ACTING LESSONS: The Official PatreonGamer Review
General Verdict: Simple, short, antiquated, but a powerful emotional roller-coaster if you agree to lower your intellectual defenses for a few hours
Oh, Dr. PinkCake. These days, of course, he is mostly known for his never-ending epic college dorm saga of Being A DIK — a monumental achievement in its own right — and most fans of that game, if they are sufficiently curious, only arrive at his first tentative entry into the world of adult visual novels in retrospect.
There’s nothing surprising about that. Compared to Being A DIK, especially its later episodes, Acting Lessons does feel not only as a pretty old game, but also as a fledgling game — a game whose writer has no idea yet of what the future holds in store for him. In the realm of AVNs, Acting Lessons is like The Hobbit compared to Being A DIK as its Lord Of The Rings (and the comparison also makes sense because there are minor details in the plot linking both games, so you know they take place in the same fictional universe). But, just like The Hobbit, Acting Lessons still retains its own cute, cozy, «homebrewn» charm that gives it its own point of attraction — a special allure which Being A DIK is not meant to reproduce, and which in itself makes the game still worth playing on its own after all these years. (Besides, at least it’s actually completed, which is more than anyone can say about Being A DIK after all those years and years and years of development!)
From a certain point of view, it does make sense to play Acting Lessons as a «prequel», because it is formally targeted at an older type of audience than Being A DIK. In Dr. PinkCake’s magnum opus, you play as a teenager going through college, making the game more relatable to horny 18-year olds not getting enough of that sweet poontang in real life. In the «prequel», however, your character is a middle-aged guy — that exact same teenager with all of his college experience long gone by — who, despite all his positive qualities, has somehow never managed to form a steady relationship (this aspect is not really justified all too well in the story), and ends up subconsciously looking for a sweet young angel to lighten up his life... kind of a typical trope in AVNs with middle-aged protagonists, but Dr. PinkCake would not be Dr. PinkCake if he didn’t attempt to put his own pink-cakey twist on it. In any case, I can totally see all of us beginning to play Being A DIK at the age of 18, reaching 40 by the time it is finally finished, and then going all the way back to Acting Lessons for a «mature» ending to our imaginary life story.
The game is short — my complete recorded unhurried playthrough, even including most of the alternate paths you can take, takes about 16 hours, which is about as long as a single episode of Being A DIK runs these days — but this is not a criticism, because it achieves everything it set out to achieve in that time length (well, almost everything — read on). Much worse is the fact that, what with its representing Dr. PinkCake’s first experience with RenPy and Daz 3D models, the game is not as graphically satisfying as we’d like it to be. Although the girls are quite pretty, and the renders highlighting their prettiness are quite numerous, many still suffer from weird perspectives and unnatural body proportions — and all of the animations are in desperate need of remastering, as they mainly consist of 2-3 frames instead of using more complicated algorithms to ensure smooth flow. (In this, and quite a few other technical ways, Acting Lessons is adorably similar to PhillyGames’ Depraved Awakening — both of these masters would reach their technical peaks with their second game, raising the professional stakes but also inescapably losing some of the endearing innocence of inexperience).
Lack of experience is also evident in other areas: for instance, a relatively generic set of choices for music tracks, mostly the same old Kevin McLeod and other stuff that people use when they cannot afford licensing fees for more sophisticated compositions — although, much to Dr. PinkCake’s honor, he does manage to wring out the maximum emotional effect possible even out of these freebies (more on that later). The dialog between characters, while pretty decent on the whole, surprisingly turns to generic cringe during the sex scenes — it’s a bit off-putting when you have just sat through what felt like a meaningful, intelligent conversation with a girl and then it’s the usual "oh, your dick is so big! oh, I want your cum all over my face!" once the sex starts, unless the idea is that your intelligent partner intentionally imitates a brainless sex-robot doll porn star for your carnal pleasure, which I am not really sure the idea is. (Also, the sex dialog would get better in Being A DIK). And there are a few silly tricks inherited from regular video games that really do not work — for instance, all those ominous "Megan will remember that", "Melissa is upset with you", etc. warnings scattered all over the place that are just as useless as they were when TellTale Games introduced them in The Walking Dead adventure series. (Not surprising they would be gone in Being A DIK as well).
