If Sisyphus Was An Academic : A Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis of
BaDIK Episodes 1-11 Review. Potential spoilers ahead, read with caution. If you are deeply familiar with BADIK, skip to The 'Novel' in Visual Novel: BADIK's Writing & Characterization.
I will break this review down into several sections. The first is a general non-spoiler recap of the BADIK game cycle combined with a dovetail of my experience with the game over five years. The second will examine visuals and audio. The third section examines the writing and the final section synthesizes my thoughts.
Section 1 - How we be a DIK
The premise of this game is well known but for those that are genuinely a fish out of water and checking reviews for the first time, read on. You play #Tremolo (Your online handle regardless of the name you give your MC,) a guitarist and amateur mixed martial artist who is the son of a single father. Your mother passed away some time back, and you never got to know her too well- but your father's remained a hard-working contractor and provided you with all the tools and cash you need to begin your university career at B&R. Immediately, things go awry- your assigned roommate is a roided up metal-head prick eager for a fist fight, your first university companion seems to be an amalgamation of every prankster from every 1980's highschool slice-of-life film blended together, and each woman you meet is a very particular type and for a long time sticks to that type.
Imagine the archetypes of the game Bully, extrapolated to a college setting- Jock, Nerd, Prep/Wealthy, and the party-bros. We are the party-bros. And you will be partying. A lot. You might party so much, you don't want to party anymore. But not to worry, when you are not planning a party, someone has planned a party for you to attend. But, let us discuss characters.
You have the senior year sorority leader Sage, fresh off of a break up with CHAD CHADDINGTON, the most ALPHA of the ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA Jock Frat. She is sexually liberated, domineering, and book smart. She wants control but loves to give it up, as well. She knows bro-code language like a Ghost Whisperer. As the leader of the H.O.T.Sorority, she's a primary character.
You have Josey, a summer-time fling also going to your university. Josey is short, conventionally attractive, and has absolutely no idea what she wants to do with herself- and this makes her, by far, the most relatable and normal character for anyone going through undergraduate courses at university. This makes her an ideal primary character. Josey has a secret girlfriend, Maya, who you can also attempt to seduce and get with. Maya comes from a struggling household with extremely frustrated and ailing parents. Together, they're a 'throuple' pair of characters for you to explore.
With the Sorority President archtype, Normal-lady archtype, and normal-but-broken lady archtypes done, we also have Bella, a woman twice as old as our character #tremolo and the chief librarian of the university. She seems cold, calculated, the 'ice queen' that is a perfect main character for those seeking the mature and hard to get.
There is also Jill, an extremely sheltered individual who is academically a genius but has all the street-smarts of a wet paper rag and the social skills of a pre-taught Helen Keller. Her parents happen to own half the university and she's fabulously wealthy to the point that she is often incapable of even comprehending the struggles of fellow students. Her natural beauty and grace combined with her lack of real-world knowledge makes for either a great potential corruption or wholly romantic type of angle.
Then there is everyone else. And there are a great deal of everyone else.
Your time in BADIK Season 1 will be spent primarily going to classes, running into these characters and their friends in-between classes, and attempting to ingratiate yourself into the newest fraternity on campus that has only been around for about 4 years- the Delta Iota Kappa's, or DIK. Season 1 really emphasizes on learning who these people are on the surface and having you select cliques and groups based on your initial impressions. Although there are several frats and a sorority on campus, you are hard-locked into joining the titular DIK frat. During this time, you can hit on fellow students, teachers, and pursue flings beyond main love interests. These flings are typically students in unaffiliated frats/sororities/groups.
Season 2 will primarily be spent going to classes, learning about everyone's life falling apart around them, and attending parties which you also 'plan.' These are played out through mini-games. While mini-games can be toggled to 'skip' in some instances, or in all instances if you turn it on at the start of a new playthrough, you will lose out on renders and in-game money when doing so- which is a major detriment to accomplishing particular tasks.
Season 3 is a continuation of Season 2, except every single update is a new party, a new party to plan, and someone else's life has just become exponentially worse in the mean-time. Mind you, most of these students didn't start having a great time to begin with. You are waist-deep in the trials and tribulations of the friend-group you have ingratiated yourself with. The problem is, you're also thigh-deep in everybody else's problems, too.
There is a Karma-System of BaDIK Season 1 and 2 which narrows choices in future seasons, generating three narrative pathways that provide additional romance and erotica options. You can lean hard into the party-boy frat moniker and be a DIK, which allows for additional kinks, sexual encounters, pranks, and hard-locks you to react to situations a certain way as you lean further and further into this manner of behavior. There is a CHIK pathway, in which you avoid leaning into too much casual erotica, you treat people kindly, avoid confrontation, and attempt to be concillatory and a mediator. Rather than being an overt pushover or wuss, the auteur does attempt to be tasteful and reasonable in making #Tremolo conventionally attractive in both personality and behaviour when choosing this path.
