The DeLuca Family: The Official Review

THE DELUCA FAMILY: The Official PatreonGamer Review

General Verdict: A uniquely post-modern, porn-meets-Tarantino take on the mafia genre that, unfortunately, ended up crushing its own creator.

Introduction

If you excuse me, I’ll start this one with a little detour. Remember how in the past, before popular demand on the Internet changed the face of the industry forever, there used to be porn movies with plots — particularly the «parody» porn movies, which, in strict accordance with Rule 34, took all your favorite narratives from The Three Musketeers to Star Wars and generated their porny equivalents? Apparently, the genre was never too popular (many more people simply want to see other people fucking than a whole lot of plot exposition followed by people fucking), but it did have its own loyal fanbase — and, for what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure many of those same people have by now switched over to AVNs for compensation. 

I personally loved quite a few of those movies, but oftentimes found myself disappointed by the fact that there was too little plot in them, not too much. Because every once in a while, what you get is a craving for your favorite story — a historical novel, a mystery tale, a sci-fi epic — in which characters, from time to time, get involved in explicit, rather than suggested, sexual activities. Basically, not «porn with a bit of plot», but «good plot with a bit of porn», if you know what I mean. The same Three Musketeers or Star Wars where the heroes come across as real heroes, with all of their motivations and emotions and seriousness, not as cartoonish parodies, and you can also see them screwing every once in a while — like they probably did in real life, after all. This sort of thing can sometimes be found in (usually very poorly written) hardcore erotic novels, but it simply does not exist — has not ever existed — in the movie genre, where, for various reasons (including the necessity for people to be good actors and porn stars at the same time), it is as impossible as ice-cream in the hot sun. 

You’d think that this pattern — «interesting story lightly peppered with hardcore elements» — would be far better represented in AVNs. After all, visual novels and video games based on them require far fewer resources, can much tighter represent their creator’s own vision, and do not depend on finding real-life porn stars who can both fuck and act. But in reality, the majority of AVNs follow the same patterns — their creators know that their audience is here first and fore­most for the saucy stuff, and everything else is just a framework. Even the best devs like Dr. PinkCake or PhillyGames, who are sincerely interested in developing their stories, are fully aware that their audience will lose interest sooner or later if they just continue to be «teased» indefinitely. I mean, really, if we start slobbering over a hot lady and don’t see her taking it all off in the first hour or so of playing the game — we start complaining, don’t we? 

In this context, The DeLuca Family by HopesGaming, regardless of everything else that was good or bad about it and its development cycle, is unquestionably one of the bravest Western AVNs I’ve ever played. From the very start, it was conceived, first and foremost, as a story — based on action, humor, irony, fantasy, emotions, and romance — with the suggestive promise that as the story slowly develops before your eyes, the curtain won’t be dropped right after the French kiss and nothing will be left exclusively to your imagination. But it would not be a «sex game with elements of plot»; it would be a «fantasy adventure with elements of hardcore». And those elements of hardcore, they would manifest strictly on their own time, when the plot realistically demanded them, not every thirty minutes of the game (a.k.a. «every time the player’s dick gets hard once again after the last fap»). 

The Setting: A Surrealistic Mafia Story

In this universe, ninja nuns with big tits are just an everyday reality...

In an age where games like Summertime Saga and MILFy City, with their near-instant sexual gratification, ruled supreme, this strategy chosen by HopesGaming, the developer, was almost foolishly brave and risky — an indie game like this could not be pushed on the «regular» game market by definition, and could easily find itself downvoted and neglected on the X-rated market as well. Instead, it found itself quickly rising up the general rating scale, and for at least the first two or three years of development was among the most popular AVN titles — despite not even having one full-fledged sex scene to offer to its audience. (In fact, what few bona fide sex scenes there actually are already came at a time when the game’s ratings were dropping — and even in retrospect, do not really constitute its main selling points). 

Even more surprisingly, The DeLuca Family is not only not a proper «sex game», but, from a certain point of view, can hardly be called a «game» as such. Although it includes a formal mechanic of free-roam, events in the game unfold mostly linearly (many of the free-roam parts, for instance, cannot be accessed until the main storyline has progressed to a certain level, and vice versa) — and the player’s interaction is mainly limited to a small, very rarely activated, set of choices which, at best, do not matter, at worst, merely lock you out of content. (Given the possibility of training your character in a more paragon-ish or renegade-ish fashion, I suppose that in the long run some of those choices could have mattered, but as it stands now, we shall most likely never be able to see in what way). There’s also the «Contracts» side game, which I will comment on later, but it’s (almost) optional and feels a bit like its own separate entity. 

Anyway, long story cut short, The DeLuca Family is essentially a near-kinetic visual novel with some illusions of player agency, delivered in the interlocking genres of mafia thriller and romantic comedy (dramedy) with enough elements of hardcore to give it an assured X-rating, but never enough to satisfy all of your base urges until it’s a little too late for that. Why, then, should we bother with it at all — especially today, when it looks less and less likely that «Season 1», with its frustrating cliffhanger, shall ever be followed by a «Season 2»? 

My answer to that question is simple: I love unique artistic visions, even if (especially if!) they are framed within the context of a hardcore adult game — and for most of his work cycle on The DeLuca Family, HopesGaming was blessed with precisely such a vision. Of course, it was not completely original (what is these days?), but the basic concept of his imaginary universe and its story, which could be roughly described as «The Godfather meets Reservoir Dogs», looked and felt like absolutely nothing else — still does, actually. There are other sources, of course: all sorts of mafia tales, post-modern dialog-heavy gangster movies, and, presumably, all sorts of manga / anime stories of which I have little knowledge. But overall, The DeLuca Family is about one-third gangster drama, one-third action-flick, and one-third surrealist comedy, based on quite intentionally absurd sets of premises, combinations, and coincidences — and on constantly defying and inverting your expectations. Oh yes, and sometimes it gets genuinely lewd... but only if you are a good boy and wait for it, very, very patiently. Don’t bother skipping through the dialog — you’ll never get to the end of it anyway. 

Some players would lash out angrily at the absurdity — a mafia game set in the modern age with tough guys wielding flails? karate-practicing badass nuns wreaking havoc against goons armed with UZIs? medieval honor codes taken as a serious thing? Irish criminal families operating, out of nowhere, in a presumably Sicilian type of environment?.. But, really, none of that is any more absurd than the setting of, say, Kill Bill, or Resident Evil 4, or any other pop-art phenomena that give us alternate realities to love and cherish, provided they’re done right. And with the level of creativity displayed in Hopes’ visual art and dialog, they are done right. The universe of The DeLuca Family sets its own rules and follows them in a logical and rigorous manner. 

But it is also true that the game messes with you — very seriously so. As you start out, playing a young protagonist that, for some inexplicable reason, finds himself forced to work as a novice for one of the most prominent mafia families in the region, the game starts out on a surrealist / comedic path, with both male and female characters engaged in oddly Tarantino-esque dialogs, mixing the thrilling with the routine, and pretty soon you’re convinced this is all going to be fairly lightweight and occasionally hilarious. Hopes’ dialog skills are a mixed bag: with no quality control attached, there’s always about a 50-50 chance that it’s either going to be comedic genius or forced, unfunny cringe with a failed punchline (but when it works, it works! I sometimes catch myself laughing at some of his twists with the same naturalness and ease I do at classic Seinfeld episodes). Whether he succeeds or fails, though, the first several hours of the game play out like a post-modernist comedy, with your two main potential love interests — the daughters Gracie and Luna — playing out the «oddball romantic goof» and the «oddball psycho goof» stereotypes to perfection. 

The Evolution: From Hilarious To Terrifying

"Just a quick trip to the bathroom, dear, and THEN I'll suck your dick..."

Eventually, character development comes into play, and the plot begins relying less and less on goofy jokes and more and more on sentimental bits, sexy teasing, and darker, psychologically uncomfortable elements. This could have been a flaming disaster, but Hopes shows that he can handle gritty drama far better than, say, Dr. PinkCake, and while some of the scenes could certainly use a little dialog trimming, on the whole Gracie’s progression from nerdy show-off to witty strategist and Luna’s from Harley Quinn-style psychopath to brokenhearted victim is genuinely gripping. There’s even a bit of role reversal going on, as by the end of Season 1 the balance between «delicate / fragile» and «creepy / ruthless» seems to have been seriously shifted between the two main girls. I’m a slightly lesser fan of the third major sub-story — Isabel and her cuckolding plotline — but it’s still handled with seriousness, delicacy, and tact (and it does lead to what is perhaps the single sexiest scene in the game!). 

Now the one thing that can be a serious turn-off for some players is that at a certain point, the game does take a dark twist. Perhaps realizing that he might have gone a bit too far to the goofy / parodic side of things, Hopes begins to interrupt the romantic storyline with mafia-related side­lines with unsettling, sometimes gory details you’d probably expect from the likes of Boardwalk Empire, not from a «porn game». Some of them come on so abruptly that it takes some time to get adjusted and realize it’s not another goofy put-on, but actually a real dark twist, and from then on the story shifts from lightweight comedy to heavy gory drama and back in total Jekyll-and-Hyde mode. For me, it works, though. We know mafia dramas and mafia comedies, but we don’t often encounter such defiantly crude mixtures of both, and this combination gives The DeLuca Family its own special edge — like it or hate it, you’re gonna remember it as a stand-out. 

