(Review based on v0.2.3 Alpha)
How Long To Beat: 3+ hours
The character models are great. The art direction for the character designs are distinct. The variety of animal species is solid (To date, there are furry characters, such as a wolfman, wolfwoman, horsewoman, catwoman, disgusting batwoman, mousewoman, and several scalies characters, such as a sharkwoman and a dragonwoman.) Unfortunately, that is the best thing the game has and it isn't enough to solidify the entire experience in a positive light.
This is a standard dating sim with sandbox elements and a three part day cycle. Every Morning, Noon and Evening you will be presented with the town map. Pick where you want to go. As of this release, there are 4 locations available (not counting the apartment that acts as a secondary hub.) There is a park, an office building, a zoo, and a convenience store. Each location has different interactable characters depending on the time of day. It's all standard dating sim VN stuff.
There is an inventory system, which is barely utilized in the current release.
Before I get into my criticisms, I think this game has potential. Most of the issues are correctible. I would be willing to try this game again in the future if improvements are made.
The writing is bad.
MC was a human who lived on a farm. A mass of energy similar to a bolt of lightning strikes his farm. MC wakes up in an apartment in a city with a new identity as an anthropomorphic wolf. He can't remember his identity and he experiences sensory distortions when he tries. He decides to embrace his new life and start trying to fuck animal people.
This premise is good, solid, and can maintain an entire game of this caliber. Unfortunately this gets qualified by implications of the dreaded compound noun, "Chosen One" with a "destiny", told by a disgusting omniscient eldritch bat woman being. This feels like a poor attempt at giving stakes to the drama, which is a peeve of mine. If the actual progressive game-based drama consists of "how can I fuck these characters in the game", why oh why does the fate of the world have to get involved?
The actual dialogue is completely overwritten. The narration is hampered by an inconsistent casual tone, a misfire of colorful characerization. A simple description like, "It was time to milk the cows" is instead written as "It was time I fuckin hadta milk alltha goddam cows". This makes every narration or conversation take twice as long as necessary, and it reads as immature rather than interesting. This game is originally written in Spanish, and while it definitely needs some help with translation and editing, the writing is consistent enough to show this is a deeper problem beyond translation.
The game is buggy as hell. I had to restart it multiple times. You can only save the game during dialogue or when you are prompted for a choice, as that is the only time the save menu at the bottom of the screen becomes visible. The convenience store minigames are broken. I had an image from the convenience story replace the background in the game, which obscured whole cutscenes and even the world map.
The biggest issue in the game is the Affection System. It is completely mislabled and counterintuitive to how the game tells you to play.
At the top of the screen during a character interaction, you will see three empty heart-shaped values. When flirting with a character, you will be prompted with a choice with a label "+1 Affection" and "-1 Affection". This implies that there is a Good Choice and a Bad Choice, right? Wrong! According to the game, both choices are valid to progress the story and unlock content. The message the game is actually trying to convey is "+1 Affectionate/Loving/Kind" or "+1 Dominant/Rough/Tough Love". This information is even more muddled with the fact that if you choose "-1 Affection you lose a heart that you've accumulated. This doesn't make any sense.
The counterintuitive design even flows into unlocking content. An example is how to see content with Nora, the pink dragon tsundere shopkeeper at the convenience store. Nora hates her job. You offer to work her shift so she can pursue becoming an artist. There are three minigames and a non-minigame way to progress the story. If you complete a shift for Nora, you will raise her affection, which culminates in her giving you a drawing of her in a bikini with erect nipples. If you play the minigames (remember, they're buggy and break the game) and fail, then she comes out and punishes you. These punishments involve the MC making moves on her, which means more content.
There is more content in failing the objectives and playing the game badly than there are in succeeding.
The game insists that you can unlock the content in a single playthrough by changing up your choices, but that's completely untrue. I progressed the catwoman character by flirting with her affectionately rather than being aggressive. Once I reached the end of that storyline (which, as of now, involves just seeing a movie together), the game is stuck at that point of progression. There is a dance event with her that can only be played once.
This is pretty standard in a VN game: you're locked to your choices. Wanna see alternatives? Play through it again or use a mod to unlock it. That's fair. But if the game specifically tells you "You can unlock everything in one playthrough" and that's a lie all the way to the programming, that's frustrating as a player.
I question the priorities of the creator's writing impulses. This is a fantasy game where we are now in a world of furries and can fuck in fantastical situations, yeah? One of these fantasies is getting to fuck your boss, who in this game is a sharkwoman named Alexa. I get it, fucking your hot boss is a fantasy. There's a lot of content tied to that fantasy. However, the most popular character, content-wise, is a white wolfwoman sex worker. Nothing against sex work, but you're telling me that in a fantasy situation in a genre based around wish-fulfillment, most of the work has gone towards imagined scenarios based around bartering sexual commerce with a sex-worker? We've got a dommy mommy police horsewoman with abs, we've got mini-games built for a pink dragon girl, but the fantasy we're putting our time and money into is convincing a sex worker to fuck us through services?
