Man Wreck

I had no idea wtf the game was looking at the screenshots. It's basically a weirdly designed collection of visual novels with a crappy minigame inbetween scenes and a terrible UI for progression since you have to pick a random dot until you find an area with something to progress. Eventually needing to take care of some guys in your hideout which increases your demon meter which lets you progress further in some of the other stories. It's not quite as frustrating structurally as Dirty Education by the same developer. There's not as much random factor to it. Only in this you can't skip the terrible minigame which you could in DE [which had 3 minigames]. The minigame in this doesn't even really make sense, it's in theory a 3x3 match game. Make matches to increase a meter... but it increases with anyclick. You only get more meter with matches. And given how long it takes to set up matches it's faster to just mash on one of them. And it doesn't even work, often times the click you do will not select the thing you clicked on. For something so simple that's a bit ridiculous that it doesn't even work properly. I like most of the art/animation. It's simple animation, but it's fine. The only art I didn't really like is the stuff that lives up to the "Wreck" in the title. I'm pretty vanilla. I knew going in that stuff was there. I just don't get it, and it's not in most of the art. Though it is in a lot of text description. I actually think this is Aaron Dodo's best art in spite of the grey tones and muddiness to the art. In terms of proportions it's a lot better, it's still hyper masculine but it's less goofy looking like all his other games. At first glance however it does just look hideous beyond all words. It's a bit weird to come out of this actually liking the art when I thought it looked really dumb and weird from screenshots. *shrug* And there's some art where the entire body isn't drawn and it's hard to understand what's being conveyed. Are they tied up? The third screenshot is like that. One of them makes sense since he put the character in water so the non-visible parts are submerged in water. Makes sense in that background. Not when he uses that art in the awful minigame though it looks goofy. But the brick one just makes no sense. And when there are more than one full character [or 1.5 character] it's often hard to tell what's going on because the coloring on them. The game is quite annoying to progress through. Most of my time felt like it was just clicking through the dialog to setup the minigame and then playing the minigame. After every text based mission you are forced to find wherever you go empty and then you do the minigame after 3 dialogs that repeat [granted the last of the three is different per each level/background, so for the first visit adds something]. However each dialog cannot be skipped quickly. It takes 3 seconds until you can click through dialog. You didn't have to wait that long in Dirty Education to mash through the repetitive dialogs. And if you click an area you're done with at that point then you have to do that entire process for no reason [rather than just leave which makes more sense]. I just closed the game and reopened it, it was faster and less annoying. Which is kind of sad if you think about it. The plot isn't very cohesive, it feels very detached. Which is why it feels more like mini vns shoved together with a lose connection with the demon. I want to recommend this, but it's just not a good game. It has some solid art [that often clashes with the muddy backgrounds] and while the writing is a bit goofy and has a lot of ~~~ in it, it's whatever it works i guess, but it has no viewer [even if the one in DE was terrible with RNG mechanics attached at least it had one]. And for $9CAD for 2.5h of content, it's hard to recommend. Even for steep discounts, it's hard to recommend it as a game because it's just so tedious to get to everything else even if 100% of it was exactly to my tastes. I'd like to see more bara games on Steam, and while this is somewhat improved over DE which did come out before this... it's still a mess and in some ways is worse like the UI and the dialog progression delay. The soundtrack is funny though. Incorporates various moaning in it. And there was more than one track. It's hard to really accurately describe it. You have to hear it to understand. I'd almost recommend it just for that if it were like a dollar, but it's not.

Absolutely love it wish there's more like this. :D

I was able to let Dirty Education slide a fair bit because I liked the character designs and personalities but this just ain't it for me. Progression is just as plodding if not more than DE, the plot given isn't especially interesting even as an excuse plot and the art style really doesn't work for me. All the characters being depicted as grayed out figures makes them all look identical and when you interact with them, things tend to play out in the exact same way regardless of who it is which makes everything feel monotonous. Combine all that with having to do a singular minigame over and over for no real given reason and it all just feels like a chore to play. If you were to skip any of these games, I'd make it this one.