The Neutral path allows you to follow the romance of several main characters, while also providing the opportunity to sleep with multiple recurring characters. This pathway locks one out of all major DIK related decisions and CHIK related decisions. However, I have been able to prank individuals and console individuals under this pathway. It is the path which feels the most organic, realistic, and grounded in the undergraduate atmosphere and culture. Both DIK and Neutral offer the larger amount of erotica options, and CHIK provides only a marginal amount of additional story or dialogue compared to the same attempts under Neutral paths.
BADIK Minigames began as anagram-solvers, high-school math tests, and memory games. Anagram solvers tested your actual English skills, the math-tests were generic, and the memory game was cleverly mixed in with a Gender Studies class- so you're learning about minor NPC's and their backstories while being rewarded for remembering these details. It's extremely clever writing and game-design for a visual novel.
Over-time, Minigames are usually a variance of mouse-precision, anagram solving, mine-sweeper, memory games, and dexterity-based arrow-key repetition. Sometimes, your save game paths will not save your progress on these mini-games. The fighting/brawler mini-game is the most egregious issue of this- I have likely spent a fifth of my play-time of this game replaying and winning the same fights over and over and over again ad-infinitium in order to make sure I have obtained a particular set of required statistics and resources. Save-states would have me beat a fight twice in a row and receive no reward, requiring me to fight three, sometimes four times in a row to achieve the offered reward. The simplicity of the game 'engine' makes the creation of engaging mini-games extremely difficult, especially in this era of erotica and game design. I am sympathetic to this. However, while BADIK manages to keep a healthy balance of short, succinct mini-games with story-telling and erotica throughout Season 1, this balance shifts over time to be beyond filler and rather a means of intentionally styming the narrative flow of the story.
The plot of Season 1 is relatively simple: You're discovering who this character #Tremolo is, and what he's capable of, in his first year of university. You're learning the frat, your fratmates, your teachers, and feeling out the main romantic interests. There are opportunities to ignore romance and think with your dick, but there is a clear indication by the developer that the emphasis of the work will be on engaging story-telling and character development. This intention is ultimately not followed through with baDIK.
Season 2 has #Tremolo deeply engrained in the DIK subculture and within the wider school community due to Season 1 antics. This inexoribly links #tremolo to a series of cliques and groups that you may have either entirely ignored, or actively worked against. Unfortunately, #Tremolo is also wrapped up in the domestic affairs of friends, non-university students, co-workers of friends, and pretty much anyone and anything except his own trials and tribulations. This is thrust forth in Season 3 at exponential speeds, with the added caveats that there are now additional characters attempting to seduce you. Atop of this, consequences for your actions- the primary theme of the game- begin to bite people here. This review is not designed to be against this concept, more a critique of how it's achieved.
There's a clear Thesis to Being A DIK on a metanarrative level, beyond the story. The Thesis is this: In a scenario where you have very little to lose and everything to gain, the actions we take shape us as much as the consequences that follow. This is the metanarrative that guides us in this place where everyone is hungry, thirsty, and horny, and there's a slice-of-life tragic comedy erotica in here. But like an unedited Thesis, it's grown well beyond its initial scope and scale. It is now over-cited, over-researched, and this book has now spirraled out into an entire cinematic universe with only a single auteur at the helm. What started was a University Erotica, in which we learn that human beings aren't just sexy, they're also emotionally and socially messy. We have 5 girls to explore these themes with, a frat of bros to share memories with, three karma paths to follow.
But now we have more than a freshman University experience. We have a city of monsters. Dozens of girls- all of whom have a dead or abusive relative, or have a ticking-time-bomb medical issue that will explode any moment.
Aesthetic & Atmosphere: Seeing through the eyes of a University Student
BaDIK's first season is high quality for late 2010's DAZ. The camera angles are tasteful. Backgrounds are complex and fit the scenery. This city is clean, but there's signs that it is clearly lived in. Rather than staring at randomness, each room is designed to tell us about the person who owns it. The more complex the room, the more complex a character. As the seasons change, these locations are either retired/abandoned/heavily modified in order to achieve a new aesthetic that is typically holiday themed.
Where BaDIK shines visually is in the timing of frames with comedic purpose. PinkCake, the auteur of this game, knows comedic timing well. His comedy shines through the Tri-Alpha's and through #Tremolo's university-bro, Derek. Derek assists #Tremolo in visually framing his university life in a particular way, and the auteur of BaDIK uses whatever assets he can to achieve allegory and character expression to achieve visual story telling. I feel he achieves this best through Derek, a far more complex and intriguing character than our MC and, frankly, most of the other characters.