These are all problems I can easily live with, though, as long as the game tells a good story, gives you enough playing choice, and stirs up the right feelings. In all of these areas, the results are mixed — far from perfect, but efficient enough to admit that the game does work.
Let’s begin with the overall genre characterization: Acting Lessons is a 100%-certified soapy melodrama, intended to manipulate your feelings in fairly obvious ways. In the very first episode, you, the player, emerge as an affluent, but depressed character, mentally struggling after a humiliating break-up and desperately searching for just the right spark to light up your life. Of course, that spark just happens to take on the shape of a beautiful young girl, to whom you just happen to get a chance to play the role of the Knight In Shining Armor. Everything that happens after that develops in full accordance with the age-old textbook of soapy melodrama as well. There will be broken families, terminal diseases, household abuse, corporate power abuse, desperate love triangles, a black pal guy for comic relief, a detective mystery angle to prevent you from tuning out too early, and, of course, lots and lots of deus-ex-machina coincidences and «random» surprises. Officially, Acting Lessons may be taking place in the «real world», but this world is really about as real as any given world in an American (or Latin American) soap opera from the not-so-golden age of TV.
As long as you realize that, though, and as long as you consent, of your own free will and sane mind, to signing the Agreement To Be Manipulated, Acting Lessons is a cheesy little delight that truly has the potential to make you laugh, make you cry, make you feel ashamed of yourself, make you feel proud of yourself, make you feel small and insignificant, make you feel big and accomplished, and all of that without forgetting to make you feel, you know, whatever a porn game is supposed to make you feel (but beware, every once in a while you are going to forget that you are playing a porn game in the first place — and it’s not a bad thing).
Dr. PinkCake achieves these goals not with any kind of inventive plot brilliance, and certainly not with any amazingly well-written dialog (most of it is heavily clichéd), but rather with a clever combination of attractive visuals, aptly used music, and player agency. (And yes, player agency is very important. If, in real life, you found a gorgeous young girl standing on your porch in the falling rain, pleading for help because she’d just been evicted and had nobody else to turn to and no money to help her around, you probably wouldn’t be slamming the door in her face, thinking to yourself, sorry but no, I have no desire to turn my life into a cheap soap opera — on the contrary, it’d rather be, holy hell, I’m the luckiest guy on Earth whose life has just miraculously turned into a soap opera. That’s player agency, and Dr. PinkCake knows how to use it).
Most choice-based games follow three types of options: either your choices are simply cosmetic and do not matter at all except for elements of «flair» and your own world-building, or you have to decide between a «right» or «wrong» choice, with the latter locking you out of certain amounts of content or even leading to some sort of fatal outcome — or, in the best-designed games, it might be a choice between significantly different branching pathways. But while there is really not a lot of «true» branching in Acting Lessons, Dr. PinkCake’s main accent is on turning his game into a morality play — most of the significant choices you have to make will be testing your moral character, one way or another, and even if the tests themselves are fairly predictable, once you get inside the game, they work.
To make it work, though, Dr. PinkCake first has to get you in a tight vice grip. Your primary love interest in the game, Megan, seems to be very divisive. On one hand, she’s obviously nice, pretty (some would say gorgeous), physically attractive and all — on the other hand, she is intentionally depicted as very «vanilla», sort of a goody-two-shoes, saintly figure who might be willing to go for a tiny bit of theatrical mischief every once in a while (consider her Harley Quinn impersonation, for instance), but within such tightly restricted bounds that any idea of dirty talk in bed or, God forbid, anal sex with her will be utterly unimaginable. In other words, she probably resembles most of our girlfriends and wives, and who ever comes to the world of AVNs for that kind of partner?