This is a criticism aimed more at Furry Games in general, although Between Beasts does fall under it's shadow: shouldn't writers have more fun with the personalities and "stereotypes" of learned animal behavior for their stories? Every furry has seen Zootopia, right? Remember all the species-specific gags in that movie? Why is the adult furry genre bereft of these qualities, and instead obsessed with head-pats and glomping and cock knots?
Here's what I mean:
To reiterate, you are a human being who is now in a world of furries, meaning you remember a world of animals who are now anthropomorphic hybrids. Your boss, Alexa, is a shark. You progress her route by showing up for work and talking to her. One day you help her find her keys to her motorcycle. She rewards you (for some reason) with letting you see her tits. You squeeze her tits without permission, ending that interaction. Then you show up for work, and she asks you to clean her office. Once you do that, you get more progression. You get drunk with her and that leads to some foreplay. None of this has anything to do with the personality of "shark" to me.
Now let's say MC goes to work and gets too horny at his desk. He decides to go to the bathroom to masturbate. When he sprouts a bit of precum, his boss, Alexa, perks up in her office. She smells something. Sharks can smell bodily fluids from a quarter of a mile away, and smelling the cum has honed her senses and put her into "hunt" mode. She breaks into the bathroom before MC finishes. He sees her mouth full of rows of razor teeth. She leaps towards him. He expects to be bit to pieces, but instead she is on her knees sucking him off. Once the union is complete, Alexa comes to her senses and yells at him for masturbating in the employee bathroom.
Wow, we've just written a scene that emphasizes knowledge of the animal creature that's inspired our character, still fulfills a boss/employee work fantasy, and has a bit of humor to it. It also doesn't need a lot of dialogue (the worst part of the game) and would inspire some nice art (the best part of the game).
The sex scenes aren't animated. Animation takes a lot of time and work. This is more disappointing because the art is the best part, and I'd love to see it moving. If the game were animated, I could look past many (but not all) of the game's flaws.
As of this release, I can't recommend playing this game. It's not animated, so you can truly experience the best parts of this game by just looking at the screenshots. It's not fun to play. The route of progression is counterintuitive. The romance system is poorly designed and explained. It's buggy. It needs serious editing in the writing. It needs greater inspiration outside of Patreon polls. (If there's anything adult game developers need to learn, it's that Patreon polls should only dictate a fraction of a game's development, not lead it. Fans are dumb.)
I write all of this because I do see the game's potential. All of this could be fixed.
How Long To Beat: 3+ hours
The character models are great. The art direction for the character designs are distinct. The variety of animal species is solid (To date, there are furry characters, such as a wolfman, wolfwoman, horsewoman, catwoman, disgusting batwoman, mousewoman, and several scalies characters, such as a sharkwoman and a dragonwoman.) Unfortunately, that is the best thing the game has and it isn't enough to solidify the entire experience in a positive light.
This is a standard dating sim with sandbox elements and a three part day cycle. Every Morning, Noon and Evening you will be presented with the town map. Pick where you want to go. As of this release, there are 4 locations available (not counting the apartment that acts as a secondary hub.) There is a park, an office building, a zoo, and a convenience store. Each location has different interactable characters depending on the time of day. It's all standard dating sim VN stuff.
There is an inventory system, which is barely utilized in the current release.
Before I get into my criticisms, I think this game has potential. Most of the issues are correctible. I would be willing to try this game again in the future if improvements are made.
The writing is bad.
MC was a human who lived on a farm. A mass of energy similar to a bolt of lightning strikes his farm. MC wakes up in an apartment in a city with a new identity as an anthropomorphic wolf. He can't remember his identity and he experiences sensory distortions when he tries. He decides to embrace his new life and start trying to fuck animal people.
This premise is good, solid, and can maintain an entire game of this caliber. Unfortunately this gets qualified by implications of the dreaded compound noun, "Chosen One" with a "destiny", told by a disgusting omniscient eldritch bat woman being. This feels like a poor attempt at giving stakes to the drama, which is a peeve of mine. If the actual progressive game-based drama consists of "how can I fuck these characters in the game", why oh why does the fate of the world have to get involved?
The actual dialogue is completely overwritten. The narration is hampered by an inconsistent casual tone, a misfire of colorful characerization. A simple description like, "It was time to milk the cows" is instead written as "It was time I fuckin hadta milk alltha goddam cows". This makes every narration or conversation take twice as long as necessary, and it reads as immature rather than interesting. This game is originally written in Spanish, and while it definitely needs some help with translation and editing, the writing is consistent enough to show this is a deeper problem beyond translation.
The game is buggy as hell. I had to restart it multiple times. You can only save the game during dialogue or when you are prompted for a choice, as that is the only time the save menu at the bottom of the screen becomes visible. The convenience store minigames are broken. I had an image from the convenience story replace the background in the game, which obscured whole cutscenes and even the world map.