Unfortunately, there is difficulty in achieving consistency with character models. Nerd archetype 'Sally,' a tsundere and sarcastic young lady with spectacles and a short stature, drastically ages nearly a decade when she is seen under low-light, or in a romantic setting. Her porportions and unique facial features shift from frame to frame. Multiple recurring characters have this occur. Main characters have this occur. By the time we are in Season 3, model consistency is more or less out the window. Women with sharp, pointed chins and high cheeks bones suddenly have rounded faces and dimpled jawlines. Everyone gets their ass bleached at the exact same wax parlour. They've all had their BBL's done by the exact same surgeon.
While each subsequent chapter has more and more erotic scenes, they achieve less thematically on each subsequent release. As other reviewers have noted, it feels as though #Tremolo is merely going through the motions of erotic activity. This is most blatant in the static camera angles, three-to-five second long animation loops, and the same several generic poses being applied to an increasing amount of recurring one-off characters while the supposed primary characters fade further and further into the background. The artistry and tastefulness of good cinematogrophy is strong in Season 1 and the majority of Season 2, but fall off into factory-like automation and repetition in Season 3. Despite Season 3 providing more unique locations than ever before, each of them feel less life-like, less realistic, characters react to their surroundings far less and thus reveal less and less of their personality, history, and story as a result. More and more sexual activity has very little to do with the plot, and if there's no emotional or narrative purpose for the sex, what are we doing here?
The Auteur must be worried about repetition causing boredom in his audience, but he mixes up the trees with the forest in his solution- more and more models and recurring women to cheat on a main character with. There is a thousand opportunities to cheat on Sage. Hundreds for Josey and Maya. Dozens for Jill and Bella- and these opportunities only grow with each episode, with more and more dialogue, scenes, renders, and effort placed into minor characters and concepts that do not contribute to the over-arching plots in a meaningful enough way to justify their inclusion. Tragically, most of these new characters are subjected to the same several extremely short and generic animations, to the same music we've heard with dozens of other girls. It all becomes a blur, even with well-paced playing. Rather than adopting subtle mechanisms for infidelity or to explore ones feelings by focusing on just 5-6 women, this machine-gun-new-models-until-one-sticks motif cheapens what started as a carefully crafted experience.
The Music in Season 1 and 2 was fantastic. Tasteful. At times, emotionally impactful. Punk and metal for fighting and the lads having a beer, seductive rhythm and bass and suggestive pop-electronic lyrics for parties, acoustic whisper-singing melodies for heart-tugging times, and fantastic use of malt-shop 1950's music for comedy. Once again, however, the placement and use of the OST in Season 3 is haphazard and contributes far less to the atmosphere and story than previously curated audio.
Beyond the music, the game's audio is frankly minimal. There is no voice acting here. Doors open, cars squeal, engines rumble, there is generic background classroom talk- but the primary atmospheric thrust of an erotica is not achieved here. Both visually and through audio, there is little sense of action-reaction-action between characters. You don't hear heart-beats fluttering when #Tremolo's ear is on a woman's chest, there's no heavy or soft breathing, there's no groans or moans or cries of pain, pleasure, disgust. The writing is strong enough in Season 1 and the music is tastefully curated enough and the atmospheric noise provided is just tolerable enough to forgive it all. But as the years go on and equally small teams with far less funding are achieving far longer animations with far superior lighting, camera-work, and matching erotic and atmospheric/diagetic audio, it becomes more and more obvious that BaDIK's animations, cinematogrophy, and audio have fallen into a automated-factory routine.
The 'Novel' in Visual Novel: BADIK's Overall Writing Problem
Being A DIK is a HBO sequel to the film Rules of Attraction (2001.) This is a film in which a young woman loses her virginity and is assaulted shortly after, becoming sexually promiscuous as a coping mechanism. A chad is deeply closeted and rejected by a jock, a guy gets high with an old friend on mushrooms and makes sexual advances, most people have a family member or former lover who has died in a car accident or a drug overdose or suicide, and these college students barely manage to navigate themselves through the semester. People's lives are ruined due to getting too deep into narcotics. They all shag each other. All of this happens around University.
Being a DIK is a game in which young women lose their virginities and go through abusive lifestyles that cause them to become sexually active as a coping mechanism. There are closeted jocks that fear rejection. You get high on mushrooms and make sexual advances on old friends. I guarantee you, whoever you sleep with in this game, they have a family member who either died of an overdose or a car accident, or suicide. Some of them are even suicidal right now, probably due to their deep involvement in narcotics. Most friends are shagging each other or willing to. All of this happens around a University.
I am being mildly facetious here, but I am also deeply sincere. But it is not just a sequel to Rules of Attraction. It's a sequel to Kids, it's a sequel to Gumbo, it's a sequel to the myopic proto-dystopian 1990's aesthetic. It's Daria with tits. But it's Dawson's Creek, Boston Public, Community, Joan of Arcadia, and Succession, too. It's too much.