The principal test of strength comes with the «My Name is Luna» plotline, in which Hopes dares to go into the kind of territory where absolutely no adult video game — heck, almost no regular game, and very, very few books or movies, for that matter — dare to go. (Well, at least not Western ones; I’m not so sure about all that whacky Japanese stuff). On one hand, it’s really done for pure shock value, manipulative and exaggerated to the core; on the other hand, it’s executed sufficiently well to succeed in its manipulation, and just the very thought of a brutal plotline like that being made part of an adult video game already turns Hopes into some sort of Andy Kaufman of the visual novel industry. Some might say Luna’s story heavily undermines the suspension of disbelief — I think, however, that on a psychological level it agrees quite well with the goofy presentation of the character in the first part of the game, because, after all, childhood traumas are unpredictable as to their consequences, and this particular character transformation is perfectly possible even in the real world, let alone an imaginary one. 

Technical Aspects: On The Tolerable Side

"So, do I still look like I have an IQ of 250 even with your cum all over my bare pussy?..."

On the structural level, The DeLuca Family is not a masterpiece of craft, but not a source for serious complaints, either. The renders are largely standard Ren’Py, but Hopes makes good use of landscape assets (the atmosphere of a little old-fashioned ancient Italian town / countryside is conveyed quite well), and most of the characters are rendered with love and delicacy — well, I’m not entirely sure that Isabel needed all that purple hair, and, as usual, most of the MILFs (like Lady Cordia) look more like hot elder sisters than actual 50-year old ladies, but these are nitpicks. Hopes does a great job of letting you see the «frightened little girl» inside Luna’s usual «evil badass» type, and the «ruthless mischievous imp» inside Gracie’s «naive narcissistic beauty» personality — and when you do get around to the sex scenes, they are done diligently enough even though you know they are not supposed to constitute the main attraction. Animations, angles, curves, cumshots — you can fap to this game, yes, if you have enough patience. 

The soundtrack is not overwhelming — probably about a dozen or so repetitive instrumental tracks — but it is chosen well enough to add flavor to the game. I really love, for instance, the main free-roam theme in the mansion, with its wobbly electric piano and atmosphere of gentle, but sinister mystery, and some of the more symphonic arrangements give a baroque feeling perfectly in line with the cultural setting of the game. Alas, no voice acting — this is one of the few games which, I believe, could truly benefit from voiceovers, but then again, you’d need actual professional voiceover talent for the likes of Gracie and Luna; amateurish acting usually employed for this kind of games would only spoil the effect. 

The allegedly free-roam construction of the game is totally unnecessary: with the exception of the «Contracts» section (which is formally optional, but you’ll have to tackle it at least occasionally so as to raise money and gain experience for promotions), the «main mission» and the «side missions» are actually interlocked, and some parts of the main quest cannot proceed without completing some side missions, or vice versa. Most of the side missions serve the purpose of romancing specific girls, so you don’t have to do them if you’re not interested in Gracie, Luna, Isabel, etc. romantically (but if you’re not, why are you playing the game?) — overall, little would be lost if the whole thing were to be re-designed as a straightforward visual novel with skippable parts, but then again, this organization does let you choose your own order of progressing things with the ladies, so no sweat — just keep in mind that The DeLuca Family is not really a «sandbox free-roam» about having fun whenever and whoever with you want to have it, but a sprawling mafia saga with its own linear plot, largely set in stone. 

Development Cycle: The REAL Tragedy

"He dressed me up like THIS and he STILL didn't have the strength to let me take over the world?.."

Unfortunately, most AVN developers fall into two categories — those who manage to stay in control of the work process throughout (usually, these are the people who have a more or less clear understanding of how their game will end already while working on its beginning), and those who, sooner or later, succumb to their own creation and are almost literally devoured by it. Poor HopesGaming, alas, pretty soon fell into the second category and began taking his art far more seriously than your local shrink would ever recommend it. The game started leaning a bit too heavily into worshipping its own characters — to the extent that some patrons and players started worrying about whether we’d be getting any action with the girls at all, because with all that deification of Gracie and Luna, would Hopes ever allow himself to stoop to defiling their sanctified images with somebody’s dick up their butts? The game lore, too, started living its own life, bringing on new families, new antagonists, new code of honor, new drama, with each new quest containing less and less humor and more and more complexity and seriousness, until the scarcely dispensed jokes and puns began to take on an almost nostalgic flavor. 

Ironically, it was only at this point that the game started getting its first lewd scenes — but by this time, if I understand this right (I usually have no interest in following messageboard dramas), Hopes had gotten himself in messy fights with some of his former fanbase over the direction of the game, even becoming as riled up as to express his contempt for his critics right inside the game itself (the infamous Filius Canis scene), which is never a good thing, because this kind of artistic decision never succeeds in shaming the discontented, but often ends up pissing off the neutral or even the supportive ones (even I had to cut most of that scene out of my recorded playthrough, because it had nothing to do with the game and only stood out as a miserable, self-apologetic embarrassment). It feels as if, at some point, the game’s magic and logic simply got the better of him, and pushed him into the dangerous direction of making «the visual novel to end all visual novels» or something, taking on some subtle, unwritten epic pledge that no single person could ever hope to keep. 

There have been speculations that progress on the game slowed down and then completely stopped due to a variety of personal reasons (health, family, etc.), but to me it looked like a classic case of burn-out — the promise of the game simply became too much for the poor guy to handle, and left him buried waist-deep in the ruins. He was at least capable of rounding things up to formally complete «Season 1», leaving us with a symbolic cliffhanger — alleged execution of one of those game characters who took control of his own life, as if in an act of spiteful revenge (of course, it’s not technically an execution, but since, at present, there is absolutely no hope for Season 2 to ever appear on the horizon, might as well be an execution). But then he broke down for good — and I have a strong suspicion that, to a large extent, this was because he realized that, in order for this thing to proceed, it needs to get better, and he was unable to make it better. At this point, ambitions were outweighing talent, and he could not bring himself to defile his creation by drowning it in mediocrity... so he just choked it. 

It’s a sad, sad situation, as Elton John would say. At its still-relatively-lightweight best, The DeLuca Family offered a unique premise, a set of colorfully clichéd-but-idiosyncratic characters who felt alive, and unpredictable twists and detours that bounced between goofiness and tragedy in a rational manner. It never was much of a «game», but it gave you just enough agency to feel yourself included in that universe and set your own pace for its events to unfurl. Even when its humor went on the wane, its dialogs got way too long-winded, and its promised lewdness turned out not to be what it was hoped to be, I still kept following it to the end because, in a way, I felt myself to be under that contract — pledging to protect and woo the exquisite ladies of the house no matter what happened. But after «My Name Is Luna» came out, I instinctively knew that it was bound to crash, and crash it did.

I still recommend everybody to download and play this game (maybe even pay for it on Steam if you got an extra buck to burn), honoring it the same way people honor, say, the first and last season of Firefly — it’s all about the journey, and then about thinking for the rest of your life of how that journey could have ended. Now, of course, there is still a minuscule chance of Hopes getting his second breath someday, or of him yielding the rights to some adoring and capable fan who’d be able to both understand his vision and expand it further. But do not hold your breath: the probability here barely rises above zero, and even if a miracle does occur, there is no guarantee whatsoever that after such a long break, things will truly pick up from where they ended with the same level of devotion and inspiration.

Being A DIK: The Official Review

BEING A DIK: The Official PatreonGamer Review

General Verdict: One of the most creative adult games ever made — and one of the saddest examples of watching creativity wither and die before our very eyes...

Oh boy, here we go... deep breath... okay, ready or not, here I come.

Although I normally dislike reviewing, much less giving an overall judgement to, games that are as of yet incomplete, it is probably high time (maybe even a bit overdue) to spill the proverbial five cents on Being A DIK, one of the most revered and admired AVNs of the past decade. I have at least two pretty good excuses: (a) judging by the current speed of Dr. PinkCake’s updates, it is less and less likely with each day that the game will ever be completed in my (or his, for that matter) lifetime anyway; and (b) running a little ahead of the story — I strongly believe that the game’s greatest, finest days are long since over, and I am not really sure what kind of miracle is needed to get it up to the benchmark-setting glory days of its first two «seasons». So while I certainly reserve the right to update and amend this review anytime in the future, I’ll also try to write it with a bit of a conclusive flair. If the future proves me wrong on any counts, hey, I’ll be glad to be proven wrong. (But I doubt it).

THE HAPPY PART: BECOMING A DIK

Anyway, let’s go back to the beginning, which is where I was lucky to be at — I’d just gotten into the art of the visual novel around 2019, back when Dr. PinkCake had just finished his first AVN, Acting Lessons, and was putting the finishing touches on the first episode of his new project, which was apparently going to be set in the same fictional universe and focus on a much younger protagonist during his early college days — an AVN equivalent of the coming-of-age school drama à la American Pie or something. Acting Lessons was a fine AVN in its own right, a classic «use-your-right-hand-to-jack-off, use-your-left-hand-to-dry-your-tears» melodrama that made good history on its own — but it was Dr. PinkCake’s first experience, and thus, a bit too short and a bit too rough around the edges from a technical perspective. Subsequently, while we can only speculate, I do believe that Dr. PinkCake made a solemn vow before the altar of Beelzebub (or somebody with a comparably respectable pedigree) that his next try would yield the single finest adult visual novel ever made by a single mortal man. 

