Hillside is another game which I expected to love and was unpleasantly surprised, especially given the positive reviews I’d read prior to playing it. No music, no animations, a handful of sex scenes roughly eight or more hours into the story that are over in the blink of an eye, and a story that varies between far-fetched and out-right preposterous, with one-dimensional Shakespeare villains that leave the impression that the author hasn’t finished high school. The negatives far outweigh any positives resulting in a game that, in its current form, I would not recommend to anyone.
While the game is pretty bad, it’s not all doom-and-gloom. The character designs are unique and attractive and I had no issues telling different characters apart. Effort was put into lighting and shadows as well as into adding background characters which many authors don’t bother with. We’ve all seen the black blobs in the background to represent the general populace, so seeing them fully rendered was a welcome change.
The plot began as an interesting one. You’re hired as a bodyguard by a famous (though aging) model in order to protect her eighteen-year-old daughter who is being stalked and harassed. The model in question is extremely distrustful of men and for good reason, and it was brave of the author to show those reason in painful detail making the reader instantly sympathetic.
However, those same painful details are where the problems begin. To call the motivations of the villainous characters preposterous would be an understatement. They’re clearly meant to be fictionalized versions of well-known #MeToo casualties, such as Harvey Weinstein, but the character is barely one-dimensional and acts like an unhinged lunatic, screaming in public areas about wanting to kill and rape people. There’s no depth to the villains and their motivations make no sense. Another villain is momentarily in police custody and immediately brags about trying to kill other characters and yet is still let loose. In another scene, a pair of cops find that someone has killed another cop, and start yelling, in public, and in surprising detail, how the person is going to have an accident on the way to the station. This is not how real people talk. This isn’t even how TV/Movie people talk. This is bizarro world stuff, and it makes the entire plot unravel.
Another villainous character has non-stop repeated inner monologues about how all they want to do is screw and/or rape everyone and how they’re going to do lots of horrible things to make that happen. Someone needs to explain to the author that even rapists have thoughts other than rape. All of the villains are pure ID with no reasoning going on beyond “Want to get my way and rape and kill and brag!”
The inner monologues are another issue in that there’s just so many of them. Every scene, each character thinks far more than they actually speak, resulting in seemingly endless exposition instead of action. They talk and talk and think and think and no progress is made. The character development is either horribly stunted or fast-tracked when you weren’t looking. For example, the MC confesses to loving the daughter he’s protecting after only doing so for maybe a week. Why? There’s no apparent reason. All of the dialogue is over the top and not in a good way, making few if any of the characters believable.
Adult content is another weakness. There’s simply very little going on in that department. There is no harem route, so you have to commit to one partner, and as of 14.1, there are maybe 3 or 4 adult scenes total, requiring at least three playthroughs. Worse still, the romances are poorly written and advance awkwardly. There’s very little buildup. Other plots progress and then suddenly so-and-so confesses their love even though it feels completely out of left field. There are also no animations, which normally wouldn’t bother me, but there are very few renders or dialogue for these scenes either. They’re over in less than a minute. Some of my favorite adult scenes from other games contain no animations, but they have to be done right. This one does it all wrong.
After getting through the first few chapters I assumed I must be missing something. The game has 4 ½ out of 5! That’s a good game, right? Popular too! What am I missing? After finishing the current content, I can say I’m not missing anything. Poor writing and adult content that is limited in both quantity and quality leads to a game I likely won’t continue unless some serious edits are done.
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