Power Vacuum: Ophelia's Date Night
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Ophelia's Date Night is ostensibly an unofficial "what-if" - devised by upcoming creator Sumatra3D. Is it fair to compare it directly to existing "what-ifs" by WWG? Maybe not, but we'll cover that later. The abstract is this: Sumatra makes good renders, decent animations and cares to add sound effects. The rest is up in the air.
For starters and as expected, this is a pretty short playthrough. Sumatra said something about somebody telling him it's like doing covers before recording your own music or something. Ergo, he's just getting his feet wet. This little episode doesn't fuck around with establishing characters and assumes you've played PV before. I'd like to say from the outset that Ophelia looks great and I'm happy to see familiar areas from the main game.
Here's the rub; there's not a single hint of that original PV quality writing here, not even a whiff. A few swill-drinking, window-lickers from PV's main thread might not miss it, but there's this gaping hole in the content that no amount of projectile lactose can fill. Ophelia reads nothing like Ophelia, and neither does anyone else, which kind of kills your interest in seeing this character getting ruined by Eric; it does just seem like a skin. Nobody could have asked for the original level of writing, but any attempt at the humor or absurdism of the original is conspicuously absent.
The fucking is decent, Eric predictably breaks down Ophelia but it's kind of surprising she acquiesces so easily. I won't compare in detail to Hunter for the sake of brevity, but Eric lacks Hunters' absurdity as a character. It's hard to imagine how Ophelia doesn't wear him down and leave him stood whether anyone is there to stop the date happening or not. There could have been more in-your-face stuff on Eric's' part. There is at least, many more position variations than one might expect.
Overall - the visuals are strong, the sounds effects are admirable, most of us are just glad to get our fix. If you like plot with your porn, you'd be better turning to the OG "what-ifs".
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3/5, mainly for quality visuals. I'd like to think Sumatra has something more comprehensive planned for his writing in his upcoming original work, "Campus Lyfe". Still, it's hard to criticize a solid attempt.