And Beelzebub listened, because at that time we hadn’t really seen anything like Being A DIK. There are many parameters according to which we can rate an AVN — the storyline, the choice system, the game mechanics, the graphics, the animations, the sound, the replayability value, etc. — and while nothing made in this world is completely above criticism, one thing that was immediately visible about the very first episodes of the game is that its creator took care of everything. All of these parameters were seriously taken into consideration. All of them. There are many wonderful AVNs around that try to woo you with a few of these aspects, but they almost always end up lacking in one department or another. Great story, but no sound. Mouth-watering animations, but a dumb story. Magnificent choice system with near-endless replayability, but scarce and laconic artwork without animations, and so on. Dr. PinkCake looked at all that and said, «Fuck that shit. I’m gonna be the hardest-working man in this business, like James Brown, and I’m gonna make the best-rounded adult video game of all time». 

And for quite a while, the man delivered on the promise. If you take any single aspect of the first two seasons of Being A DIK, there will probably be at least one, usually more, games that do it better (except maybe for the music, which I will touch upon in more detail later). But the greatness of Being A DIK is precisely that it is a jack-of-all-trades, the most well-balanced, nutritious meal you’re getting in a single setting. If it is indeed true that the man takes care of everything on his own, without any outside help, he’s not even James Brown — he’s frickin’ Paul McCartney playing all of his instruments on his own. The story, the renders, the animations, the mini-games, the choice system, the licensed music tracks... to be able to take care of all that and to take care of it so good, honestly, sometimes I wonder (or, at least, used to wonder) how much better off Earth might have been if we all had Dr. PinkCake as Lord God Emperor watching all over us. He’d probably be able to stop all wars, eliminate taxes, give everybody central heating, and ban dubstep from the airwaves all at the same time. At least, for the first two seasons of his rule. 

Unlike Acting Lessons, a short game which was largely structured as a single melodramatic story with a classic story-telling progression, Being A DIK is more of a TV show equivalent — the diary of a young man going through the trials and tribulations of college, with all of its ups and downs but no carefully pre-planned story arc. That said, although the game has elements of «sandbox» («free roam») gameplay, the overall progression is linear — it’s not just a dating sim where the main storyline hardly ever takes precedence over adding more hot bangable chicks to your harem, like Summertime Saga; it’s a «journey into adulthood», where your character is supposed to gradually progress from the level of young inexperienced party animal to that of a mature, responsible member of society with potential of real commitment. Along the way, there’ll be plenty of specific adventures, but mostly it’s a character study — both you and your nearby male and female NPCs are supposed to grow and learn to understand themselves and others (which still, fortunately, leaves plenty of space to get wild). 

This progression, according to Dr. PinkCake’s original plan, may go along two (or three, if you so prefer) possible paths: the «DIK» route and the «CHICK» route, or a balance between the two (which, like most «neutral» paths in choice-based RPGs, is actually the least interesting strategy to take, because, with a few exceptions, all it does is lock you out of the most exciting «extreme» choices on either side — you are, in fact, strongly encouraged to keep two different playthroughs from the very beginning, so as to get the most out of the game). The «DIK» strategy involves the player being more mischievous, arrogant, extravert, and (occasionally) asshole-ish, while the «CHICK» choices are consistently more gentlemanly and considerate of others — which, of course, means that your chosen path will endear you to a certain type of girls, while a certain other type will soon learn to avoid you like the plague. I sometimes lament about the lack of truly tricky strategies that would somehow allow you to get on the good side of both Quinn (the game’s equivalent of Chaotic Evil) and Jill (the embodiment of Lawful Good), but I suppose even an AVN magician like Dr. PinkCake couldn’t convincingly design such a strategy on his own, so I guess we’ll have to make good with swapping between different save files. 

That said, much of the time you do have enough leeway to veer between the «Renegade» (DIK) and «Paragon» (CHICK) sides of things — for instance, be generally courteous, romantic, and understanding for the ladies but mean and violent when it comes to handling the gents, be they of the more assholish persuasion (the Alpha jocks) or even your own pals. If you prefer a single playthrough, options for your own scenario are nearly limitless — most likely, though, nobody is going to prefer a single playthrough, because we all come here for the goodies, and any single playthrough, want it or not, locks you out of at least some of them unless you make use of unofficial mods or any other trickery. 

Besides, different playthroughs involve doing different things and holding different conversations with a lot of the NPCs, and Dr. PinkCake’s principle is that all the NPCs, even minor ones, should have their own quirks and personalities. As unrealistic as the college in which most of the action takes place really is (we’ll get down to that soon enough), it feels like it is populated by real people, not just a bunch of tits and asses surrounded by a swarm of faceless, interchangeable minor characters. Most of them have their problems, which you will have to volunteer to solve if you want to get on their good side, and many of the choices will be tough to make in the situation of a single playthrough (e.g. yield to sweet temptation and reap an instant «cheap» reward — or resist it and hope for a bigger, deeper, more satisfying reward later on). 

As he did in Acting Lessons (and now does it in more details and with more depth), Dr. PinkCake generally respects his women — despite, every now and then, making a point of poking fun at «woke» exaggerated feminist values and stuck-up leftist attitudes. Like in most games, the ladies are generally divided into the «slut» and the «prude» camps, but the distinction is never black and white, as the «sluts» eventually reveal their own soul, sensitivity, and intellect, while the «prudes», with the right approach, can be prodded into revealing their own inner slut as well. All of this is usually taken at the right pace — not too quickly, but so as not to leave you blue-balled for too long, either — and with enough realism, as long as we make peace with the general porn game convention («all women are supposed to instantly fall for a guy with a sweet smile and a big dick — unless they don’t quite understand it yet, in which case it’s only a matter of time. A small matter of time»). Well, I guess if we didn’t have that porn game convention, we probably wouldn’t have any porn games, so Dr. PinkCake may be excused here for the exact same reason why most of the women in this game have (on the average) twice as large breast sizes as you’d expect to see in real life. Porn game conventions! 

From the very beginning, game art and animation were among Dr. PinkCake’s strongest lures as well. Despite working with the same generic DAZ models as everyone else, he somehow possesses the gift of squeezing more lifelike-ness, charm, and sexiness from them than the absolute majority of his competitors. I am not a big fan of the MC (particularly his awful buzz cut which is probably meant to stress his simple working-class pedigree, but what kind of girl could really fall for that hair?), but there is probably not a single girl in the game on which I have not developed at least a small crush (except the exaggeratedly depicted «woke» feminists, of course) — even the heavily tattooed ones (and I am normally not a fan of tattoos in real life porn). Dr. PinkCake is always generous with his renders, shifting perspective and expression for his characters multiple times over a single scene, and his girls can do everything — joy, sadness, seriousness, hilariousness, seduction, rejection, orgasmic bliss, and deep tragedy. A character like Quinn can remain the Impenetrable Enigma until she softens up to have almost tender sex with the MC — and a character like Isabella can be the stern, unbreakable Ice Queen until you thaw her out into an intimate emotional breakdown. 

Animations, generally (though not always) reserved for the sex scenes, at the time of the game’s first episodes were really at the top of the heap and still look fine today, though, of course, some developers with bigger budgets and larger teams can now do technically far more impressive jobs. Technically, but not substantially: when Dr. PinkCake’s beauties start to shake their tits, wiggle their asses, or take charge in the cowgirl position, the effect is absolutely lifelike. The scene in Episode Six where Bella, the Ice Queen librarian, finally relents and gives you her first titjob, is downright mesmerizing when it comes to animations — and it’s not just because of the oversized boobs, as the eyes and lips communicate a whole host of thoughts at the exact moment that her titflesh is smoothly sliding around your throbbing shaft... whoah, sorry, got carried away there for a moment. 

"Eyes up here... no, eyes down there... no, up here... oh fuck."

As if the beautiful visuals and silk-smooth animations weren’t enough, from the very beginning of the game Dr. PinkCake also made the best use of that one invisible force which, often, can turn even a generic AVN into an experience — the music. The game has no sound effects, which some people can probably get upset about, but this seems to have been an intentional «tasteful» decision on the game designer’s part, and I can respect that: to some, if your characters aren’t voiced, throwing in sounds of sloppy blowjobs and orgasmic moans can feel weirdly out of place. But the game does have music a-plenty, and here Dr. PinkCake continues with the same flair he’d already demonstrated in Acting Lessons, except on a whole new level, now that his income has allowed him to license higher quality and more diverse music for various episodes. 