However, for the entire first episode of the game, Dr. PinkCake tightly railroads you into establishing a connection with Megan — you cannot not dream about her, you cannot refuse to accept her into your house, etc., all you can really choose from is whether to be «just nice» or «very nice» to her. If you happen to be completely indifferent to the poor girl and her fate, you might as well quit in the middle of Episode 1, because whatever you do in the future will always revolve, at the very least, on the fact of your initial affection for Megan. Some might complain and call this a design flaw, but it’s not: Acting Lessons is not a free-roam open-world sandbox game, it’s a choice-based visual novel with a core story, and the protagonist’s obsession with Megan is as much of an inescapable core plot element as, say, Max and Chloe’s friendship in Life Is Strange. Take it or leave it.
Things become really interesting — and less rail-roaded — starting with Episode 2, when you are slowly, but inevitably begun to be bombarded with moral questions. Are you or are you not in a genuine «relationship» with Megan? How do you feel about cheating? Are you absolutely sure that she’s just the right type for you? Aren’t you really more attracted to any of the other major characters — such as Megan’s friend Melissa, who seems to be her complete opposite in just about every possible aspect of her life, being far more adventurous, uninhibited, and provocative (although, as it eventually turns out, with a long history of family abuse responsible for much of that behavior)? Or go even further and switch your allegiance to Rena, Megan’s partner in her acting classes, who has an even wilder streak going for her than Melissa? Is it OK to have affairs on the side with any of them, or, perhaps, even decide that one of them is far more precious to you than Megan, and ultimately leave her on the curbside?..
And I like how you have all these moral dilemmas thrown at you, and how you have to decide for yourself which ones are less or more significant (some of the «morally questionable» choices turn out to be quite safe in the long run, but others will ruin your chances forever). Dr. PinkCake has a knack for setting up temptation and playfully goading you into it — the sexy renders, the music, the pacing — and since we all know that the feel of the «forbidden fruit» can be ten times as orgasmic as any action gotten by a true Paladin, chances are you’ll spend about half of this game cumming like crazy in true sinnerman-mode, then feeling like treading the highway to Hell for the other half. Betrayal is a very powerful theme in the game, and even if you’re one of those who scream at the top of their lungs, «well I never did give a damn about that Megan anyway, the game just made me do it!», chances are you’ll be so loud precisely because deep down inside you feel bad about what just happened, and you need loudness to drown out your conscience...
It all culminates in THAT ONE AWFUL CHOICE you are forced to make by the author late in the game — yes, the one that is probably responsible for the majority of the negative reactions and thumbs down on the part of players who believe their agency has been insulted because they are being forcibly deprived of a potential happy ending. I understand their rage and indignation, but cannot agree with their rationalization. Want it or not, choice-based games are always about limiting your choices. Put it this way: if your character lives on a block that has a diner, a barber shop, and a drugstore on it and the episode starts and you get the options "Go to the diner" and "Go to the barber shop", you will probably not be raving and ranting about how the game fucks you over by not letting you "Go to the drugstore", taking your agency away and spitting on your player choice. One way or another, you are still playing the story pre-designed by the author for you, not truly inventing one of your own (though you may be served an illusion of it). And the story of Acting Lessons, like a Greek drama or an American romantic soap opera, simply happens to be designed with a tragedy in mind. If you believe a «porn game» should have no place for tragedy, I’m not going to argue, but I think that by the time THAT ONE AWFUL CHOICE comes along, you should have figured out long ago that Acting Lessons aspires to be more than just a porn game — justifiedly or not, doesn’t really matter — and should probably be exempt from that line of thinking.
Besides, it’s not as if the player is being thrown inside the ONE AWFUL CHOICE completely unprepared (though I confess that it did come as a shock to me) — throughout the game, cheesy lightweight humor is consistently mixed with dramatic elements, and while the elements themselves are all too familiar, their pacing is decent and the overall mix is well-balanced (better balanced, I’d say, than it is on the whole in Being A DIK, where large stretches of humor and large chunks of drama tend to get annoying after a while). In addition to humor and drama, there’s also a mystery which I find pretty well constructed for such an off-the-cuff genre as adult visual novels — I don’t know if I could call this an Agatha Christie-level piece of work or anything, but, again, to me the denouement came as a surprise, though, honestly, it’s not as if I spent a ton of time wrecking my brain on the issue of the villain’s identity.
