Isekai Quest

Skip Straight to the Horny Parts

Synopsis

A game that demands more of your time than it earns

Isekai Quest is a match-3 type puzzle game developed and published by Ginkgo Studio. When you buy it from the Steam store it comes with all the r18 content blocked, but it can be unlocked by simply downloading some free DLC. This is still my favorite means of patching lewd content back into games. It's true that Steam allows pretty much anything these days (what a time to be alive) but some countries still don't allow it. Providing the r18 content as DLC allows the game itself to be released all over the place, and give those of us with more lax content laws the goods we crave.

After getting run down by a truck in the street, you are teleported to the world of Isekai! And what are isekais for? Building harems of course. So you set off across the world, unlocking ladies' heart meters so the fall madly in love with you. For most of the game that's about all the story you get, but honestly I think that's the right amount. I love VNs but since most of the ones I play have been translated, they can be very rough. Lighter dialogue works out great with smaller budgets. There are 5 girls to choose from, with 2 more planned as free DLC in the near future.

The core gameplay is a bog standard match-3. Different colored blocks will either damage the woman you're fighting, or restore your health. Matching more than 3 of the same color will give you special blocks that give you mana when you clear them. Combo moves give you money to unlock stat boosts and in-game items. Like I said, bog standard. You could take this description and apply it to the gameplay for most match-3 games and it would still be accurate. That's not a bad thing though, as I stated in my review of Wish match-3 is very prevalent in h-games to pad out between lewd scenes, as it has simple well defined rules that let you have gameplay, but spend more time on more... important aspects of the game. Isekai Quest also does match-3 a lot better than Wish. While Wish had a ton of gameplay bugs and audio issues, I didn't run into any bugs at all in Isekai Quest. Everything pretty much worked how it was supposed to

Unfortunately Isekai Quest suffers from something worse than gameplay bugs. It's core gameplay loop punishes failure with boredom. When you start the game your stats are so low that you can't fill any girl's heart meter without dying a few times. There isn't anything inherently bad about that, except any time you lose, all of the heart meters of every girl on the map resets back to 0. You keep your boosted stats and your money, but you have to go back to square zero with every girl on the map. You only get stat boosts by winning, or by spending money. If you lose to a character one time, you're unlikely to be powerful enough to beat them the next time, so you'll keep bashing your head against this wall, seeing the same character models, and the same h-scenes over and over and over. The later levels aren't really beatable without spending money on usable items to remove negative effects.

If I'm expected to defeat each character 3 times, I expect that to take maybe 10 tries at most. But in this game, I completely lost count of how many attempts I made. Maybe I'm just mad cuz bad but I honestly believe that losing progress on one character, because you lost to a different character, is a poor design choice.

Once you do defeat each of the girls, you face-off against the Game Dev, who is represented by a floating purple orb with a single eye. This honestly took me by surprise, and I was here for it. You fight him in more match-3s, but he plays with time and space to do things like split the board, and make the gamepieces fall in different directions. All while using the special abilities of the other enemies you've defeated. If you don't have a lot of mushrooms available to remove negative effects, you probably aren't going to win. Upon beating him he gives you the secret code to get unlimited money in the store, which makes the game a LOT easier.

Horny Parts

• Characters

  This game has some sexy-ass characters

• Stripping

  Y'all already know I love in-game stripping based on damage. Every once in a while a "quest" will appear on the gameboard, and if you get it to the bottom of the screen, the lady you're fighting will lose a piece of clothing and take more damage for the rest of the battle

Horniest Part

• Sex Scenes

  When you defeat various characters, you unlock their sex scenes. There are also a few scenes you can unlock through dialogue choices. For the most part they are slide shows but there are some that are more interactive than others.

Rating

Neutral

Honestly this game would have a positive review if they simply removed the way all character's heart meters reset any time you lose to anybody. Even if they made it only reset the character you lost to, I'd be okay with it. But as it is Isekai Quest just demands me to play way more match-3 than I want to in an h-game.

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