Unfortunately, the tracks that constituted the bulk of the game’s original musical content and, for a long time, were most closely associated with Being A DIK — a set of rambunctious, catchy pop-punk tunes by the Swedish band The Friday Prophets — eventually had to be removed from the game, apparently, after the band members understood that the only way they were going to be remembered in this world was through a porn game (well congrats boys, now that you’ve revoked the license you aren’t going to be remembered through much of anything). Hopefully there are still some unofficial mods that help you return the original music, because, honestly, I cannot imagine any of the episodes of the game’s first two seasons not opening up with the merry "LET’S GO!!" of ‘Punk Rock Flu’. It’s not very great music on its own, but it fits perfectly with the game’s mischievous-but-in-good-fun atmosphere — as does most of the rest, with Dr. PinkCake collecting a great selection of pop, rock, folk, electronic, and even classical tracks that always fit and enhance the general mood of the scene. While some AVN creators pay more attention to musical accompaniment than others, I can state with certainty that not a single game I’ve played in the genre even comes close to lavishing the same sonic care on its players as Being A DIK does. 

But probably the single greatest thing about Being A DIK — especially if, like myself, you have been steadily following the new episodes, impatiently waiting for each new one to appear — was the feeling of expansive growth and endless creativity of its author. Each new episode was bigger than the previous one, and not because of simplistic and boring padding (e.g. walls of generic dialog that many AVN creators often fling at us just to artificially inflate the game’s running time), but because of real worthwhile reasons. Each episode added new characters with new personalities, or drastically expanded on the personalities of characters from previous episodes. Animations got longer and more detailed. New musical tracks continued to be licensed. Mini-games, winning which helped you get extra bonuses (such as hidden renders or money), got more challenging — or, if their challenge was exhausted, got replaced by other mini-games. (I am not generally a big fan of mini-games in choice-based visual novels, but Dr. PinkCake’s challenges are so diverse and cover so many bases, from QTE stuff to word games to puzzlers to everything in between, that I make an exception in his case). 

The culminating moment of this growth happened, I believe, sometime around Episode 6 ("Damage Control"), midway through season 2 of the game. Not only was it huge, but it had everything, absolutely everything going for it. A swarm of new music tracks. The mansion-repairing mini-game (quite a marvelous micro-management simulator). Some moments in the library which finally reminded us that college is not merely for having parties and wild sex, but is sometimes, you know, a place for studying. A long and twisted sequence of D&D playing with different strategies designed for the DIK and CHICK paths. Most importantly, the best sex scenes up to date — Josy and Maya proving "for real" that their much-touted lesbian relationship was not just a trendy put-on; bad girl Quinn showing her sensitive and vulnerable soul for the first time once the MC takes her under his wing after her terrible setback (with the accompanying I made a journey through the darkness... soundtrack adding a whole lot of deep mystery); Isabella’s previously-mentioned titjob actually feeling like a glorious moment of sexual self-liberation (Origami Pigeon’s ‘We Can’t Slow Down’ accompanying it really enhances the atmosphere of "fuck it, I can’t fight this feeling, I want to just go with the flow and be happy"). 

At this time, I was ready to forgive all of the game’s weak points — to which I’ll get in a moment — and just lose myself in this fantastic universe which seemed to have it all. Burgmeister & Royce really felt like a paradise, inhabited by the best friends and hottest girls you could only dream of (or, rather, couldn’t even dream of) in real life. Episode Six is the main reason why my rating for Being A DIK will always be a five out of five — no matter what happens in the future, because a sprawling work of art should always be judged by its peaks, not by whatever depths it might eventually sink to due to unfavorable circumstances. 

THE SAD PART: STAYING A DIK

Unfortunately, though, this is precisely what happened to Being A DIK. Once you’ve gone all the way to the top, sooner or later, there will be nowhere to go but down — particularly if you have no idea of when to stop. What I shall write below will, no doubt, sadden (maybe even offend) the large army of Dr. PinkCake’s fanatical followers who have fallen under the game’s spell so hard they probably wouldn’t abandon it even if he’d sold the executive producer rights to Kathleen Kennedy — but while I always try to look for the best aspects in every AVN I play, and am ready to defend, for various reasons, a lot of the titles that attract dissatisfied reviews, I also refuse to put on rose-colored glasses even for my favorite games, and, most importantly, I am a firm believer in the power of brevity. Like a great TV show, a great episodic game, adult or not, also has to know when to stop, so as not to descend into boredom, self-repetition, or even self-parody. At a certain point, great aspects of each great venture start getting bleak and bring in diminished returns, while the poorer aspects of each such venture start to show with more and more vehemence. This, alas, was the fate of Being A DIK. 

Most of the «endless», episodically released adult games, sooner or later, end up bogged down in their own problems — but at least those games that follow the simulator-in-a-sandbox principle can theoretically be kept up running forever, as long as the developer keeps thinking up small separate stories with various characters, as well as adding new, fresh faces all the time (this is the way simulators like Mythic Manor and Summertime Saga work, for instance — or, rather, used to work before their developers got lazy and complacent). Being A DIK, from the start, was different; it wanted to tell a looooong story — a saga of several tightly interconnected characters within one small environment — and once the going got good, it decided that the story could pretty much run forever. After all, the MC has at least four or five years of college before him, so why hurry and wrap things up? 

The problem — and here we go from worshipping Dr. PinkCake’s innumerable strong sides to reluctantly admitting his weak ones — is that the game creator is not really all that much of a story-teller. This was already evident with Acting Lessons, which wooed us with its visuals, music, and player agency, but the story itself was largely an amalgamation of generic tropes which, if you just stuck to the dialog without everything else, would be corny, soapy, and shallow. For Being A DIK, Dr. PinkCake did not unexpectedly grow himself any major writer’s talent. Some of the dialog is tolerable and modestly witty, some tolerably humorous (this is a college dramedy, so expect quite a bit of below-the-belt locker-room humor), but on top of all the porn and all the dirty jokes, Dr. PinkCake wants to pile up drama... and he’s not really good on drama, unless you’re actually determined to count teary stories of 18-year olds’ hook-ups and break-ups as modern day Shakespeare. 

And as the game goes on, there is more and more drama. Characters originally introduced as lightweight and sweet get their «personality growth» through all sorts of traumas and misfortunes and family problems and stuff that we’ve all read and seen in pulpy novels and cheap sitcoms. Of course there’s going to be family members with terminal illnesses. Of course there’ll be weird love triangles. Of course there’ll be jealousy and revenge and unrealistic coincidences. Of course there’ll be the usual Romeo-and-Juliet-meet-21st-century stuff, utterly unimaginable in the real world (one of the most despised antagonists is even called Tybalt, for Chrissake!). As long as the drama is kept relatively in check — not overwhelming everything else — tolerating it, and even getting sympathetic to bits of it, especially when it is well fed with the visuals and the music, is not difficult. But by the end of Season Two, every other aspect of the game seems to pale and retreat in the corners compared to the Big Psychological Conflicts of the characters... most of which, frankly speaking, seem to be puffed up to ridiculous heights. 

Given the scope of the game, it would take kilometers of text to properly explain everything that does not make sense about the emotional manipulation in the game — but let me limit myself to just one serious point: in all of its duration, the game still has not managed to properly explain what kind of intellectual or pragmatic benefits does staying at the «Burgmeister & Royce» college actually bring. There is not a single student in the game who is even close to understanding if this sort of «education» matches his / her dreams and expectations (other than the «easy credits and vaginas» ideology espoused by our pal Derek, easily the most honest of them all because he, unlike all the others, has no problem admitting that he’s nothing but a lazy deadbeat, and proud of it). In fact, there is not a single student in the game who has any dreams at all — everybody just lives for the moment, said «moment» usually meaning ‘hooking up’ and ‘partying all night long’. Even the admittedly diligent and earnest ladies like Jill or Maya mainly just... exist, as objects of the MC’s admiration and lust. 

Because of this, it is difficult — impossible, even — to take any of the game’s drama that is directly related to college life seriously. The worst culprit is unquestionably the big plot line that has to do with Maya’s inability to pay her tuition: it’s one thing to never have heard of student loans (or maybe they just don’t exist in Dr. PinkCake’s alternate universe), but quite another thing to make us care for a character whose happiness depends on being able to stay in a place whose usefulness has always been in doubt from the very beginning. Dr. PinkCake does not seem to understand that Big Drama does not grow on any random tree branch on which you decide to stick it; Big Drama needs proper context, and if he has failed to present his imaginary university as a place whose attraction runs beyond the simple pleasures of beer in a plastic cup and pussy galore, how can there be any believable drama attached to this place? And how justified can it be to expose us to more and more and more of that drama with each new episode? 

But where the game really hit rock bottom with the melodramatic approach was in between Seasons 2 and 3, with the lengthy «Interlude» that temporarily took the agency from our MC and put it in the hands of his former crush, Zoey. Apart from one nice sex scene and an okayish temporary change in art style with Zoey’s diary (very strong Life Is Strange vibes in there), to me this felt like a couple hours of time wasted on resisting being emotionally manipulated into sympathizing with a confused teen making all sorts of stupid decisions, socializing with a bunch of largely unsympathetic deadbeats (if you are a great fan of tattoo art, this will make things easier for you; I am not, which made this a more aggravating factor). There was no humor. No dialog suggesting even the tiniest hints at these characters’ individuality (they were just cut-outs spewing the usual life-is-hard-but-life-is-beautiful banalities). No dialog depth extending beyond the blandest, regurgitated philosophical / therapeutical common places and clichés. And, worst of all, almost no lewd stuff — as if Dr. PinkCake had finally forgotten the game’s one true purpose, converting himself into believing that Being A DIK is, first and foremost, Great Modern Drama with a bit of adult content for extra artistic purposes (and not just to satisfy your loins). If not for the fact that Episode Nine at least redeemed itself with some heavy action, I might have dropped the game in frustration back there and then. 