My chief complaint about the game’s general design is, perhaps, that it seems to be way, way oriented at the player reaching a «canon» ending (SPOILER: MC ends with Megan, of course, and his best friend Liam ends with Rena). Again, it’s not really within our rights to tell the author about how to shape his own story, but I’d think that if he does leave space for at least two alternate endings with other love interests, then a big part of the game should not have been written as if Megan were still the central character. (Note that the only major unskippable sex scene in the game is with Megan, which makes dumping her in the aftermath look extremely awkward and unnatural). In fact, I have a suspicion that both of the alternate endings might have been designed almost as an afterthought — so as not to make this into even more of a «kinetic» novel than it already is — and although the alternate love stories themselves are pretty well fleshed out, both leave you feeling like an awful cheater, sacrificing the one who was really meant for you in favor of... well, you know, girls who wouldn’t mind taking it up the ass. Most importantly, Megan’s story, if you happen to dump it, just kind of... fizzles out without a satisfactory conclusion.
What I mean to say is that even if we generally accept the warped realities of Dr. PinkCake’s alternate universe and its soapy-melodrama-meets-porn-game rules, the game is still far from perfect even according to those rules — and I, for one, would be glad to see the developer revisit his first creation after he’s finally done with Being A DIK (say, a hundred and fifty years from now or something?), because Acting Lessons fully deserves a complete redo, starting with the technical aspects (graphics and animations) and ending with a bit more variety of possible paths and playstyles. (Or, perhaps, some inspired modders could take a hint).
Nevertheless, I was glad to play the game even as it is, completing all the paths twice for my recorded playthroughs and somehow still being emotionally touched each time. If you think about it real hard, this is weird, because essentially the game is all about getting you on a serious guilt trip for being way too irresistibly hot for the ladies which is, you know, not even your fault really (you’re already made this way). But then it actually does happen sometimes in real life, you know — people sometimes do break girls’ hearts by doing absolutely nothing and simply existing — so even in this respect, the game may ring a genuine bell or two.
One thing I would not want to change much are the musical choices: even if most of the tracks are generic free-use compositions, they have been very carefully selected to enhance the required moods — casual, ominous, joyful, melancholic, tragic, romantic, lustful — and I absolutely could not imagine the game without them. (One track in particular, ‘The Last Breath’ by Nicolai Heidlas, gets me every time — it’s the slow depressing piano-led composition that plays at the supposedly most heart-breaking moments in the game). Of all the people in the AVN business, only PhillyGames and Dr. PinkCake really care about having relatively tasteful and diverse musical backgrounds in their games — and Dr. PinkCake definitely has PhillyGames beat in terms of diversity. It’s weird that so many game developers do not understand how huge a role the choice of music does for these things — particularly in the absence of proper voice acting — and settle for either no sound at all, or just a few generic / ugly tracks on endless repeat. I’m pretty sure Dr. PinkCake could not have built himself up such a mighty fanbase without realising the importance of this aspect — proper use of music is that one secret ingredient in his recipe that makes you a fan without even realizing it.
Needless to say, in the years that followed this kind of soapy-melodramatic genre has been done with more depth and scope in AVNs (most notably, in DriftyGames’ Leap Of Faith, clearly inspired by Dr. PinkCake but also trying to push this thing even further). However, there’s always a thing or two to be said about the freshness and innocence of a pioneering effort. If you want to quickly and effortlessly experience how it feels to be a hot girl’s knight in shining armor, a dirty sexual cheater, a traumatized survivor, and a helpless victim of bizarre circumstances at the same time, no other game is as visceral about it as Acting Lessons — so forgive it its inevitable technical deficiencies, its inescapable clichés, and just give in to its emotional tug. (And don’t worry, it DOES have enough sex scenes to fulfill its primary purpose with honor as well!).
