lemme wax pretentious for a sec. games with boobs stapled onto them are not as interesting as games with natural boobs.
what the hell do i mean by this? well, in my mind, there are two kinds of h-games:
- titles that absolutely could be serviceable, enjoyable indie games on their own, which happen to have sexual content of some sort that just floats around the main game.
- titles that are designed to be about sex, where the sex is in some way woven directly into the gameplay.
granted! i am not trying to imply one is better than the other. i personally happen to prefer the second category, but i've had my share of phenomenal and awful experiences with both.
with that out of the way, carnal instinct is solidly in the first category, and good gravy, is it egregiously so.
carnal instinct is an open-world action RPG. it has dungeon crawling, single-target Souls-style stamina combat, quests, rudimentary base-building, and, of course, a crafting system. it tries and fails to execute most of these elements.
the open world is underpopulated, which could be a good thing, depending on how little combat you want to engage in. exploring is mostly pointless because getting within 50 feet of a lootable object activates the player character's MKULTRA conditioning and puts a little marker on the screen for you to walk at, and these caches are usually placed near other locations of interest, so there's no reason to go off the beaten path unless you have a quest marker off in the distance that your handler put there.
the dungeon crawling is, i think, intentionally gimped, so that you can't see more than 10 feet in any direction, obscuring how extremely linear the dungeons are and forcing you to spend more time in a dark, underground maze trying to figure out where the hell you're going and if you've already been that way once before getting stuck in between two rocks and having to reload a save. they also make you engage in combat.
the combat is not all that bad on it's own. yes, the player character handles like a drunk semi-truck, and the game's status as Perennially Unfinished Unreal Engine Porn Game means that the performance will do you zero favors there, but at least it's better than the dungeons. i just hope you like mashing mouse1 and throwing out the occasional parry like a beer can onto the freeway.
now, notice how in all three of the above elements, you can start to see a gameplay loop emerging. get a quest, go somewhere, kill some guys, maybe get asbestos in your lungs from cave air, turn in quest. sounds pretty reasonable, yeah? it would be, if this were a $5 student project ARPG on steam, but this is a sex game. where's the sex?
i already told you that i prefer games which try to marry gameplay and sexual content. the reason for that is simple: mood. take strip poker, for example. it's tense and more than a little exhibitionist. if you lose a hand of strip poker, you have to bear the embarrassment of getting naked, but being all exposed like that is fun in its own unique way. conversely, if you don't lose, you get to see other people naked. the goal is simple, the mood is established, bam: instant drunken afterparty classic.
carnal instinct's mood is all over the fucking place. everyone is walking around with their pussy out because of religion or something, and the voice acting is like something horrible mimicking a woman to lure you out into the open. the gameplay mostly revolves around the beige combat and walking around the overworld -- the unseasoned pasta of game mechanics -- before slapping you in the face with sex sometimes.
instantly, you go from gameplay that has been clinically proven to put small lab animals to sleep to labor-of-lust animations with care even in the camera movements. you pull down your pants and start crankin' it a little, but it's too late -- after the gameplay, nothing could get you going. the cognitive dissonance is just too much to bear. the worst part is, scene-wise, it's not all that bad! there are shitloads of them and they're professionally animated, even if they never show you the pussy because they haven't figured out how to make collision work properly down there.
i apologize if this review reads like the game killed my dog or whatever, but i'm just completely baffled at how such a high-effort project on the visual side of the things would deliberately design its gameplay to be just as unfun as its SFW counterparts while still being a sex game. something about it just does not compute.
in conclusion: they should put the sex scenes on e621 and bin the rest of the game. Would Not Recommend!