DAUGHTER FOR DESSERT: The Official PatreonGamer
Review
General Verdict: Frustrating, But Fascinating If You Only Let Yourself
Be Swept Away
Most of the people pronouncing judgement on Daughter For Dessert, the
first of Palmer’s two "epic" games completed (mostly) in his lifetime
(Double Homework being the second), tend to focus on the game’s negative sides,
probably because they are so blatantly obvious. Let us quickly move them out of
the way, as this has all been written about many times:
1) The game features its own engine rather than the standard RenPy, Unity, RPGM
etc. packages — partly out of ambition and vanity, partly to prevent theft and
unsolicited dissemination (which, as the very existence of F95 proves by
itself, is a futile affair anyway). The engine, with its poor handling of every
mechanic that RenPy does ten times better (transitions, skips, hiding the
screen, saves, etc.), is cumbersome and annoying; I think there is not a single
person in sight who would dare defend it against the insurmountable odds.
2) The game has relatively few graphic renders (most of the action is
represented by static cut figures) and no animations whatsoever — Palmer and
his team just couldn’t be bothered with something as trivial as movement on the
screen. Coupled with the fact that there are long, REALLY long dialog or
monolog sequences, it really sounds like a perfect recipe for boredom.
3) The voice acting in the game is weak and perfunctory; the
"actresses" voicing Amanda and Kathy sound wooden, bored, and overall
easily replaceable by AI these days. The samples provided for free can in no
way serve as proper motivation for people to support the game financially.
4) The plot of the game, generally speaking, is stupid, unrealistic, and
illogical, and it seemingly gets worse and worse, rather than improving, as the
game goes on. By the time of the final denouement, you MAY want to be seriously
posing yourself the question of whether the game’s writer really lived on the
same planet with us and had any idea of how real people think and act on the
surface of Earth, regardless of their race, nation, or creed. More details on
this later.
5) The game largely develops as a kinetic novel, with your choices
overall meaning very little, unless you just want to lock yourself out of sexy
content with some of the girls. It does have some replay value depending on
whether you are going for a more harem-like setting (although there are no true
harem paths) or want to stay true to a single lady, but since the game has to
be replayed as a sequence of 19 stand-alone episodes, it is a serious hassle to
actually go through with the replay, and in the end you’ll probably be relying
on cheat codes to see everything.
I could go on with these criticisms, but, like I said, they’ve all been
done before, and even the four points listed should, for most people, already
suffice to condemn Daughter For Dessert
as a very, very bad game, one where unbridled ambition does not even begin to
get tempered with intelligent, professional, user-friendly realization. (It
should also be briefly added that the game ONLY makes sense if you play it in
its "untampered", incest-oriented version, but that’s something that
applies equally to pretty much any game whose creators are forced to follow the
strict Patreon content guidelines these days).
So this is where the tricky part begins. Why, despite all these obvious
issues, would I want to give it a four-star rating and urge everybody who still
hasn’t done so to give it a try (or, at least, everybody belonging to a certain
psychotype, as you’ll find out very soon)?
There are two reasons — one fairly simple and one that may be a bit
harder to explain. Let’s start with the simple one in plain sight.
To put it bluntly, many, if not most, of the sex scenes scattered
throughout Daughter For Dessert — alas, there are usually, at best, only one or
two per chapter — are AMAZING, and I do not use that word lightly. Amazing not
from the technical point (as I said, no animations), but rather from the angle
of the careful build-up, the love invested in the graphic depiction of the
girls, and the attention dedicated to the fine-tuning of their personalities,
all of which tie in directly into the love-making. Very, very few games I have
experienced here ever try to go for the same depth.
All the four main girls — the daughter Amanda, the nerdy sidekick Kathy,
the rational helper Heidi, and the quirky outsider Lily — are written with such
distinct, interesting, and generally believable characters that it’s a genuine
thrill to then witness them bring in their character traits into bed with them
(and with you, of course), with the
accompanying pictures telling an even better story than Palmer’s text (although
his erotic writing, as opposed to his plot construction skills, is not half-bad
either).
Curiously, the main character — Amanda, the MC’s daughter — is perhaps
the least charming of the four. She has somewhat of a
"cute-girl-next-door" look, is written as a capricious and
unpredictable human being with lots of ridiculous mood swings, and almost as
soon as we are finally ready to believe her obsessive infatuation with her
father, she is shown to be capable of abandoning him on a whim. Still, in
places it’s a reasonably decent portrait of a young girl who chooses to confirm
and strengthen her identity through surrendering it to an object of «Forbidden
Love», and that’s pretty much the image she projects every time she takes her
clothes off before your character. It’s a slightly disturbing, perverted (but
not seriously traumatic) kind of passion that is hard to resist even if her
facial and body features are (to me at least) generally less alluring than
everybody else’s.
Then there’s Kathy, Amanda’s best friend, the voracious nerdy
student-cum-waitress at your cafe. Kathy may be my single most favorite AVN
character of all time — the classic example of that "brainy intellectual built
like a brick shipyard", "stimulating conversationalist by day,
fire-breathing demon in the sack by night" stereotype that so many of us
dream about but so few of us ever encounter in real life. If you remember Woody
Allen’s classic "woman interested in Mozart, James Joyce, and sodomy"
line from Annie Hall, well, that’s
more or less Kathy. She’s usually got the wittiest and funniest (yes, this game
can be funny, though it fails at that
just as often as it succeeds) lines of them all, she’s got an intelligent face
above and reasonably big tits below, she’s willing to risk, experiment, and
cross all sorts of lines, and her pictures always show her totally getting into the spirit of things. She’s totally awesome.