General Verdict: Simple, short, antiquated, but a powerful emotional roller-coaster if you agree to lower your intellectual defenses for a few hours
Oh, Dr. PinkCake. These days, of course, he is mostly known for his never-ending epic college dorm saga of Being A DIK — a monumental achievement in its own right — and most fans of that game, if they are sufficiently curious, only arrive at his first tentative entry into the world of adult visual novels in retrospect.
There’s nothing surprising about that. Compared to Being A DIK, especially its later episodes, Acting Lessons does feel not only as a pretty old game, but also as a fledgling game — a game whose writer has no idea yet of what the future holds in store for him. In the realm of AVNs, Acting Lessons is like The Hobbit compared to Being A DIK as its Lord Of The Rings (and the comparison also makes sense because there are minor details in the plot linking both games, so you know they take place in the same fictional universe). But, just like The Hobbit, Acting Lessons still retains its own cute, cozy, «homebrewn» charm that gives it its own point of attraction — a special allure which Being A DIK is not meant to reproduce, and which in itself makes the game still worth playing on its own after all these years. (Besides, at least it’s actually completed, which is more than anyone can say about Being A DIK after all those years and years and years of development!)
From a certain point of view, it does make sense to play Acting Lessons as a «prequel», because it is formally targeted at an older type of audience than Being A DIK. In Dr. PinkCake’s magnum opus, you play as a teenager going through college, making the game more relatable to horny 18-year olds not getting enough of that sweet poontang in real life. In the «prequel», however, your character is a middle-aged guy — that exact same teenager with all of his college experience long gone by — who, despite all his positive qualities, has somehow never managed to form a steady relationship (this aspect is not really justified all too well in the story), and ends up subconsciously looking for a sweet young angel to lighten up his life... kind of a typical trope in AVNs with middle-aged protagonists, but Dr. PinkCake would not be Dr. PinkCake if he didn’t attempt to put his own pink-cakey twist on it. In any case, I can totally see all of us beginning to play Being A DIK at the age of 18, reaching 40 by the time it is finally finished, and then going all the way back to Acting Lessons for a «mature» ending to our imaginary life story.
The game is short — my complete recorded unhurried playthrough, even including most of the alternate paths you can take, takes about 16 hours, which is about as long as a single episode of Being A DIK runs these days — but this is not a criticism, because it achieves everything it set out to achieve in that time length (well, almost everything — read on). Much worse is the fact that, what with its representing Dr. PinkCake’s first experience with RenPy and Daz 3D models, the game is not as graphically satisfying as we’d like it to be. Although the girls are quite pretty, and the renders highlighting their prettiness are quite numerous, many still suffer from weird perspectives and unnatural body proportions — and all of the animations are in desperate need of remastering, as they mainly consist of 2-3 frames instead of using more complicated algorithms to ensure smooth flow. (In this, and quite a few other technical ways, Acting Lessons is adorably similar to PhillyGames’ Depraved Awakening — both of these masters would reach their technical peaks with their second game, raising the professional stakes but also inescapably losing some of the endearing innocence of inexperience).
Lack of experience is also evident in other areas: for instance, a relatively generic set of choices for music tracks, mostly the same old Kevin McLeod and other stuff that people use when they cannot afford licensing fees for more sophisticated compositions — although, much to Dr. PinkCake’s honor, he does manage to wring out the maximum emotional effect possible even out of these freebies (more on that later). The dialog between characters, while pretty decent on the whole, surprisingly turns to generic cringe during the sex scenes — it’s a bit off-putting when you have just sat through what felt like a meaningful, intelligent conversation with a girl and then it’s the usual "oh, your dick is so big! oh, I want your cum all over my face!" once the sex starts, unless the idea is that your intelligent partner intentionally imitates a brainless sex-robot doll porn star for your carnal pleasure, which I am not really sure the idea is. (Also, the sex dialog would get better in Being A DIK). And there are a few silly tricks inherited from regular video games that really do not work — for instance, all those ominous "Megan will remember that", "Melissa is upset with you", etc. warnings scattered all over the place that are just as useless as they were when TellTale Games introduced them in The Walking Dead adventure series. (Not surprising they would be gone in Being A DIK as well).