Speaking of heavy action, though, there is another serious looming problem here. Theoretically, sandbox-styled games like Summertime Saga or Mythic Manor can run forever, like GTA Online, because all their creators have to do is occasionally come up with new mini-stories and create tons of extra side characters to keep things fresh. But Being A DIK, despite having an impressive variety of girls for you to choose, is a story with a plot, meaning that, want it or not, you have to keep the emphasis on your main characters — Maya, Josy, Bella, Jill, Sage, Quinn, and others. Sooner or later, interacting with them, both emotionally and physically, is bound to run out of steam. They cannot simply go on uncovering hitherto hidden aspects of their personalities forever — so every once in a while, Dr. PinkCake has to resort to really weird deus-ex-machina plot twists that become less and less believable as the game goes on. And sex? Gradually «conquering» each of the girls over the first two seasons is great, but where exactly can you go once the conquest is made? At least in Episode Nine, Dr. PinkCake came up with the idea of the Halloween setting, taking the cosplay aspect of the game to its limits. But already in Episode Ten, once the partying is (temporarily) over, much of the fucking becomes perfunctory, just fucking for fucking’s sake — something that might be great in real life, but can’t help but become tedious on-screen. 

And the developer’s decision to «stick to realism» does not really help in this situation — things could certainly be spiced up if we saw, for instance, our hero have a threesome with Jill and Quinn, or introducing Jill to the joys of anal sex, or double-teaming one of the girls with Derek (though I suppose most fans of the game aren’t really into sharing), but any such fantasies would go against the rules of the Being A DIK universe, so... can’t be done. (To alleviate this issue, we have the «special render» system, but these are just isolated fantasy pics, not full-fledged scenes). Not that the rules of that universe always match those in the real world — have you ever seen a real-life college that would allow its students to dress that sluttily on campus? or its teachers, for that matter — but they do have their own logic. And by Season Three, that logic has pretty much run its course with most of the established characters. There is nothing refreshingly new we can learn about them, unless Dr. PinkCake decides to spring another unbelievable Luke-I-am-your-father jack-in-the-box at us. 

One thing I have noticed is that the last few episodes of the game have attracted a lot of user complaints about the pervasiveness of annoying and distracting mini-games — something that rarely happened in Seasons 1 and 2, even if mini-games had always been an integral part of the whole experience, and, like everything else, actually kept getting better and better with each new episode. It is true that they got a bit more complicated and demanding in the latest season (like the math class game, for instance, which has subtly progressed from kindergarten level to a genuine puzzler), causing extra headaches for those who just want to relax and have fun. But I think the real discomfort comes not from the games as such, but more with the fact that we now perceive these games as desperate filler, masking the lack of fresh new ideas. The typical episode used to be something like FUNNY — MINI-GAME — FUNNY — DRAMA — LEWD — FUNNY — MINI-GAME — HOT SEX — DRAMA. Now it’s more like DRAMA — DRAMA — MINI-GAME — MORE DRAMA — MINI-GAME — NOT TOO FUNNY — LEWD — DRAMA — DRAMA — DRAMA — DRAMATICALLY DRAMATIC DRAMA — MINI-GAME — A BIT OF SEX (finally!). 

Another frequent complaint is about the free roam sections, which I wouldn’t mind too much if they were equipped with a better navigation system — getting from Point A to Point B in any of the frat / sorority mansions is always a chore because the direction arrows tend to be confusing. Other than that, the free roams were generally designed with the noble purpose of rewarding the player for being attentive, inquisitive, and curious — during these, you had the option to play extra mini-games on your phone, search for cleverly hidden special renders, do tasks for extra money, and pick up brief additional encounters for more relationship points with the girls or friendship points with the boys. But, again, as time went by, the free roam sections became bigger and bigger, sometimes disorienting and confusing rather than entertaining, and ultimately just pissing off the not-so-patient players. 

Again, it would not be so bad if each of the free roams had its own identity. And earlier in the game, they did (there were short free roams in your house, in the different dorms and mansions, in Bella’s house, etc.). But eventually, «free roams» began to correspond to «parties» — and it became just one party after another, one after another, so that I finally lost count. At some point, everything in Being A DIK started revolving around parties. If you’re not having a party, you’re probably preparing for one, or recovering from a hangover after one before it’s time to start planning for the next party. Yes, we get it, frat life is about partying — but I, for one, would think that there’s pretty much nowhere to go after the huge-as-heck Halloween party in Episode Nine, and yet here we go again... 

Cutting an already overlong story short: Being A DIK is a game that, as of today, can be accused of falling to its own greatness. With the first two seasons (all the way up to Episode Six, to be precise), Dr. PinkCake set the AVN bar as high as it could possibly go — that would have been the perfect point to start thinking about how to quit while still on top. Perhaps that one super-important choice you make at the end of Season 2 — going steady with one of your main love interests or staying single and open to hook-ups — should have been the final big choice of the game, rather than simply the beginning of a very painful process where each new episode now had to feature at least five or six seriously divergent paths, each of which drastically limited your options (I have to keep about a dozen different save files now to get access to all of the game’s content, instead of the former two, one for the DIK route and one for the CHICK one). Perhaps that big, sprawling, visually inventive Halloween mega-party could have been the final big event of the game, heralding a new start for our MC. Perhaps all of his choices and decisions could be somehow summarized at that point, counting to your ability or inability to select the ending that works best for you. Perhaps... 

...but anyway, it’s too late for dreaming. Miracles do happen every once in a while, and I, for one, would be glad to see Being A DIK somehow managing to return to its former glory — except that I think it’s about as possible at present as finding the Fountain of Youth or breaking the speed of light. I will, of course, continue to follow the game’s progress — out of respect and admiration for Dr. PinkCake’s former glories, if nothing else — and like I already said, I reserve the right to update or modify this review as I see fit. But for now, to me, Being A DIK is six episodes of funny, touching, and ridiculously hot entertainment, followed by a long after-life in which blandness and tediousness occasionally mix with flashes of nostalgic bliss. For those six episodes alone, my rating is forever fixed at five stars and won’t ever budge, no matter to which potential depths of boredom the game might sink in the future. But somewhere in here lies a hidden lesson to artists: Remember your natural limits. Don’t lose your head over success. Try not to succumb to fan pressure or commercial gain. Retire — or, at least, change your game — while you’re still on top. Do you really want to go the way of The Office or Lost? 

Bottomline: Thank you, Dr. PinkCake, for giving us a beautiful and unforgettable masterpiece of a game. And damn you, Dr. PinkCake, for slowly and inevitably turning your masterpiece into a trainwreck.

Acting Lessons: The Official Review

ACTING LESSONS: The Official PatreonGamer Review

General Verdict: Simple, short, antiquated, but a powerful emotional roller-coaster if you agree to lower your intellectual defenses for a few hours.

Oh, Dr. PinkCake. These days, of course, he is mostly known for his never-ending epic college dorm saga of Being A DIK — a monumental achievement in its own right — and most fans of that game, if they are sufficiently curious, only arrive at his first tentative entry into the world of adult visual novels in retrospect.

There’s nothing surprising about that. Compared to Being A DIK, especially its later episodes, Acting Lessons does feel not only as a pretty old game, but also as a fledgling game — a game whose writer has no idea yet of what the future holds in store for him. In the realm of AVNs, Acting Lessons is like The Hobbit compared to Being A DIK as its Lord Of The Rings (and the comparison also makes sense because there are minor details in the plot linking both games, so you know they take place in the same fictional universe). But, just like The Hobbit, Acting Lessons still retains its own cute, cozy, «homebrewn» charm that gives it its own point of attraction — a special allure which Being A DIK is not meant to reproduce, and which in itself makes the game still worth playing on its own after all these years. (Besides, at least it’s actually completed, which is more than anyone can say about Being A DIK after all those years and years and years of development!)

From a certain point of view, it does make sense to play Acting Lessons as a «prequel», because it is formally targeted at an older type of audience than Being A DIK. In Dr. PinkCake’s magnum opus, you play as a teenager going through college, making the game more relatable to horny 18-year olds not getting enough of that sweet poontang in real life. In the «prequel», however, your character is a middle-aged guy — that exact same teenager with all of his college experience long gone by — who, despite all his positive qualities, has somehow never managed to form a steady relationship (this aspect is not really justified all too well in the story), and ends up subconsciously looking for a sweet young angel to lighten up his life... kind of a typical trope in AVNs with middle-aged protagonists, but Dr. PinkCake would not be Dr. PinkCake if he didn’t attempt to put his own pink-cakey twist on it. In any case, I can totally see all of us beginning to play Being A DIK at the age of 18, reaching 40 by the time it is finally finished, and then going all the way back to Acting Lessons for a «mature» ending to our imaginary life story.

