It's quite easy for a game to not live up to its hype when the hype is as grand as it's been for this one. I tend not to follow games pre-release, and Manaka reminded me why. Beware, this review is quite thorough, so anti-intellectual "it's just a game bro"–type haters who fear earnest criticism should probably just go ahead and type their pre-emptive dismissals and move on.
Whereas the first game had very few but very highly polished features, the sequel instead has a number of new features that seem like they were hashed together, even after a year-plus of development. There are far more character customisation options, but all the new sliders create uncanny shapes well before their extreme values (not to mention that several key ones have been arbitrarily progression-locked, but more on that in a minute), and we're still stuck with the same limitations of the same mildly attractive model as before. The urination is not another ability that you can call upon at will, but is instead weirdly gated behind drinking water from your inventory, and then given a time limit; maybe the developer was thinking that this could create an interesting sense of urgency, but there's very little risk involved, and the urination could have functioned as an unlimited sandbox ability whilst still having the water-drinking time-limit version for those who wanted it.
The most disappointing new feature by far must surely be the dozen-plus outfits, each with anywhere from two to fourteen items, which are almost entirely gated behind incredibly grindy achievements. Worse still, these clothes all contradict the gameplay in a painfully frustrating way. Manaka is still, just like Seleka, fundamentally centred around flashing with the coat, to the point where it's impossible to put on any functional clothing unless you are standing on top of the coat, or wearing it—which clips through literally everything and looks horrible.
Without this limitation, the player could just open their inventory and cover themselves with any clothing item at any time. The obvious solution to this balance issue would be to restrict the player to what they were wearing when they left the house—or, if you had the time and resources to implement it (which they do, since they did this with other items like the handcuff key), lock the inventory altogether and make the clothing an actual item with an actual icon that you drop onto the ground. But instead, the developer enigmatically decided to require the coat at all times, making all the outfits functionally useless on release day (despite constantly plugging how cool they were in the pre-release dev logs).
The handcuffs somewhat redeem the new batch of features by virtue of being simply fantastic. The piston machines and the late-game skills are good as well, but they add very little to the game's premise. Seleka boasted an excellent balance of punishing, challenge-based gameplay that was truly optional, alongside an open sexual sandbox. This is where Manaka loses me: it seems that in the dev's intent to expand the game (with an explicit focus on increasing its playtime), the 'stealth challenge' side of things has been stretched and padded as much as possible, specifically
at the expense of the sandbox.
This game introduces a very brazen anti-feature whereby most (nearly all) upgrades are double-locked, meaning that the player has to grind in order to unlock the privilege of buying things. Seleka had this with only one thing, the body paint; the body paint was gated so heavily because it was the only means of actually beating the entire game for the casual player who didn't want to engage in a tryhard stealth game, and it was clever for that. Manaka, on the other hand, does this with most of its unlocks—not to balance the later parts of the game, but to simply add a grind, to pad the runtime, and perhaps to even further incentivise the player to participate in the style of gameplay which had previously been optional. The result is that some things which used to be accessible from the outset are now locked until the mid-game. Classic sequel, amirite?
This creates an accessibility issue that completely undermines what made the original game a good sandbox. Those who are not here to take on the challenge of an ambitious stealth game are probably here because they like exhibitionism, because this game is supposed to be the genre codifier of 3D ENF. I have the kink. For me to enjoy the game beyond a one-hour novelty, I need immersion: I want to roleplay, to create a character, to exclusively pursue my own challenges with my own imposed restrictions. To even
begin to achieve this in Manaka, one has to literally grind for hours. You cannot customise your character's expressions or get naked until rank 6 out of 8, and you can't change her thighs or butt until rank 5. The more desirable hairstyles are priced in the 300–400 RP range just for the sake of it.
You are required to play a game you don't care about, for hours, in order to play the game you came here to play. Part of the game's premise is that you start as a novice and work your way up to an expert flasher, an experience which had been genuinely fun in Seleka, but that I hadn't gotten a chance to enjoy in Manaka. Since I wasn't yet aware of the reasons behind my frustration, I attempted to start a new game—but I was so disillusioned with the core gameplay loop at this point that I was going out on easy difficulty (a selection that candidly insults the player on the menu, which I'm faithfully chalking up as a translation error) to farm points, and still getting caught because I just wasn't paying attention. It isn't fun enough to hold my focus.
In Manaka, the sandbox itself is effectively a late-game unlockable. This was technically the case in the previous game as well, but because of its reduced size, it wasn't really a problem; most cosmetic items were accessible almost right away, and pretty much everything in the game could be unlocked within a few hours of normal play.
Unbeknownst to me, the day before I wrote this review, an update dropped which attempted to mitigate the fundamental issue with the special outfits, by adding an unlockable skill that allows the player to equip these clothes from anywhere, at the cost of lower point gain while the skill is active. This particular solution to an obviously deep-seated issue with the game's direction is what helped me understand why Manaka is so frustrating to play in the first place. Being forced to play 'as the developer intended', only going out and repetitively achieving the same things that
they enjoyed in order to progress, is a very unfree and even condescending design approach in a sequel to a game that was renowned as a sandbox.
Because of the rapid updates, I considered abandoning this review altogether, and I'm still hopeful that future changes will bring the product closer towards an experience that's less restrictive and... more fun. But I'm honestly not sure if post-release adjustments can overcome the strange decisions at this game's core. While I was writing this, I stumbled upon a fantastic review on the developer's Ci-en page by a user named MiaoMiao, who very effectively argues against many of this game's restrictions in a way that I could not have articulated myself, but that I very strongly agree with. For instance, they criticise the game's equipment modifiers, the sprint bar, the instant totality of the game-over state, and the forced autosaves. If you want to read that review, go
here, scroll through the comments until you find it, slap it piece-by-piece into DeepL or Google Translate, and enjoy.
As a stealth-based challenge game, Manaka is fine, and even quite good in some ways. Its mechanic of letting the player decide how much to risk on a single run is its most interesting feature by far. But as an ENF exhibitionism game, Manaka has lost the plot. It's like the developer has replaced the thrill of 'exhibit yourself and don't get caught' with the thrill of 'exhibit yourself a bunch of times without going home to deposit your points'. Again, if what you're looking for is an independent, stealth-based Dark Souls knockoff made in Unity, then this premise can carry the game quite far; but for the "secret flasher" game that it claims to be, it falls flat.
My disappointment is matched only by my respect for what the dev has built and the high-quality precedent that they've set for everyone to follow. Giving Manaka a less-than-average rating would be a crime. However, its inability to build upon the previous game without jeopardising its status as an exhibitionist sandbox, as well as the fact that the intended, restrictive playstyle simply isn't fun enough to sustain it for anywhere near the twenty-plus hours it promises, leads me to conclude that a 3-star rating is the most authentic representation of my opinion. I concede that this will improve if future updates address more of the issues.
Despite fifteen months of hype, I'll be quite satisfied to delete it less than a week after release. If I come back and play again, I will probably use cheats to make the game enjoyable. I'll look forward to how future games may build upon the concept.
Whoever you may be, if you read this whole thing, thanks for your time!