These are all problems I can easily live with, though, as long as the game tells a good story, gives you enough playing choice, and stirs up the right feelings. In all of these areas, the results are mixed — far from perfect, but efficient enough to admit that the game does work.
Let’s begin with the overall genre characterization: Acting Lessons is a 100%-certified soapy melodrama, intended to manipulate your feelings in fairly obvious ways. In the very first episode, you, the player, emerge as an affluent, but depressed character, mentally struggling after a humiliating break-up and desperately searching for just the right spark to light up your life. Of course, that spark just happens to take on the shape of a beautiful young girl, to whom you just happen to get a chance to play the role of the Knight In Shining Armor. Everything that happens after that develops in full accordance with the age-old textbook of soapy melodrama as well. There will be broken families, terminal diseases, household abuse, corporate power abuse, desperate love triangles, a black pal guy for comic relief, a detective mystery angle to prevent you from tuning out too early, and, of course, lots and lots of deus-ex-machina coincidences and «random» surprises. Officially, Acting Lessons may be taking place in the «real world», but this world is really about as real as any given world in an American (or Latin American) soap opera from the not-so-golden age of TV.
As long as you realize that, though, and as long as you consent, of your own free will and sane mind, to signing the Agreement To Be Manipulated, Acting Lessons is a cheesy little delight that truly has the potential to make you laugh, make you cry, make you feel ashamed of yourself, make you feel proud of yourself, make you feel small and insignificant, make you feel big and accomplished, and all of that without forgetting to make you feel, you know, whatever a porn game is supposed to make you feel (but beware, every once in a while you are going to forget that you are playing a porn game in the first place — and it’s not a bad thing).
Dr. PinkCake achieves these goals not with any kind of inventive plot brilliance, and certainly not with any amazingly well-written dialog (most of it is heavily clichéd), but rather with a clever combination of attractive visuals, aptly used music, and player agency. (And yes, player agency is very important. If, in real life, you found a gorgeous young girl standing on your porch in the falling rain, pleading for help because she’d just been evicted and had nobody else to turn to and no money to help her around, you probably wouldn’t be slamming the door in her face, thinking to yourself, sorry but no, I have no desire to turn my life into a cheap soap opera — on the contrary, it’d rather be, holy hell, I’m the luckiest guy on Earth whose life has just miraculously turned into a soap opera. That’s player agency, and Dr. PinkCake knows how to use it).
Most choice-based games follow three types of options: either your choices are simply cosmetic and do not matter at all except for elements of «flair» and your own world-building, or you have to decide between a «right» or «wrong» choice, with the latter locking you out of certain amounts of content or even leading to some sort of fatal outcome — or, in the best-designed games, it might be a choice between significantly different branching pathways. But while there is really not a lot of «true» branching in Acting Lessons, Dr. PinkCake’s main accent is on turning his game into a morality play — most of the significant choices you have to make will be testing your moral character, one way or another, and even if the tests themselves are fairly predictable, once you get inside the game, they work.
To make it work, though, Dr. PinkCake first has to get you in a tight vice grip. Your primary love interest in the game, Megan, seems to be very divisive. On one hand, she’s obviously nice, pretty (some would say gorgeous), physically attractive and all — on the other hand, she is intentionally depicted as very «vanilla», sort of a goody-two-shoes, saintly figure who might be willing to go for a tiny bit of theatrical mischief every once in a while (consider her Harley Quinn impersonation, for instance), but within such tightly restricted bounds that any idea of dirty talk in bed or, God forbid, anal sex with her will be utterly unimaginable. In other words, she probably resembles most of our girlfriends and wives, and who ever comes to the world of AVNs for that kind of partner?
