Unity - Completed - Holy Whore Emily [Final] [Asami]

(----) requires long key press to skip dialogue, every time
(++) has scene collection; does not require playing the game unlock
(+) voiced; though mediocre performance
(--) uninspiring gameplay (though frankly, due to pt1, I didn't check in details)
(-) mediocre writing (though frankly, due to pt1, I didn't read in details)

Holy Whore Emily is a prime example of a diabolical UI choice wasting a game. Although in this case, Holy Whore Emily is also an example of poor gameplay wasting art assets. Good gameplay design is not easy but designing gameplay (and balance etc, altogether) is cheap in comparison to commissioning/making art, writing, voice, as well as programming the game. Without at least functional game design, all the costly parts of a game can be wasted. Waste, is what came to my mind, when I attempted to play Holy Whore Emily.

The devs were possessed to require player to press ctrl for >= one-whole-second every time the player wants to skip some dialogue or scenes. EVERY TIME. There is no alternative key. There is not even an alternative key on the keyboard for skipping one box of dialogue -- one can only left click. Some transitions are also not skippable by long pressed ctrl and can only be skipped with left click on mouse.

The result is there is no viable way to skipping a few lines or scenes or dialogues to speed up reading. Skip it all, or break your finger and mouse skipping.

All that is aggravated with a gazillion repeated dialogues or explanatory text to skip. There is really no functional way to experience Holy Whore Emily as a game.

That's also not the only UI implementation issues. Others include a poorly implemented frame transition for save or load.

Adding to the game-breaking, and unfathomable UI choices and implementations, is that there is not an interesting story or game underneath.

You can get the premise of the game from summary before you download the game. And you are not getting any more than that through the story's writing.

There is not going to be writing that builds character in our Emily. She is not going to be shy or lusty or feeling shameful or whatever. If there is, I missed it -- and you will too -- because of the diabolical skip implementation.

The game mechanics looks to me an integer management system where you are to click through the same skids (ie. non-H; with the aforementioned skip system) repeatedly -- starting with 8 times per skid. Clicking through a skid increments an integer variable by 1. You will manage several integer variables for them to hit target cap at various points of progression in the "game". If there is something else, I don't care to know -- and I doubt you will either.

So my recommendation is: toggle on the scene collection and if enough of the scenes really attract you to find out their context play the rest of game. You can ofc also click start the game first. It's quick enough to do that and experience what I described in quick order.

Only 1-star is suitable for a game that cannot be legitimately experienced outside its scene collection. Adding a star for at least the awareness by the dev to open scene collection in setting and for the decent art quality.

The art is great. Animation is below average. For example, instead of the cock moving into her mouth, it clips through her face to get into her mouth. Animated boobs having a weird shape. Don't know the term, but like a slice from a loaf of bread, square with an arch at the top. Just upside down. Like, noticeable sharp angles to the boob. Animation starts improving near the middle, then becomes average at the end. Decent music, sound effects, and voice acting for the girl. Translation is decent for the most part. A bit off for sex scene sound effects. Sometimes a word is translated wrong.

The settings have a button to unlock all CG, if you don't want to play it. The gallery's CGs seem to be out of order, because the ending CGs aren't the last CGs. The last ones might be bonus CGs, but the gangbang CG clearly had to happen before the Holy Whore ending CG. So it's jumbled. This game appears to have done the reverse of optimization. Takes 12 to 13 gb of ram. If you click too fast at the end of animated scenes, while the screen fades to black, all the layers of the scene slowly becomes transparent at different speeds, so it looks creepy. Apparently, the rape is avoidable on pure route, people in the thread have a guide.

(Scene-only review)

The images are high-quality. There are almost 30 scenes. 11? of them have high-quality animation, with half-a-dozen animation loops per scene. 3 of those can be played as visual novel or as interactive scenes (although interactions mostly just involve progressing linearly through the scene, but you first have to click the same button enough times to make a number increase). The remaining scenes aren't animated, and seems like they were really phoning it in on those - they're fairly short and they're often just a single still with a handful of transitions to minor variations of the same image.

There is some light audio in the form of a few untranslated voice lines, moaning and sound effects.

The English quality is decent enough, even if the whole "train my holy power to give it to people" idea that most scenes are based around is kinda cringy.

The scenes are largely vanilla piv (especially the animated ones), they're slightly non-consensual at times, including gangbangs and a little bit of bondage. Most scenes are just with the main character, 2 scenes feature a group scene with 3 other girls.

I'll call it 3.5 stars, rounded down. The animations are high-quality enough, but the scenes with more interesting kinks aren't animated, the animations are a tad too short, and the dialogue doesn't do much more than basically serve its purpose of padding out the animations without being awful.

Scenes can be unlocked in the options from the start.

The art is above average. The rest of the game is mind-numbing and boring. You adopt a girl who's related to your childhood friend or something. Then you end up raising her to be a saint. The saints in this world are trained to perform holy rituals that transfer holy power between two or more people. They're basically glorified whores, as per the game's title.

You have around 7-8 stats to keep track of. The most important are holy power, faith, skill, bond. Holy power is increased by having her have sex, either with you or random people. Faith is a special stat that will lower depending on your actions midgame and can lead to a vastly different ending. Skill is her sexual proficiency. Bond is your intimacy with her specifically.

The sex scenes flip flop between, "Yes, sex is supported and celebrated and is the norm in this world" and "No, having sex with so many people is bad, I shouldn't do it". If you're going to actively glorify the saint's job then you need to go all in on it. It doesn't really make sense that people are actively drugging her, kidnapping her, or threatening her for sex if the story already has the subtext that having sex with her is the norm in this world. These random bozos should just be literally asking her for service, there's no need to go to all this trouble. And if you want to play the darker undertone angle, then there's no need to normalize sex as apart of the saintess' job.

It's grindy as balls. You have refill her holy power up until she reaches 20 skill. Meaning you have to repeat the same 3 sex scenes with her a bunch of times. Only then will she go out and just willingly whore herself out. The other stats aren't as annoying to grind because you don't have to fast forward through a sex scene over and over again. Be careful not to go over 100 holy power, or else it will just result in an automatic game over.

The sex scenes are what earn this an extra star. Yeah, some of the CGs and animations are nice, but the issue is that they're mostly all in the same outfits or no outfit at all, which is depressing because she could've worn so many different ones when you account for the stuff she has during side jobs. The VA work is whatever. It's a generic young girl with bad mic quality, which is to be expected for these sorts of games (She's trying her best I guess).

There's 64 in-game days with a 3 time increment system (morn, noon, evening). It will take you approximately 1-2 hours, or even less if you give up on reading dialogue and just skip through everything like me. Go waste your time on something else, unless you just wanna quick fap, but tbh the art isn't worth it - just go read some doujin with the NTR/incest/prostitution tags - you'll essentially experience the same thing.