HuniePop

Developer: HuniePot | Publisher: HuniePot | Release Date: 2015 | Genre: Indie / Strategy / RPG / Simulation | Website: Official Website | Format: Digital Download

HuniePop opens with your character failing miserably at picking up a girl in a bar. However, it turns out that the girl is actually a love fairy in disguise. Even better, she feels so sorry for your character that she decides to lend her expert assistance in an effort to improve your love life. What follows is a game that combines dating sim elements with the puzzle genre while also mixing in a dash of light role playing elements. It is an intriguing combination which drew enough attention during its Kickstarter campaign to soar past its goal.

HuniePop might look like a visual novel at first glance, but doesn’t really feature the same kind of character progression and focus on story. Instead, you encounter eight gorgeous girls and must woo them by paying attention to what they tell you, showering them with gifts and taking them on successful dates. The girls all have their own personalities and you can ask them about facts such as their age, birthday, weight, hobbies and even cup size. In turn they will quiz you about information they already told you and ask probing questions where you have to select the answers that closest match their personalities.

The girls are all a hungry lot though and if their food meter is empty they will refuse to interact with you until you have fed them. They all have their favorite types of food and if you can’t afford these or there are none left in the shop that match their taste you’ll have to move on to another girl for the day. Talking to girls and buying them unique gifts that they love will reward you with “Hunie Points” which is used to boost your character traits such as talent, flirtation, romance, sexuality, passion and luck. These all come into play during the “dating” part of the game.

You can take a girl on a date, once per day, giving you a chance to impress her even more and earn some “munie” in the process. Before each date it pays to check out the girls profile to determine which traits she favors and which ones she dislikes and then selecting appropriate date gifts to take with you on the date. Date gifts are unlocked by buying girls presents that they like, but you can only take six with you on the date. They can turn the tide during dates though, so it is a good idea to take along gifts that will help with the type of traits favored by the girl.

The dates, which take the form of a match-three style puzzlegrid, start off relatively easy, but the points needed to make the date “successful” increases after each one. The goal is to match the tile colors in pairs of three or more in order to gain points, but just matching random colors won’t help much. As you are only given a limited amount of moves in which to accomplish the required score you have to focus on matches using the color favored by the girl. For example, the most desired trait of the yoga teacher, Beli, is romance, which is orange tiles, while her least desired trait is flirtation, which is the green tiles. This means that bringing along date gifts such as peach perfume, which increases the amount of romance tokens that fall by 50% for the remainder of the date and orange cosmos, which consumes all romance tokens on the grid will be beneficial. Using date gifts requires “sentiment” though, which is obtained by matching teardrop tokens on the board.

You can also match the “joy” tokens, represented by bells, to increase your available moves and the heart shaped “passion” tiles to increase the multiplier for matches. In addition, the date board contains “broken heart” tiles to trip you up as matching these will decrease your date score. Since tiles can be moved any distances horizontally or vertically it is a bit easier than typical match-three games where you can only swap with adjacent tiles. The limited moves and date gift aspect does mean that there is a lot more strategy involved than what you might think, especially for later dates where very high scores are required to be successful.

Each day in HuniePop is divided into a morning, afternoon, evening and night, which gives you the opportunity to interact with up to four girls per day. The girls all have a five heart meter, which is filled up by making them happy. At four hearts you can take a girl on a date during the night phase and if successful you will end up back at your bedroom with her. The bedroom scene plays out almost like a date, but without the date gifts or move limit. Instead you must make color matches as quickly as possible to reach a set score. Your points continually decay while you are not making matches though, so this mini-game requires a quick eye and reflexes to pull off. Succeed however and you get a “naughty” picture of the girl. In the steam version these pictures are censored, but still contains plenty of nudity. The “uncensored” version of the game basically just have less panties and more bodily fluids in all the pictures. If you buy the uncensored version from the official website or MangaGamer you get a Steam key as well, and turning the Steam version into the uncensored version is as easy as playing the latter at least once.

The game allows you to choose between easy, normal and hard difficulty settings and you can even select the gender of your character. He or she is never seen in the game or CG artwork, but certain bodily fluids are absent if you play as a female character. As you will essentially be doing the same thing every day in the game it can become repetitive and once you have bedded all the girls there isn’t really anything that could be called an “ending.” These are minor concerns though and didn’t really impact my enjoyment of the game too much.

Visually HuniePop is very polished and features beautiful artwork and hand painted environments. You’ll meet the girls at the shopping mall, park, beach, fitness club and many other locations while the date scenes also feature unique backgrounds to represent the location you took the girl. There isn’t a whole lot of animation, but the anime style visuals look great and the cast of characters are quite diverse. There are even a couple of hidden girls you can find and date plus hundreds of food items, gifts, accessories and drinks to buy or unlock if you are a completionist. You can even unlock new outfits and hairstyles for the girls and they’ll send you some steamy CG photos if you have managed to impress them enough. My only gripe with the visuals is that the game is locked to a resolution of 4:3 which means playing it in full screen on a 16:9 monitor results in stretching.

Audio wise the game features a great soundtrack with all kinds of jazz, pop and bossa nova inspired melodies to listen to. The girls are also all fully voiced by professional English voice actors which means the conversations sound quite natural. You can also adjust the background, sound effects and voice over volumes independently or turn off the voices completely if you wish. Some of the questions asked by the girls in the game and the answers you can choose from had me laughing out loud which rarely happens in gaming these days. Everything in the game is mouse driven and I didn’t encounter any issues with the controls.

HuniePop is obviously not meant to be taken very seriously and if you think that interacting with women in real life like you can in this game will have a favorable outcome I have bad news for you. However, as far as lighthearted entertainment goes HuniePop definitely delivers. I would obviously have liked to see more depth added to the visual novel aspect of the game, but this is something that is probably easier said than done.The game, even in its “censored” form on Steam doesn’t shy away from swearing and nudity, so it goes without saying that it is not meant for children or the easily offended. If you can appreciate addictive puzzle style gameplay and great anime style visuals then HuniePop will have you hooked.