The game is short — my complete recorded unhurried playthrough, even including most of the alternate paths you can take, takes about 16 hours, which is about as long as a single episode of Being A DIK runs these days — but this is not a criticism, because it achieves everything it set out to achieve in that time length (well, almost everything — read on). Much worse is the fact that, what with its representing Dr. PinkCake’s first experience with RenPy and Daz 3D models, the game is not as graphically satisfying as we’d like it to be. Although the girls are quite pretty, and the renders highlighting their prettiness are quite numerous, many still suffer from weird perspectives and unnatural body proportions — and all of the animations are in desperate need of remastering, as they mainly consist of 2-3 frames instead of using more complicated algorithms to ensure smooth flow. (In this, and quite a few other technical ways, Acting Lessons is adorably similar to PhillyGames’ Depraved Awakening — both of these masters would reach their technical peaks with their second game, raising the professional stakes but also inescapably losing some of the endearing innocence of inexperience).

Lack of experience is also evident in other areas: for instance, a relatively generic set of choices for music tracks, mostly the same old Kevin McLeod and other stuff that people use when they cannot afford licensing fees for more sophisticated compositions — although, much to Dr. PinkCake’s honor, he does manage to wring out the maximum emotional effect possible even out of these freebies (more on that later). The dialog between characters, while pretty decent on the whole, surprisingly turns to generic cringe during the sex scenes — it’s a bit off-putting when you have just sat through what felt like a meaningful, intelligent conversation with a girl and then it’s the usual "oh, your dick is so big! oh, I want your cum all over my face!" once the sex starts, unless the idea is that your intelligent partner intentionally imitates a brainless sex-robot doll porn star for your carnal pleasure, which I am not really sure the idea is. (Also, the sex dialog would get better in Being A DIK). And there are a few silly tricks inherited from regular video games that really do not work — for instance, all those ominous "Megan will remember that", "Melissa is upset with you", etc. warnings scattered all over the place that are just as useless as they were when TellTale Games introduced them in The Walking Dead adventure series. (Not surprising they would be gone in Being A DIK as well).

These are all problems I can easily live with, though, as long as the game tells a good story, gives you enough playing choice, and stirs up the right feelings. In all of these areas, the results are mixed — far from perfect, but efficient enough to admit that the game does work.

Let’s begin with the overall genre characterization: Acting Lessons is a 100%-certified soapy melodrama, intended to manipulate your feelings in fairly obvious ways. In the very first episode, you, the player, emerge as an affluent, but depressed character, mentally struggling after a humiliating break-up and desperately searching for just the right spark to light up your life. Of course, that spark just happens to take on the shape of a beautiful young girl, to whom you just happen to get a chance to play the role of the Knight In Shining Armor. Everything that happens after that develops in full accordance with the age-old textbook of soapy melodrama as well. There will be broken families, terminal diseases, household abuse, corporate power abuse, desperate love triangles, a black pal guy for comic relief, a detective mystery angle to prevent you from tuning out too early, and, of course, lots and lots of deus-ex-machina coincidences and «random» surprises. Officially, Acting Lessons may be taking place in the «real world», but this world is really about as real as any given world in an American (or Latin American) soap opera from the not-so-golden age of TV.

As long as you realize that, though, and as long as you consent, of your own free will and sane mind, to signing the Agreement To Be Manipulated, Acting Lessons is a cheesy little delight that truly has the potential to make you laugh, make you cry, make you feel ashamed of yourself, make you feel proud of yourself, make you feel small and insignificant, make you feel big and accomplished, and all of that without forgetting to make you feel, you know, whatever a porn game is supposed to make you feel (but beware, every once in a while you are going to forget that you are playing a porn game in the first place — and it’s not a bad thing).

Dr. PinkCake achieves these goals not with any kind of inventive plot brilliance, and certainly not with any amazingly well-written dialog (most of it is heavily clichéd), but rather with a clever combination of attractive visuals, aptly used music, and player agency. (And yes, player agency is very important. If, in real life, you found a gorgeous young girl standing on your porch in the falling rain, pleading for help because she’d just been evicted and had nobody else to turn to and no money to help her around, you probably wouldn’t be slamming the door in her face, thinking to yourself, sorry but no, I have no desire to turn my life into a cheap soap opera — on the contrary, it’d rather be, holy hell, I’m the luckiest guy on Earth whose life has just miraculously turned into a soap opera. That’s player agency, and Dr. PinkCake knows how to use it).

Most choice-based games follow three types of options: either your choices are simply cosmetic and do not matter at all except for elements of «flair» and your own world-building, or you have to decide between a «right» or «wrong» choice, with the latter locking you out of certain amounts of content or even leading to some sort of fatal outcome — or, in the best-designed games, it might be a choice between significantly different branching pathways. But while there is really not a lot of «true» branching in Acting Lessons, Dr. PinkCake’s main accent is on turning his game into a morality play — most of the significant choices you have to make will be testing your moral character, one way or another, and even if the tests themselves are fairly predictable, once you get inside the game, they work.

To make it work, though, Dr. PinkCake first has to get you in a tight vice grip. Your primary love interest in the game, Megan, seems to be very divisive. On one hand, she’s obviously nice, pretty (some would say gorgeous), physically attractive and all — on the other hand, she is intentionally depicted as very «vanilla», sort of a goody-two-shoes, saintly figure who might be willing to go for a tiny bit of theatrical mischief every once in a while (consider her Harley Quinn impersonation, for instance), but within such tightly restricted bounds that any idea of dirty talk in bed or, God forbid, anal sex with her will be utterly unimaginable. In other words, she probably resembles most of our girlfriends and wives, and who ever comes to the world of AVNs for that kind of partner?

However, for the entire first episode of the game, Dr. PinkCake tightly railroads you into establishing a connection with Megan — you cannot not dream about her, you cannot refuse to accept her into your house, etc., all you can really choose from is whether to be «just nice» or «very nice» to her. If you happen to be completely indifferent to the poor girl and her fate, you might as well quit in the middle of Episode 1, because whatever you do in the future will always revolve, at the very least, on the fact of your initial affection for Megan. Some might complain and call this a design flaw, but it’s not: Acting Lessons is not a free-roam open-world sandbox game, it’s a choice-based visual novel with a core story, and the protagonist’s obsession with Megan is as much of an inescapable core plot element as, say, Max and Chloe’s friendship in Life Is Strange. Take it or leave it.

Things become really interesting — and less rail-roaded — starting with Episode 2, when you are slowly, but inevitably begun to be bombarded with moral questions. Are you or are you not in a genuine «relationship» with Megan? How do you feel about cheating? Are you absolutely sure that she’s just the right type for you? Aren’t you really more attracted to any of the other major characters — such as Megan’s friend Melissa, who seems to be her complete opposite in just about every possible aspect of her life, being far more adventurous, uninhibited, and provocative (although, as it eventually turns out, with a long history of family abuse responsible for much of that behavior)? Or go even further and switch your allegiance to Rena, Megan’s partner in her acting classes, who has an even wilder streak going for her than Melissa? Is it OK to have affairs on the side with any of them, or, perhaps, even decide that one of them is far more precious to you than Megan, and ultimately leave her on the curbside?..

And I like how you have all these moral dilemmas thrown at you, and how you have to decide for yourself which ones are less or more significant (some of the «morally questionable» choices turn out to be quite safe in the long run, but others will ruin your chances forever). Dr. PinkCake has a knack for setting up temptation and playfully goading you into it — the sexy renders, the music, the pacing — and since we all know that the feel of the «forbidden fruit» can be ten times as orgasmic as any action gotten by a true Paladin, chances are you’ll spend about half of this game cumming like crazy in true sinnerman-mode, then feeling like treading the highway to Hell for the other half. Betrayal is a very powerful theme in the game, and even if you’re one of those who scream at the top of their lungs, «well I never did give a damn about that Megan anyway, the game just made me do it!», chances are you’ll be so loud precisely because deep down inside you feel bad about what just happened, and you need loudness to drown out your conscience...

It all culminates in THAT ONE AWFUL CHOICE you are forced to make by the author late in the game — yes, the one that is probably responsible for the majority of the negative reactions and thumbs down on the part of players who believe their agency has been insulted because they are being forcibly deprived of a potential happy ending. I understand their rage and indignation, but cannot agree with their rationalization. Want it or not, choice-based games are always about limiting your choices. Put it this way: if your character lives on a block that has a diner, a barber shop, and a drugstore on it and the episode starts and you get the options "Go to the diner" and "Go to the barber shop", you will probably not be raving and ranting about how the game fucks you over by not letting you "Go to the drugstore", taking your agency away and spitting on your player choice. One way or another, you are still playing the story pre-designed by the author for you, not truly inventing one of your own (though you may be served an illusion of it). And the story of Acting Lessons, like a Greek drama or an American romantic soap opera, simply happens to be designed with a tragedy in mind. If you believe a «porn game» should have no place for tragedy, I’m not going to argue, but I think that by the time THAT ONE AWFUL CHOICE comes along, you should have figured out long ago that Acting Lessons aspires to be more than just a porn game — justifiedly or not, doesn’t really matter — and should probably be exempt from that line of thinking.