There's too many plates spinning here. Too many plot lines picked up, dropped, ignored. Fewer of these plots have to do with University. What plot threads are consistent are extremely weak and uninteresting compared to the threads that are dropped. Major accomplishments in University related plots are immediately hand-waved away as unimportant, or they were already solved before the audience's effort, making the entire arc a waste of time for both the characters, the author, and the audience. There have been clear allusions to women being trafficked by men of affluence at the university- the daughters of whom #Tremolo is likely sleeping with. Where is that plot? Some plot beats take too long to repeat, some plot points repeat themselves too often, and the introduction of many side characters only tangentially connected to the primary characters and their plots taxes even the most attentive mind to care.
The Auteur of this game spent two and a half years making the audience care about five possible women: Jill, Bella, Sage, Josey & Maya. Gameplay mechanics implied this. The quality and content of writing implied this. Rapidly, characters such as Quinn received more writing and time- but mechanically, these characters were never dovetailed into 'main' romance/story status, even as their roles expanded further and further. By the end of Season 2, we are re-introduced to #Tremolo's highschool sweetheart Zoey, whose storyline is a dovetail of Quinn and Josey: An Alternative-Punk girl who enjoyed drugs and living fast, but decided she didn't truly know herself, and thus went to find her passions. Zoey is a completed character- she has no other ambition except you, #Tremolo, who has spent the last several dozen hours of gameplay forgetting this person. She is not University related.
Narratively, I understand completely why the Auteur wrote this character, and it's brilliant to place them when and where they did- if this was a Sequel to a previous film, or show. But I don't know Zoey. You don't know Zoey. #Tremolo knows Zoey. The problem is, Zoey is a completed character. She is a talented artist with references from a business, she has sorted out her feelings, she has had her awakening moment and understands her limits. While #Tremolo is the narrative guiding rock for practically every female on campus, Zoey is designed to represent #Tremolo's rock. But this rock arrives when we're swimming in the ocean, and narratively, it's drowning the flow for the audience.
"Less isn't more: More is more." - Writing Sex.
The Auteur is a script writer. He wants to make a television series. BADIK works better conceptually as an extremely high budget, thirty hour long, three season epic following #Tremolo's first year in University. It works better this way because DAZ and ren'py are frankly too limiting for his scope and scale. Facial expressions, backgrounds, trinkets, reveries- he wants expression and action to tell as much of the story as dialogue. The dialogue in Season 1-2 is very organic, largely realistic, and hits the notes of a black comedy. When learning about someone, or expressing oneself, #Tremolo and his friends are likely some of the most healthy and mature introspective 19-22 year olds in America. But they cannot seduce each other for shit.
For a game that relies on very short animation loops and repeat frames, there is no erotica writing actually occurring in this erotica game. You may think there is- women discuss dicks, guys discuss tits and ass, characters make comments about dicks during sex, and guys compliment girls while they shag- but it's worse than 2000's porn dialogue. There's no descriptions here, no deeper characterization beyond using the sex as comedy. What you see is what you get, and the inner-thoughts of #Tremolo during sex read pretty much like he's having sex for the first time, despite this being his thirtieth woman in 3 months. Without a good soundscape, and with dwindling returns in the animation department, a plot heavy game should have writing beyond pure comedy or pure tragedy, and here, the game doesn't even try. The emotions, reveries, and little things which sell erotica simply aren't written here. Three hours of dialogue about yet another terrible tragedy is tolerable if that same effort is put into making me feel sensual too, but having #Tremolo say "I like the way your boobs feel" when his game-listed rank is Experienced Slut is not acceptable.
There are ren'py games which can accomplish the right mix of showing, and telling. BADIK doesn't even bother to tell you about the erotic, only about how terrible everyone is, how terrible they feel, or how terrible they're about to feel.
TL;DR:
Being A Dick is trying to juggle 5 themes, 3 karma paths, seven main characters, and two dozen side characters on a game engine designed for reading, not playing. The scope and scale of the stories being told is better suited for a multi-season Entourage-style pornography series than as a riveting visual novel. Its minigames are too plentiful and annoying, providing just enough benefit to force participation while not being entertaining enough to justify their worth. So too are many of its plots and character concepts- too plentiful, too repetitive, rapidly becoming annoying, and diminishing returns on erotica scenes that barely justify their worth.
It's a porn game where there's no erotica written that accurately or vividly describes how your partner feels. The visualization of the erotica is stiff and at times unnatural. It's an emotional game where people speak with Graduate-Level Philosophic insights about themselves and others, but have no idea how to engage in the art of seduction. A severe lack of audio and a lack of written erotica provides no feed-back to your actions, and the glacial pacing in which plots of worth are pursued exacerbates the underlying mechanical and metanarrative issues with expanding a single semester of university into a trauma-sex-speed-run-simulator.
