching various tokens before running out of moves.  The board is called a “date grid” and the colours of the tokens represent different aspects of a girl, like sexuality (red) and passion (pink).  Each girl favours a different colour, so bonus affection is generated when matching that colour.  Blue tokens represent sentiment, and if you match enough of them, you can use date gifts as if they were spells charged up in Puzzle Quest.  Yellow tokens grant extra turns, but purple tokens remove affection and must be avoided.

After playing through the tutorial, the HunieBee is unlocked, which is the game’s menu system in the form of a smartphone, and at that point, it’s time to go out and meet some girls!

Speaking of girls, they can be found in various places, like the university, the mall or the park, and talking with them… well, let’s just say that I didn’t like a lot of the options available to me.  “I’ve got to know, what cup size you rockin’?” is one of the questions I can ask a girl.  Wow.  But there is apparently no wrong question, since each girl is willing to answer twelve things about them, from stuff that would get you slapped in the real world, like weight, cup size and age, to more normal things like what their hobbies and occupations are.  At various points in your conversations with these girls, they’ll ask you if you remember these details and you’ll score extra points if you do.

So yeah, this is one of those dating sim games.  Just when I thought developers had run out of places to stick a match three system of gameplay, they discovered you could put one into a dating sim.  Honestly, now that RPG elements are everywhere, everyone’s trying to see where you can put Bejeweled.  I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the next couple years, you had to match jewels to aim a gun at enemies and fire it.  It’ll be the world’s first Bejeweled FPS.

The basic plot of the game is that Kyu wants to help you to get into a relationship and have sex.  It’s pretty much just an excuse for the gameplay, so here’s a fair warning for all of you reading this: this game is not safe for work.  Very not safe for work.  I’m not talking a God of War or Mass Effect thing here, where sex is such a minor part of the overall gameplay experience (and in some cases, can be skipped entirely).  On your fourth date, you can take a girl home with you and then a new version of the date grid appears.  This time around, the meter goes down if you don’t make any matches, and it goes down quickly, so you have to keep filling it like one of those carnival games where you try to shoot water into a tiny hole.  Sometime during this mini-game, she loses her bra… but my question is, are you supposed to be looking at her when playing this minigame or looking at the board?  It seemed to defeat the purpose when my first time playing this mini-game, I was concentrating on the matches and then looked over when I finished and blinked in surprise.  “Whoa, when did that happen?”  I suppose I’m supposed to have my attention on the entire screen so that somehow I will notice her nudity as it happens, but those that don’t will probably miss the only real reason why someone would play this game in the first place.

“Hey player, look at her, she’s topless!”

“Not now, I’m trying to win this game.  Are you on my side or are you trying to distract me?”

After I had Bejeweled with one of the girls, Kyu congratulated me and then suddenly said, “Fuck it, I’m in” and joined the available pool of girls.  It was then that my eyes were opened to the reality of games like this and I realized that the true object of the game was to get in all the girls’ pants, not just one of them.  Silly me and my monogamist values.  In the interest of trying to bring the game to 100% completion, I followed through with several of the girls, including Kyu herself and Nikki, the nerd girl with a Willow Rosenberg thing going for her and discovered that the more girls I successfully got in the sack with, the longer it took to fill the affection meter for the next girl.  Fortunately, things didn’t get too difficult for me, thanks to the game’s RPG elements.  Successful conversations with the various girls earn a currency called Hunie (because of course it’s called that, everything else is in this game) and Hunie can be spent on improving traits, most of which control how much affection is earned during a date.  Hunie can also be earned in other ways, too, like giving the girls gifts.

But after grinding Hunie for a while, I realized that I didn’t need to go any further in order to give this game an honest review and so, for the first time ever, I’m reviewing a game that I’ve not “finished”.  For general RPGs or games with a focus on story, I consider done to be when the final boss is dead, I see the ending and the end credits roll.  This does sometimes prevent me from commenting on the post-credits content, like in Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2, for example.  For other games, I’ve been trying to get to 100% completion, or get to the point where I’ve unlocked everything, like in Bejeweled 3.  Recently I heard in a podcast that another reviewer’s criteria for when they review a game is simply when they get to the point where they know that their opinion of the game will not change if they get any further and that struck me as a very good idea.  I’m pretty sure I won’t find out anything new about this game that’ll change my opinions.

There apparently is an end game scenario where even Venus, the goddess of love herself, is added to the available pool of girls, but I didn’t get that far, nor do I have the desire to at this point.

So is this a good game?  Is this a bad game?  It’s a beautifully presented game, I’ll give it that.  Someone put a lot of care and attention into making sure it doesn’t suck.  In the end, I’m not going to recommended this game due to its subject matter, nor will I condemn it.  I figure I’ll leave that up to reader discretion.  What I will say is that, even though it’s in essence a porn game, it does prove that quality products are possible from Kickstarter campaigns as long as your name isn’t, say… Peter Molyneux.