Besides, it’s not as if the player is being thrown inside the ONE AWFUL CHOICE completely unprepared (though I confess that it did come as a shock to me) — throughout the game, cheesy lightweight humor is consistently mixed with dramatic elements, and while the elements them­selves are all too familiar, their pacing is decent and the overall mix is well-balanced (better balanced, I’d say, than it is on the whole in Being A DIK, where large stretches of humor and large chunks of drama tend to get annoying after a while). In addition to humor and drama, there’s also a mystery which I find pretty well constructed for such an off-the-cuff genre as adult visual novels — I don’t know if I could call this an Agatha Christie-level piece of work or anything, but, again, to me the denouement came as a surprise, though, honestly, it’s not as if I spent a ton of time wrecking my brain on the issue of the villain’s identity.

My chief complaint about the game’s general design is, perhaps, that it seems to be way, way oriented at the player reaching a «canon» ending (SPOILER: MC ends with Megan, of course, and his best friend Liam ends with Rena). Again, it’s not really within our rights to tell the author about how to shape his own story, but I’d think that if he does leave space for at least two alternate endings with other love interests, then a big part of the game should not have been written as if Megan were still the central character. (Note that the only major unskippable sex scene in the game is with Megan, which makes dumping her in the aftermath look extremely awkward and unnatural). In fact, I have a suspicion that both of the alternate endings might have been designed almost as an afterthought — so as not to make this into even more of a «kinetic» novel than it already is — and although the alternate love stories themselves are pretty well fleshed out, both leave you feeling like an awful cheater, sacrificing the one who was really meant for you in favor of... well, you know, girls who wouldn’t mind taking it up the ass. Most importantly, Megan’s story, if you happen to dump it, just kind of... fizzles out without a satisfactory conclusion.

What I mean to say is that even if we generally accept the warped realities of Dr. PinkCake’s alternate universe and its soapy-melodrama-meets-porn-game rules, the game is still far from perfect even according to those rules — and I, for one, would be glad to see the developer revisit his first creation after he’s finally done with Being A DIK (say, a hundred and fifty years from now or something?), because Acting Lessons fully deserves a complete redo, starting with the technical aspects (graphics and animations) and ending with a bit more variety of possible paths and playstyles. (Or, perhaps, some inspired modders could take a hint).

Nevertheless, I was glad to play the game even as it is, completing all the paths twice for my recorded playthroughs and somehow still being emotionally touched each time. If you think about it real hard, this is weird, because essentially the game is all about getting you on a serious guilt trip for being way too irresistibly hot for the ladies which is, you know, not even your fault really (you’re already made this way). But then it actually does happen sometimes in real life, you know — people sometimes do break girls’ hearts by doing absolutely nothing and simply existing — so even in this respect, the game may ring a genuine bell or two.

One thing I would not want to change much are the musical choices: even if most of the tracks are generic free-use compositions, they have been very carefully selected to enhance the required moods — casual, ominous, joyful, melancholic, tragic, romantic, lustful — and I absolutely could not imagine the game without them. (One track in particular, ‘The Last Breath’ by Nicolai Heidlas, gets me every time — it’s the slow depressing piano-led composition that plays at the supposedly most heart-breaking moments in the game). Of all the people in the AVN business, only PhillyGames and Dr. PinkCake really care about having relatively tasteful and diverse musical backgrounds in their games — and Dr. PinkCake definitely has PhillyGames beat in terms of diversity. It’s weird that so many game developers do not understand how huge a role the choice of music does for these things — particularly in the absence of proper voice acting — and settle for either no sound at all, or just a few generic / ugly tracks on endless repeat. I’m pretty sure Dr. PinkCake could not have built himself up such a mighty fanbase without realising the importance of this aspect — proper use of music is that one secret ingredient in his recipe that makes you a fan without even realizing it.

Needless to say, in the years that followed this kind of soapy-melodramatic genre has been done with more depth and scope in AVNs (most notably, in DriftyGames’ Leap Of Faith, clearly inspired by Dr. PinkCake but also trying to push this thing even further). However, there’s always a thing or two to be said about the freshness and innocence of a pioneering effort. If you want to quickly and effortlessly experience how it feels to be a hot girl’s knight in shining armor, a dirty sexual cheater, a traumatized survivor, and a helpless victim of bizarre circumstances at the same time, no other game is as visceral about it as Acting Lessons — so forgive it its inevitable technical deficiencies, its inescapable clichés, and just give in to its emotional tug. (And don’t worry, it DOES have enough sex scenes to fulfill its primary purpose with honor as well!).

City Of Broken Dreamers: The Official Review

 CITY OF BROKEN DREAMERS: The Official PatreonGamer Review

General Verdict: A visually gorgeous and emotionally vibrant, if slightly predictable, dystopian sci-fi porn experience that, unfortunately, runs out of fresh ideas in its second half.

City Of Broken Dreamers is the second and so far the last AVN by PhillyGames, whose previous title, Depraved Awakening, as I have already written elsewhere, is easily my favorite AVN of all time, if (maybe?) for all the wrong reasons. Technically, however, DA was a water-testing effort from Philly: relatively short, graphically and sonically underwhelming, and only slowly getting better and more confident in itself as it went along. So, naturally, for his second game expectations were set pretty high — there was a clear unique talent here that was finally on the verge of being properly supported by technical expertise. 

And by all means, Philly leaves no one disappointed, as, from the very start, CoBD demonstrated a huge leap forward in effort. Static renders became more detailed and exquisite. Animations became plentiful and properly rendered, no longer confined to simple 2-3-frame repetition as it was in the early stages of DA — and not just confined to the sex scenes, either, as they now served additional purposes of marking classy screen entrances for the ladies, or, sometimes, just to illustrate the overall atmosphere of the game. There was much more music, much more exposition, extra little game-y details like «secrets» to look for... overall, on the technical front, CoBD remains an important milestone. Every now and then you can hear somebody grumble about how the render and animation quality has become antiquated for the standards of the mid-2020s, but that’s just nitpicking. If you’re expecting atmosphere and seduction rather than graphic-card-taxing heavy-duty realism, CoBD remains every bit as visually stunning today as it was on the day when Philly unleashed the first episode upon us. 

Genre-wise, CoBD at first seems to go in a completely different direction from DA: where Philly’s first game was a blatant tribute to the classic «noir» genre, focusing on a private detective investigating the dirty, seedy underbelly of the modern big city, CoBD takes us into a sci-fi, cyber-punkish, dystopian future where... uhm, a private mercenary is investigating the dirty, seedy underbelly of the futuristic big city. As you can see, not that much has changed: Philly merely transports us a few imaginary decades into the future, where the corps and the creeps are running things even more ruthlessly than today, and sex, just as it was in DA, acts as one of the most common commodities for bad and good guys alike. The atmosphere may be more Blade Runner now than it was a Chinatown / Requiem For A Dream mix in the earlier game, but the essence remains the same: you are going to meet a lot of impossibly hot women, some of whom will be trying to corrupt you with sex and some will be trying to save you with it — and some will offer a mixture of both at the same time. 

However, unlike it happens in DA, here the sex itself is formally not at the center of the game itself, but rather acts as a peripheral device, framing all the circumstances of the main plot — in which you have to help rescue a young persecuted girl in distress from the usual evil corporate overlords while exposing the evil corporate overlords’ corrupt schemes to the public. The plot, as many have pointed out already, is not particularly original and not particularly thrilling to deserve such multiple layers of convolution — but I do not think we should be too harsh on it, given that this is, after all, a porn game first and an ambitious take on the cyberpunk genre only second. On its own, without all the sexual content, it would hardly have a chance to endure as a sci-fi classic; but as a derivative exercise whose main goal is to provide a credible, immersive context for all the dick-and-pussy action, it certainly holds up better than most of the plot-based porn movies I’ve ever seen — and the sheer love that PhillyGames holds for the genre is evident from just about every single shot of the game. 

Speaking of the sexual content itself, I am a little on the fence here. On one hand, there is no arguing that the design of the girls is gorgeous. Of the five or six characters with whom you are going to get intimate on a regular basis (or not — it’s your free choice to enter or not to enter in a relationship with each of them), each single one has a distinct appearance and personality, and these personalities are going to determine the dynamics of their sexual evolution as well. Sure, they may be somewhat stereotypical and cliched, but in this day and age, good luck finding a well-written character that is not stereotypical anyway. What matters is how believable (and fappable) these stereotypes are — and I found myself drooling over most of them. 

Dr. Katie Hamilton is the classic «intellectual cutie with big tits» nerd dream, shy and blushing and polite and still adventurous enough to both accompany the MC on his dangerous missions and to try out anal penetration after having explored all the conventional boundaries. Ellen Lane is the feisty, dominant punk MILF with an attitude, though surprisingly resistant to anal action for her type (she’s not my favorite for all the tattoos and weird hairdstyles, but I’m still glad she’s in the game). Then there’s Chandra, the adorable-slash-terrifying glitzy spoiled teen brat who finds it fun to fuck older strangers just to piss off her corporate Mom — but Philly paints her as psychologically mature and stable enough to handle the consequences of those actions, and there’s an irresistible artistry to her narcissistic depravity that has, understandably, made her a particular fan favorite. Her horned friend Abby (the horns have to do with her medical condition, which is the central theme of the game) has an even more interesting character arc, going from being emotionally broken and suicidal to gradual redemption and a «healthier» embracing of her sexual urges as she eventually begins to represent a more mature and responsible counterpart to Chandra, while being every bit as wild on the carnal side of things. And Shanlon Russell is probably the quintessential image of the «corrupt TV celebrity slut» we all have in our minds: dashing, bossy, and bitchy in public — and a big fan of rough BDSM activities in private (the scenes with her and, later, with her loyal-but-treacherous assistant Teri, while not particularly disturbing, are still among the nastiest PhillyGames ever created). 