The biggest issue in the game is the Affection System. It is completely mislabled and counterintuitive to how the game tells you to play.
At the top of the screen during a character interaction, you will see three empty heart-shaped values. When flirting with a character, you will be prompted with a choice with a label "+1 Affection" and "-1 Affection". This implies that there is a Good Choice and a Bad Choice, right? Wrong! According to the game, both choices are valid to progress the story and unlock content. The message the game is actually trying to convey is "+1 Affectionate/Loving/Kind" or "+1 Dominant/Rough/Tough Love". This information is even more muddled with the fact that if you choose "-1 Affection you lose a heart that you've accumulated. This doesn't make any sense.
The counterintuitive design even flows into unlocking content. An example is how to see content with Nora, the pink dragon tsundere shopkeeper at the convenience store. Nora hates her job. You offer to work her shift so she can pursue becoming an artist. There are three minigames and a non-minigame way to progress the story. If you complete a shift for Nora, you will raise her affection, which culminates in her giving you a drawing of her in a bikini with erect nipples. If you play the minigames (remember, they're buggy and break the game) and fail, then she comes out and punishes you. These punishments involve the MC making moves on her, which means more content.
There is more content in failing the objectives and playing the game badly than there are in succeeding.
The game insists that you can unlock the content in a single playthrough by changing up your choices, but that's completely untrue. I progressed the catwoman character by flirting with her affectionately rather than being aggressive. Once I reached the end of that storyline (which, as of now, involves just seeing a movie together), the game is stuck at that point of progression. There is a dance event with her that can only be played once.
This is pretty standard in a VN game: you're locked to your choices. Wanna see alternatives? Play through it again or use a mod to unlock it. That's fair. But if the game specifically tells you "You can unlock everything in one playthrough" and that's a lie all the way to the programming, that's frustrating as a player.
I question the priorities of the creator's writing impulses. This is a fantasy game where we are now in a world of furries and can fuck in fantastical situations, yeah? One of these fantasies is getting to fuck your boss, who in this game is a sharkwoman named Alexa. I get it, fucking your hot boss is a fantasy. There's a lot of content tied to that fantasy. However, the most popular character, content-wise, is a white wolfwoman sex worker. Nothing against sex work, but you're telling me that in a fantasy situation in a genre based around wish-fulfillment, most of the work has gone towards imagined scenarios based around bartering sexual commerce with a sex-worker? We've got a dommy mommy police horsewoman with abs, we've got mini-games built for a pink dragon girl, but the fantasy we're putting our time and money into is convincing a sex worker to fuck us through services?
This is a criticism aimed more at Furry Games in general, although Between Beasts does fall under it's shadow: shouldn't writers have more fun with the personalities and "stereotypes" of learned animal behavior for their stories? Every furry has seen Zootopia, right? Remember all the species-specific gags in that movie? Why is the adult furry genre bereft of these qualities, and instead obsessed with head-pats and glomping and cock knots?
Here's what I mean:
To reiterate, you are a human being who is now in a world of furries, meaning you remember a world of animals who are now anthropomorphic hybrids. Your boss, Alexa, is a shark. You progress her route by showing up for work and talking to her. One day you help her find her keys to her motorcycle. She rewards you (for some reason) with letting you see her tits. You squeeze her tits without permission, ending that interaction. Then you show up for work, and she asks you to clean her office. Once you do that, you get more progression. You get drunk with her and that leads to some foreplay. None of this has anything to do with the personality of "shark" to me.
Now let's say MC goes to work and gets too horny at his desk. He decides to go to the bathroom to masturbate. When he sprouts a bit of precum, his boss, Alexa, perks up in her office. She smells something. Sharks can smell bodily fluids from a quarter of a mile away, and smelling the cum has honed her senses and put her into "hunt" mode. She breaks into the bathroom before MC finishes. He sees her mouth full of rows of razor teeth. She leaps towards him. He expects to be bit to pieces, but instead she is on her knees sucking him off. Once the union is complete, Alexa comes to her senses and yells at him for masturbating in the employee bathroom.
Wow, we've just written a scene that emphasizes knowledge of the animal creature that's inspired our character, still fulfills a boss/employee work fantasy, and has a bit of humor to it. It also doesn't need a lot of dialogue (the worst part of the game) and would inspire some nice art (the best part of the game).
The sex scenes aren't animated. Animation takes a lot of time and work. This is more disappointing because the art is the best part, and I'd love to see it moving. If the game were animated, I could look past many (but not all) of the game's flaws.
As of this release, I can't recommend playing this game. It's not animated, so you can truly experience the best parts of this game by just looking at the screenshots. It's not fun to play. The route of progression is counterintuitive. The romance system is poorly designed and explained. It's buggy. It needs serious editing in the writing. It needs greater inspiration outside of Patreon polls. (If there's anything adult game developers need to learn, it's that Patreon polls should only dictate a fraction of a game's development, not lead it. Fans are dumb.)
I write all of this because I do see the game's potential. All of this could be fixed.
