Hearth of the Bunker v0.1

The hacking minigame is absolute dogshit. I mean that affectionately, like when your cat knocks over a vase you never liked anyway. You're tracing circuits on some busted panel while a fish woman with tits the size of her head watches from the corner, and the game expects me to care about voltage regulation? My brother in Christ, she has gills in places that don't make evolutionary sense and I'm supposed to match resistor colors? The hand drawn art during these moments is weirdly tender though, like someone actually loved drawing the way light hits water stained metal, and then boom, alien elf with her whole business out because you fixed a door hinge. The bunker itself feels like someone took Subnautica's anxiety and crossed it with one of those old Newgrounds dating sims, which is a sentence I never thought I'd type. You're this diver guy, standard issue protagonist with the personality of wet cardboard, but that's fine because the monster girls carry everything. There's an android who speaks in glitched poetry and a green skinned elf who keeps "accidentally" pressing her massive chest against you during equipment maintenance. The voyeurism tag earns its keep here, you can literally watch them shower through a cracked vent and the game doesn't pretend it's anything but what it is. Refreshing, honestly. Most games would add some moral hand wringing. The puzzle logic falls apart around the third area. Something about aligning sonar frequencies to unlock a door, except the solution involved clicking on a completely unrelated pipe that I only found because I got frustrated and started clicking everything like a caffeinated squirrel. The teasing scenes are top tier though, that slow build of a monster girl pretending she doesn't notice you staring while her tail does things that would get this review flagged on less enlightened platforms. The sandbox elements mean you can just ignore the main story and spend forty minutes optimizing the oxygen recycler while the elf girl gets increasingly annoyed you're not paying attention to her. Which, mood. The animated scenes are sparse but when they hit, they hit like a freight train made of questionable life choices. That one sequence with the jellyfish hybrid and the zero gravity chamber? I need to go lie down. Not because it was hot, which it absolutely was, but because the physics engine clearly gave up halfway through and her tentacles just sort of phased through solid objects like a Bethesda game. Glorious.

• point and click
• monster
• 2dcg
• groping
• big ass