The two «main» characters (appearing most frequently and generally serving as the game’s primary advertising cards) have the largest amount of character evolution and are also notable in that they are «moldable»: depending on your actions in the game, you can put them on very different paths — a Paragon or a Renegade one, to use a Mass Effect analogy, with the Paragon one providing more moral satisfaction and the Renegade one essentially leading to more dirty and salacious outcomes which (you guessed it) also offer far more tasty sexual rewards. (The ruthless part is not really quintessentially «evil», though, so you’ll feel more like Donald Trump than Hitler for taking it — yes, with all that sweet pussy in tow.) Gloria, the innocent, traumatized blonde beauty whose warden you eventually become, is basically the equivalent of Judy from DA (except this time around, at least you’re not her father — CoBD is completely incest-free, by the way): you help her find the meaning of life and happiness not so much by saving her from the corps or curing her condition as you do through romance and sexual kinks (or you result in making her shape a far more cynical and nihilistic outlook on life, which reflects poorly on romance but does even more wonders on the sexual kinks). Her sex scenes come late in the game and are a bit on the so-so side at first, but quickly heat up to 100% (the "corrupt" finale with Victoria and Meredith is an unforgettable experience). 

And then, of course, there’s Victoria Shields. With Vicky, I think Philly’s goal was pretty obvious: create the ideal 3D woman for us — classy, intelligent, traditionally-aristocratically beautiful, perfectly shaped everywhere where it matters, bold, uninhibited, and a demon in the sack, just the kind of lady for one night with whom some people might agree to sacrifice their lives in the real world. On the whole, I would say he succeeded: at the time when Victoria first appeared on our screens (in 2019), there was nobody like her in the entire AVN business. Much more perfectly engineered than Mass Effect’s Miranda Lawson (the red hair and freckles alone are worth an extra million), she is the quintessential devil-in-disguise — although as you proceed with your choices, you have the subtle option to either transform her and make her find redemp­tion, or, on the contrary, be transformed by her and dissolve yourself in her overriding, ruthless, dominant personality. (I always try to keep both paths open with different saves). Some might complain that, perhaps, she gives in to the MC way too early (we can go all the way with her already in the very first episode), but I think that Philly himself knew — with a gal like Victoria, there’s no such thing as too early. You can ravage her as many times as you want and you’ll always be left wanting more of the same as if it were the first time all over again. Seriously, every time a scene with Victoria comes along I am reminded of why I love these 3D AVNs so much: there is hardly a single real porn actress alive who would exude as much sexuality and do it with such devilish flair. 

That said, while I like, love, or adore all of Philly’s characters, it is also hard not to acknowledge that many of the sex scenes feel a bit... gratuitous. In DA, where the actual plot all revolved around sex — perverted sex clubs, sex trafficking, sexual addiction, etc. — the scenes were always in their perfect place. City Of Broken Dreamers, on the other hand, is not really a game about sex. It is about preservation or loss of humanity, about fighting against The System, about survival, about technology, about dystopia — seriously, you could cut out pretty much every sex scene out of the game and it would have still made sense (though, as I said, the relatively generic plot would not have left a lot of space for serious enjoyment). Much of the action follows along the lines of «oh, we have about an hour to kill before the mission, wanna fuck?» or «hey, we might not be alive tomorrow if the plan goes wrong, wanna fuck just in case?» or «I feel really shitty right now because of all the terrible things going on in the world, can you just fuck me to make me feel better?». Yes, you can actually establish strong romantic connections with one of several potential love interests — but this comes very late in the game, by which time you’ll probably already have had sex with everything that moves (strangely enough, Philly is quite conservative in that he gives us no harem endings).

Of course, this cannot be a serious criticism, because this is a porn game supposed to have a lot of gratuitous sex; I’m just saying that every now and then there will be a sex scene feeling weirdly out of context — and that the overall plot is a bit undermined by that, as if we’re being instructed that in the technologically advanced, morally dystopian world of tomorrow everything will be beginning and ending with sex. If you’re OK with that, no problems. 

My main problem with the game — a serious one, though it still won’t deprive the title of a 5-star rating because I like to judge games by their strengths, not weaknesses — is the sheer length. I think that Philly made pretty much the same mistake as his main competition in the world of AVNs, Dr. PinkCake, is still continuing to make: after the success of Depraved Awakening and all the newly-gained confidence in his own strengths, he decided to stretch out his next title for as long as possible. My full recorded playthrough of the game takes about 50 hours as compared to DA’s 19, and, frankly, much of that — even including some of the sex scenes — is padding. The plot eventually runs out of fresh ideas, turning into an endless series of similar action scenes (run, hide, save a party member, have sex, run, hide, have sex, save a party member, run, hide, have sex, rinse and repeat over and over again). 

Worse, the sex scenes eventually run out of ideas. In the first third of the game, we are already introduced (including carnally introduced) to all the main characters. In the second third of the game, we pretty much get to go as far with all of them as possible (in Philly’s case, "as far as possible" usually means anal — really rough stuff is restricted to a few totally freaky characters like Shanlon, and it is introduced very early on). In the final third, it’s mostly just going through the motions, and it feels like the creator himself was getting tired of his creations — most of the final scenes seem very perfunctory and unsatisfying, unlike in DA, where Philly was just getting into the proper mood as he rounded off the plot. (The only exception is the final scene with Gloria, Victoria, and eventually Meredith — because it is the only scene from the finale that introduced a new angle to one of the characters). 

In other words, CoBD overstayed its welcome by a good 4–5 episodes at least — ironically, it still leaves us somewhat hanging, since it is clearly shown in the end that the "bad guys" have only suffered a temporary setback, and that the story about a few good guys battling futuristic corporate evil is only just beginning. It is unlikely, however, given the tired feel of the final episodes, that a sequel to this will ever happen — and maybe that’s for the better, since the game must have creatively drained Philly, for a while at least. 

That said, when CoBD is at its best, it shines like a bright cyberpunk star against the background of so many uninspired or unskilled other titles. Katie, Victoria, Chandra, Gloria, Abby, even Venus the nearly-sentient sexbot (is it just me, by the way, or did Philly sarcastically model her face after Taylor Swift?) — they’re all among the best-written and best-rendered characters in 3D AVNs of all time. Romancing all of them feels almost cathartic (even Chandra, the glitzy brat who seems to just want to use you as a revenge tool against her mother, shows a human heart under the pretentious facade), and there’s always a touch of exquisiteness in Philly’s approach to rendering and animation that makes you feel elevated even when you’re at your dirtiest. It’s like watching all those old «glamorous» Europorn movie scenes from studios like Private, but with ladies that are both prettier and warmer in terms of personality. 

Gameplay-wise, CoBD is the same choice-based AVN as Depraved Awakening, with your choices largely serving to determine which of the girls you want to pursue / keep around as your sex partners / romantic interests and how kinky / depraved you want to get with them. A few really stupid choices can lead to the death of several of these characters, so it’s not entirely a matter of totally random clicking, but if you read what you click on you don’t really need any walkthrough to make the right selections. Other than that, the only addition are small random «secrets» (hotspots) to click on in order to unlock extra gallery renders — since the game always flashes a warning at you whenever these come up, this is extremely simple, not much of a challenge at all. (Then again, it might be preferable to all those non-advertised easily missable secret images in Dr. PinkCake’s Being A DIK, where you either have to play with a walkthrough under your nose all the time or waste hours of time on each new screen to find tiny clickable journals or rolls of toilet paper). 

As usual, Philly shows excellent taste in his music selections — this time, he picks out a bunch of extremely moody, atmospheric «futuristic» tracks from the electronic music circuit that sound appropriately «sinister», «romantic», or «nasty» depending on the particular plot or sex scene they are supposed to illustrate. The only problem is that there are not a lot of them, and with 50 or so gameplay hours to burn they will quickly become too overtly familiar. But in the early episodes they really helped spice up the experience for me (I even ended up adding a few of them to my casual playlists).

Overall, I noticed that CoBD is one of those games that commands quiet respect on the part of the average player (it remains one of the top-rated titles at F95Zone, for instance) but is not actually played nearly as often as that respect would surmise. Possibly, this is because of its glamorous and exquisite setting, rather than in spite of it — experience shows that many more people are interested in games depicting the usual «girls next door» (preferably with big T&A) than these kinds of exotic personalities and settings which they find more difficult to identify with and, on the whole, more boring. In other words, CoBD may be too much of a weird fantasy for people to take in, and I can see that point of view (again, same reason why more people watch casual gonzo porn than lavish big-budget Private movies). But those of us who do hold a soft spot for high production values and hi-class glamour girls with a futuristic flair will have to agree, I think, that few, if any, other titles match these values when filtered through PhillyGames’ vision — at least, for as long as that vision remained fresh and inspired, which is still quite a long period.