However, for the entire first episode of the game, Dr. PinkCake tightly railroads you into establishing a connection with Megan — you cannot not dream about her, you cannot refuse to accept her into your house, etc., all you can really choose from is whether to be «just nice» or «very nice» to her. If you happen to be completely indifferent to the poor girl and her fate, you might as well quit in the middle of Episode 1, because whatever you do in the future will always revolve, at the very least, on the fact of your initial affection for Megan. Some might complain and call this a design flaw, but it’s not: Acting Lessons is not a free-roam open-world sandbox game, it’s a choice-based visual novel with a core story, and the protagonist’s obsession with Megan is as much of an inescapable core plot element as, say, Max and Chloe’s friendship in Life Is Strange. Take it or leave it.
Things become really interesting — and less rail-roaded — starting with Episode 2, when you are slowly, but inevitably begun to be bombarded with moral questions. Are you or are you not in a genuine «relationship» with Megan? How do you feel about cheating? Are you absolutely sure that she’s just the right type for you? Aren’t you really more attracted to any of the other major characters — such as Megan’s friend Melissa, who seems to be her complete opposite in just about every possible aspect of her life, being far more adventurous, uninhibited, and provocative (although, as it eventually turns out, with a long history of family abuse responsible for much of that behavior)? Or go even further and switch your allegiance to Rena, Megan’s partner in her acting classes, who has an even wilder streak going for her than Melissa? Is it OK to have affairs on the side with any of them, or, perhaps, even decide that one of them is far more precious to you than Megan, and ultimately leave her on the curbside?..
And I like how you have all these moral dilemmas thrown at you, and how you have to decide for yourself which ones are less or more significant (some of the «morally questionable» choices turn out to be quite safe in the long run, but others will ruin your chances forever). Dr. PinkCake has a knack for setting up temptation and playfully goading you into it — the sexy renders, the music, the pacing — and since we all know that the feel of the «forbidden fruit» can be ten times as orgasmic as any action gotten by a true Paladin, chances are you’ll spend about half of this game cumming like crazy in true sinnerman-mode, then feeling like treading the highway to Hell for the other half. Betrayal is a very powerful theme in the game, and even if you’re one of those who scream at the top of their lungs, «well I never did give a damn about that Megan anyway, the game just made me do it!», chances are you’ll be so loud precisely because deep down inside you feel bad about what just happened, and you need loudness to drown out your conscience...
It all culminates in THAT ONE AWFUL CHOICE you are forced to make by the author late in the game — yes, the one that is probably responsible for the majority of the negative reactions and thumbs down on the part of players who believe their agency has been insulted because they are being forcibly deprived of a potential happy ending. I understand their rage and indignation, but cannot agree with their rationalization. Want it or not, choice-based games are always about limiting your choices. Put it this way: if your character lives on a block that has a diner, a barber shop, and a drugstore on it and the episode starts and you get the options "Go to the diner" and "Go to the barber shop", you will probably not be raving and ranting about how the game fucks you over by not letting you "Go to the drugstore", taking your agency away and spitting on your player choice. One way or another, you are still playing the story pre-designed by the author for you, not truly inventing one of your own (though you may be served an illusion of it). And the story of Acting Lessons, like a Greek drama or an American romantic soap opera, simply happens to be designed with a tragedy in mind. If you believe a «porn game» should have no place for tragedy, I’m not going to argue, but I think that by the time THAT ONE AWFUL CHOICE comes along, you should have figured out long ago that Acting Lessons aspires to be more than just a porn game — justifiedly or not, doesn’t really matter — and should probably be exempt from that line of thinking.
Besides, it’s not as if the player is being thrown inside the ONE AWFUL CHOICE completely unprepared (though I confess that it did come as a shock to me) — throughout the game, cheesy lightweight humor is consistently mixed with dramatic elements, and while the elements themselves are all too familiar, their pacing is decent and the overall mix is well-balanced (better balanced, I’d say, than it is on the whole in Being A DIK, where large stretches of humor and large chunks of drama tend to get annoying after a while). In addition to humor and drama, there’s also a mystery which I find pretty well constructed for such an off-the-cuff genre as adult visual novels — I don’t know if I could call this an Agatha Christie-level piece of work or anything, but, again, to me the denouement came as a surprise, though, honestly, it’s not as if I spent a ton of time wrecking my brain on the issue of the villain’s identity.