Heidi, the redhead bartender turned manager of the diner, is the
"motherly figure" of the game, a sort of rational anti-thesis to
Kathy’s wildness, which is precisely why the scene in Chapter 12 (where Kathy
finally seduces Heidi into a threesome) is probably one of the hottest scenes
in any AVN ever written — milking the "opposites attract" idea for
all it’s worth and more. She’s the stability anchor of the group, which works
just fine when packaged with red hair, freckles, and the usual voluptuous (but
realistically voluptuous) mass of tits and ass.
Finally, Lily, the relative latecomer to the game, is a bit of an
acquired taste, but the combination of her Far East Asian (nominally Korean)
features with her naive-eccentric character gives her a completely different
flair from all the other girls — she could have been just another Kathy or
Heidi, but Palmer decided otherwise: first, he made her into a comic relief
figure for the game, and then he masterfully gave her an adorable soul (along
with a thin, slender body with very different proportions from anybody else’s).
Her sex scenes on the whole just may be my favorite in the end — in some ways,
she feels even less experienced and more innocent than Amanda, and her gradual
falling for the MC is especially thrilling when it finally happens.
Of course, to get the proper
mileage out of the game’s sex scenes, you have to spend some time with the
characters, so the lengthy build-ups and seemingly boring stretches of the plot
with endless conversations have their own worth. To me, the thrill of getting
there and living through these experiences, even if it does not entirely
justify the many technical deficiencies of the game, at least makes them
forgivable. Sure, it would be great to have all that in simple, stable, trusty
RenPy (maybe some day some thoughtful modder might just get around to that),
but in my opinion, the experience of sharing Amanda / Kathy / Heidi / Lily as
one’s waifus is still worth the pain of slugging through Palmer’s rusty game
engine.
But now we get to the second
reason why Daughter For Dessert is
such an unforgettable piece of work, though I sense that only a certain (and not
very large) category of people shall be able to bear with me here. This reason
has to do with the game’s overall atmosphere — and with its writing, which, as
I already mentioned, fluctuates between inspired / literate / humorous and
utterly embarrassing / cringeworthy... and it sort of fascinates me.
Honestly, the late Palmer (R.I.P.) must have been a very odd person in
the flesh. I would not be surprised to learn that he was some sort of shut-in
all his life, like that dude in Twin
Peaks, because both of his games that I have played (this and Double Homework) focus on protagonists
that basically live within themselves and a tiny space that they occupy, only
occasionally letting some beautiful outsider into their lives. This focus makes
Daughter For Dessert a perfect game
for introverts of all kinds — you know, those quiet and shy nerdy types who
struggle with crossing the threshold of their own apartment, but also secretly
dream of sharing it with that one special person "interested in Mozart,
James Joyce, and sodomy", with an equal propensity for intellectual
conversation and wild, uninhibited sex.
The heroes in Palmer’s games are definitely not normal people living in any kind of normal world. In this case,
their entire life — heck, the life of the entire world — revolves around the MC’s diner, with pretty much the only
road he knows of leading to it from his apartment and back there again. There
is one major exception, when he and Amanda are forced to take a trip to
«Whiskeyville» in order to repair a broken jukebox (!), but even then the
entire road trip is claustrophobic, most of it taking place either inside the
car or one or two motels along the way. People in this world do not talk or act
like normal people, but more like people invented by somebody who has never
talked to actual people — and yet, at the same time they sometimes say
interesting and occasionally even deep things.
The central plot of the game is a trashy parody of a trashy soap opera,
so ridiculous in execution that feeling any genuine emotions of sympathy or
sadness is out of the question. Only a true babe in the woods could probably
shed real tears for Amanda’s or her mother’s plight. On top of that, we have
ridiculous incarcerations, ridiculous trials, ridiculous lawyers called «Saul»
(of course, what would you expect of somebody whose conception of the real
world was probably formed by watching endless re-runs of Breaking Bad?), and a mock-detective story about the theft of a
precious heirloom that would make poor Gilbert Chesterton spin around his axis
in the grave. Not that Daughter For
Dessert is so utterly unique in this aspect — lots of adult games have
equally ridiculous plotlines — but DfD
seems to take things so seriously that I almost visualize Palmer himself believing in his plot and the emotional
weight it is supposed to carry.
But then you have the characters and their inner worlds, and suddenly,
the writing takes a sharp turn and becomes... well, not Dostoyevsky level or
anything, but mature, funny, and reasonably deep. To me, that betrays the
psychology of a reclusive shut-in: totally clueless and helpless when it comes
to depicting life outside, but with all his senses sharpened and thoughts
refined when dealing with one’s own inner world. Dialogs between the MC and
Kathy, particularly in the first half of the game, can be really golden, and
even morally instructive to some people. This, to me, is an absolutely
fascinating contrast that I have never met with any other AVN author.
Typically, people in this business are usually either consistently decent, or
consistently atrocious. Palmer is the only one who’s literally like a fish,
totally pitiful while above the water but comfortably at home while under it.
Unbelievable.
Being a bit of an introvert myself (though hardly enough to be that clueless about the world outside my
window), I can relate very strongly to this paradox, and this is why Daughter For Dessert remains a weirdly
crippled favorite of mine. I realize that what I write here may be completely
unrelatable for many people — supposedly all those one-star reviews on F95 are
indicative of that inability to relate — but I also feel that there is a
specially targeted minority that will understand exactly what it is I’m saying.
My only wish for the future is that Palmer’s successors in Love-Joint
come to their senses and one day put out a proper remake of Daughter For Dessert in a
"normal" game engine like RenPy. This way, fewer people will be put
off during the initial episodes of the game and more will be able to
concentrate on the lovable characters and their personalities rather than the
grueling technical aspects of the interface.
