It feels a bit unfair to judge Hush Hush as an eroge because it really doesn't seem like it's trying to be one. This is a shame because it is so close to being an amazing eroge, but it's limited by a few glaring design decisions and a general lack of eroticism.
The premise is that you are a gender-unspecified nobody sent to the town of Subrosa on a divine quest to save 5 girls from certain doom. You are told to get close to the girls by any means necessary to learn their traumatic secrets, as this is apparently the only way to help them avoid their fates. Your divine benefactors are only willing to comp you for exactly 1 month of lodging so you need to work quickly to fuck some sense into these girls. You are always given the option to pursue a strictly platonic relationship, but essentially you are on a sex quest to deliver post-coital catharsis to 5 girls under penalty of both theirs and your death.
At the surface level it plays like any other dating sim: you raise stats, earn money, and choose dialogue options from a list that net you the most affection with the npc's. The game map will offer a selection of events to choose from that are fixed based on the time and date. The events advance time and are often mutually exclusive with each other. You are implicitly encouraged to save scum frequently to check all events options because they can have wildly different quantity/quality of rewards that can change the outcome of your playthrough. This aspect of the game is much more similar to a VN and introduces optimal "routes" through the game. My issue is that there is little deviation allowed from the optimal route since failure to meet an upcoming stat/money/conversation check usually results in either an immediate or eventual game over.
Since most events appear at a fixed date and the stat/money requirements are unknown ahead of time, you will find yourself game over'ing constantly if you are not following a guide that describes both ideal stat progression and event choice. There’s no benefit to leveling stats other than meeting event requirements, so starting the game feels like you are randomly allocating points until a failed stat check causes you to game over. Playing the game blind was a truly masochistic challenge that involved recording the dates/time/and requirements for every single event in the game so you can properly map out a path to get through the game. The amount of trial and error required to reach the "true" ending without assistance is legitimately impressive and the lack of rollback just exacerbates this pain. At a certain point all the eroticism is gone because the game has been reduced to a mundane choose-your-adventure gamebook and you're just skipping through dialogue to spam different choices. It is then that you realize Hush Hush is actually a Groundhog Day-esque time loop simulator instead of a dating sim for people to get off to.
So just use a guide, right? Sure. I highly recommend it, even. But something gets... lost. So much of the game is built around it being this pseudo-time loop trial and error sim that once you take that aspect away all that's left is a middling VN. And really it's more like a kinetic novel with how little deviation you can afford in dialogue choices. Most dialogue options don't have any choice flexibility if you want the best outcomes and there's no gift system or similar to fix mistakes. The limited choices you have for correct dialogue and the 1 month time pressure put on the MC makes it feel more like you're manipulating the girls than establishing any genuine connections, even if it's for their own best interests.
The game is fully voice acted and directing for the VA's is surprisingly decent. Most lines are delivered as plausible dialogue with appropriate inflection/sarcasm. That said, sometimes the voices get a little wild with accents or tones. Frankly the only main girl whose voice doesn't outright annoy me is Iro's. I don't blame this on the voice actors. There's only so much you can do when the game designers want you to talk in an exaggerated New Jersey accent. Or like a vtuber. Or like a deranged person that thinks she's a kitten. The main characters are so set in their assigned stereotypes that it makes them a bit off-putting at times. Meanwhile the side characters are mostly great and I found myself wanting more interactions with them.
So those are a whole lot of words that don't have anything to do with the real reason anyone is here: the porn. I'm a sucker for dating sims so I came in hot and ready for a good time. I left completely and utterly unsatisfied. The art was good enough for me, but between the tedium of the gameplay and the insistence of the game on a gender neutral MC, I couldn't get anywhere. When you spend a long day slaving away over dialogue trial and error, it really saps most of the appeal from the brief sex scenes. With how much time and effort obviously went into crafting this game it is just bizarre how much of an afterthought the sex seems compared to every other feature.
The CG looks nice but very little of it is lewd and none of it is explicitly intimate. The romanceable characters each get 2 Live2D sex animations but the Live2D character art has a noticeably different (imo worse) style from the sprite/CG art. The scenes just have the npc doing those bad Live2D undulating animations solo accompanied by text describing how good the MC is at sex'ing them. Problem is that we never get the option to choose whether the MC has a penis or vagina so we have to settle for vague, agender text descriptions of the act. Every scene follows the same formula of: describing how good the MC is at oral followed by saying "and then they had sex for hours". It didn't work for me, but maybe it works for you. Oh and there's no gallery for the Live2D animations either so that's cool. It's a shame that so little effort went into the 18+ components of the game. The game is meant to function standalone without the 18+ content, but it's still impressive just how tacked on it feels. I almost wonder if it would be better to play without the 18+ content just to spare the bitter disappointment.
Speaking of “tacked on”, I hated the ending. I was left unfulfilled but maybe I just missed the point of the story and future dev plans to use the characters/universe. I would have liked an epilogue. I would have at least thought it was funny if our divine-ordained MC of the night rode off into the sunset blasting Goodbye Stranger. Instead we got… not really much of anything. It didn’t feel like any of the characters tried to achieve a resolution they were happy with.
This review isn't exactly glowing because I'm focusing on why it fails as an eroge. Even so, I still mostly enjoyed listening to the characters and having their stories unfold. This is honestly a 2/5 eroge but I can't bring myself to do it knowing how close it came to greatness. I would have loved to play a version of this game that was more open-world. Where the choices weren't so fixed. Where time and events weren't so strict. Where there was more porn, or at least porn where I could see the MC's genitals. That would have made it a better eroge, but I don't really think that's what the goal was. This is a game about solving the dialogue tree puzzle of how to save these 5 girls and maybe seeing a few boobs along the way. If the art and voice acting are up your alley then it’s an ok puzzle/story game even if the end is somewhat unsatisfying, but I would not recommend this as fap material.