My chief complaint about the game’s general design is, perhaps, that it seems to be way, way oriented at the player reaching a «canon» ending (SPOILER: MC ends with Megan, of course, and his best friend Liam ends with Rena). Again, it’s not really within our rights to tell the author about how to shape his own story, but I’d think that if he does leave space for at least two alternate endings with other love interests, then a big part of the game should not have been written as if Megan were still the central character. (Note that the only major unskippable sex scene in the game is with Megan, which makes dumping her in the aftermath look extremely awkward and unnatural). In fact, I have a suspicion that both of the alternate endings might have been designed almost as an afterthought — so as not to make this into even more of a «kinetic» novel than it already is — and although the alternate love stories themselves are pretty well fleshed out, both leave you feeling like an awful cheater, sacrificing the one who was really meant for you in favor of... well, you know, girls who wouldn’t mind taking it up the ass. Most importantly, Megan’s story, if you happen to dump it, just kind of... fizzles out without a satisfactory conclusion.
What I mean to say is that even if we generally accept the warped realities of Dr. PinkCake’s alternate universe and its soapy-melodrama-meets-porn-game rules, the game is still far from perfect even according to those rules — and I, for one, would be glad to see the developer revisit his first creation after he’s finally done with Being A DIK (say, a hundred and fifty years from now or something?), because Acting Lessons fully deserves a complete redo, starting with the technical aspects (graphics and animations) and ending with a bit more variety of possible paths and playstyles. (Or, perhaps, some inspired modders could take a hint).
Nevertheless, I was glad to play the game even as it is, completing all the paths twice for my recorded playthroughs and somehow still being emotionally touched each time. If you think about it real hard, this is weird, because essentially the game is all about getting you on a serious guilt trip for being way too irresistibly hot for the ladies which is, you know, not even your fault really (you’re already made this way). But then it actually does happen sometimes in real life, you know — people sometimes do break girls’ hearts by doing absolutely nothing and simply existing — so even in this respect, the game may ring a genuine bell or two.
One thing I would not want to change much are the musical choices: even if most of the tracks are generic free-use compositions, they have been very carefully selected to enhance the required moods — casual, ominous, joyful, melancholic, tragic, romantic, lustful — and I absolutely could not imagine the game without them. (One track in particular, ‘The Last Breath’ by Nicolai Heidlas, gets me every time — it’s the slow depressing piano-led composition that plays at the supposedly most heart-breaking moments in the game). Of all the people in the AVN business, only PhillyGames and Dr. PinkCake really care about having relatively tasteful and diverse musical backgrounds in their games — and Dr. PinkCake definitely has PhillyGames beat in terms of diversity. It’s weird that so many game developers do not understand how huge a role the choice of music does for these things — particularly in the absence of proper voice acting — and settle for either no sound at all, or just a few generic / ugly tracks on endless repeat. I’m pretty sure Dr. PinkCake could not have built himself up such a mighty fanbase without realising the importance of this aspect — proper use of music is that one secret ingredient in his recipe that makes you a fan without even realizing it.
Needless to say, in the years that followed this kind of soapy-melodramatic genre has been done with more depth and scope in AVNs (most notably, in DriftyGames’ Leap Of Faith, clearly inspired by Dr. PinkCake but also trying to push this thing even further). However, there’s always a thing or two to be said about the freshness and innocence of a pioneering effort. If you want to quickly and effortlessly experience how it feels to be a hot girl’s knight in shining armor, a dirty sexual cheater, a traumatized survivor, and a helpless victim of bizarre circumstances at the same time, no other game is as visceral about it as Acting Lessons — so forgive it its inevitable technical deficiencies, its inescapable clichés, and just give in to its emotional tug. (And don’t worry, it DOES have enough sex scenes to fulfill its primary purpose with honor as well!).
