Alright, Physical Feedback's honeymoon period is over. It's time to start cracking down.
Normally I prefer to focus on positive reviews rather than negative ones when I can, but with this series I've actually been looking forward to reviewing some of the shittier bits of smut out there, because I think pornography is badly in need of some serious negative criticism in places. In my experience, one of two things will stand in the way of this; People who view pornography as inherently problematic or inherently non-artistic who simply dismiss the art form as a whole without bothering to actually put forth any real analysis, which is obviously not productive, and people who like pornography and aren't interested in actually looking at it in a critical fashion, and will brush off any complaints about lack of quality with "don't take it so seriously, it's just porn."
Right out of the gate it's clear that this game is relying on the latter mentality, as even the store page for the game declares how it "doesn't take itself seriously." One might expect that this would mean the game makes some sort of effort to play around with conventions or good-naturedly poke fun at common porn cliches, but upon loading the game up it becomes clear that this isn't the case at all; When the developers said they weren't taking the game seriously, what they really meant was they didn't put any effort into it.
There's really almost nothing to actually engage with in the game, on a critical level or in terms of just actually playing the damn thing. It's a bad knockoff of Candy Crush without the visual polish or really any of the things that convince people to pour their time down that particular drain, with a badly-drawn, generic-looking anime girl standing off to the side. The game insists that there are 5 distinct anime girls, but really there's one anime girl whose breast size and hairstyle vary depending on what level you're on. And I don't mean that they all have the same personality, I mean that it's the same drawing. All of the character art uses the same base anatomy model, simply swapping out various features. Because nothing says "erotic fun" like Ctrl+Alt+Del-style paper doll character art.
Don't mistake that as praise for the character writing here, though, it's just as lazy and weak. What we have is a collection of paper-thin archetypes; the shy submissive one (who happens to also be a teacher), the tsundere, the catgirl whose only personality trait is that she is a catgirl, the friendly and otherwise completely unremarkable girl next door, the dominatrix nurse.
While progressing through the game, you'll be interacting with these girls in a set rotation, meeting and talking to each one, and gradually undressing them over the course of a couple days, sometimes under protest. Even when a night passes between encounters, they never redress themselves, even if they were vocally upset by the undressing, and in the final rotation you seal the deal and have sex with each of them, as each of them happens to show up nude at your house and go "well, we're here, might as well fuck I guess." That's not hyperbole, several of them genuinely just say to you that while they're in you're house naked you might as well have sex.
Of course, when I say "have sex" I don't mean you get any sort of animation or even a static VN-style CG, or really anything that could be taken as an abstraction of sexual activity. I mean the girl states or implies that you're about to have sex, and then it cuts to the next scene.
Which is pretty emblematic of the problems with this game. It's more interested in avoiding having to actually DO anything than it is in offering something worthwhile to the viewer; it's too lazy to be good porn, it's too lazy to be good comedy, it's too lazy to offer enjoyable gameplay. It's the product of some ambitionless hack thinking to himself, "What if I made Candy Crush but with titties in it over the course of about a weekend and shat it out on steam for 5 bucks? That'd probably make a little money." And then he did it.
Titty Crush is the result of a chronically under-criticized form of art spiralling downward into unending hellscapes of mediocrity, and is an example of the trends which lead me to start this series and the reasons why I fervently hope that more people will become interested in critically inspecting the more lurid art out there and putting together their own standards of quality, whether they match mine or not. An increase in the thoughtfulness and depth of the discussion around pornography can only have positive effects, and will hopefully create an environment in which these sorts of cynical, lazy attempts at titillation receive the scorn they deserve.
Titty Crush gets a -3 out of 5. At no point was playing this game outright painful or offensive, but the entire experience is at best mediocre and has very little to offer to the viewer. Do not play this game.
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| I'm getting out the tear gas. |
Right out of the gate it's clear that this game is relying on the latter mentality, as even the store page for the game declares how it "doesn't take itself seriously." One might expect that this would mean the game makes some sort of effort to play around with conventions or good-naturedly poke fun at common porn cliches, but upon loading the game up it becomes clear that this isn't the case at all; When the developers said they weren't taking the game seriously, what they really meant was they didn't put any effort into it.
There's really almost nothing to actually engage with in the game, on a critical level or in terms of just actually playing the damn thing. It's a bad knockoff of Candy Crush without the visual polish or really any of the things that convince people to pour their time down that particular drain, with a badly-drawn, generic-looking anime girl standing off to the side. The game insists that there are 5 distinct anime girls, but really there's one anime girl whose breast size and hairstyle vary depending on what level you're on. And I don't mean that they all have the same personality, I mean that it's the same drawing. All of the character art uses the same base anatomy model, simply swapping out various features. Because nothing says "erotic fun" like Ctrl+Alt+Del-style paper doll character art.
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| This is a man who FUCKS |
While progressing through the game, you'll be interacting with these girls in a set rotation, meeting and talking to each one, and gradually undressing them over the course of a couple days, sometimes under protest. Even when a night passes between encounters, they never redress themselves, even if they were vocally upset by the undressing, and in the final rotation you seal the deal and have sex with each of them, as each of them happens to show up nude at your house and go "well, we're here, might as well fuck I guess." That's not hyperbole, several of them genuinely just say to you that while they're in you're house naked you might as well have sex.
Of course, when I say "have sex" I don't mean you get any sort of animation or even a static VN-style CG, or really anything that could be taken as an abstraction of sexual activity. I mean the girl states or implies that you're about to have sex, and then it cuts to the next scene.
Which is pretty emblematic of the problems with this game. It's more interested in avoiding having to actually DO anything than it is in offering something worthwhile to the viewer; it's too lazy to be good porn, it's too lazy to be good comedy, it's too lazy to offer enjoyable gameplay. It's the product of some ambitionless hack thinking to himself, "What if I made Candy Crush but with titties in it over the course of about a weekend and shat it out on steam for 5 bucks? That'd probably make a little money." And then he did it.
Titty Crush is the result of a chronically under-criticized form of art spiralling downward into unending hellscapes of mediocrity, and is an example of the trends which lead me to start this series and the reasons why I fervently hope that more people will become interested in critically inspecting the more lurid art out there and putting together their own standards of quality, whether they match mine or not. An increase in the thoughtfulness and depth of the discussion around pornography can only have positive effects, and will hopefully create an environment in which these sorts of cynical, lazy attempts at titillation receive the scorn they deserve.
Titty Crush gets a -3 out of 5. At no point was playing this game outright painful or offensive, but the entire experience is at best mediocre and has very little to offer to the viewer. Do not play this game.
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