DEPRAVED AWAKENING: The Official PatreonGamer Review
PhillyGames’ Depraved Awakening was one of the first AVNs I ever played from beginning to end, back when it was only very freshly finished and its creator was just starting work on its technically far more ambitious sequel, City Of Broken Dreamers. At the time, Depraved Awakening ranked very highly in various popularity charts, but its positions gradually eroded over time as bigger and technically more accomplished AVNs, one after another, began to take its place. Not in my mind, though. As far as I’m concerned — all of its time-honored weaknesses aside — Depraved Awakening still remains the single greatest Adult Visual Novel ever created by anybody in the business. Simply put, I believe that if you let it impact you in the right way, the best way possible, it can produce the strongest mix of sexual and spiritual reactions that any such game is even theoretically capable of. But this needs to be elucidated.
Most people who praise or criticize Depraved Awakening understandably approach it from a somewhat former angle: it is PhillyGames’ projection of the classic noir style, the AVN equivalent of a Double Indemnity or, perhaps more accurately, of a Chinatown or any such classic movies dealing with disturbing sexual topics. (PhillyGames himself is obviously a classic movie buff: people have spotted multiple references in his games from films going all the way to Requiem For A Dream). Predictably, you play as a private eye who finds himself accidentally caught up in a murder mystery and eventually traces things back to a huge sex-trafficking network, run by the high and mighty — with the investigation inevitably putting yourself up to the proverbial moral test. Eventually, the bad guys are exposed and receive their just desserts, the good guys are saved and exonerated (with maybe one or two notable exceptions), but a bitter aftertaste still remains, as in every kind of noir experience. The plot is, therefore, rather generic, as some people observe — nothing much to write home about.
On the technical side, too, the game is far from perfect: not only was it produced in the infancy period of Daz 3D-model based AVNs, but PhillyGames himself was also learning his craft as things went along — which is most obviously noticeable in the quality of animations, consisting of 2-3 basic frames at first and then only very slowly improving in detail and smoothness by the end of the game (he only made a really big leap forward with City Of Broken Dreamers). Static renders also begin by being relatively simplistic, though eventually gaining in detalization. Large parts of the game (again, early on) are entirely without sound, and the selection of musical tracks (mostly by Russian instrumental composer Kai Engel) is very meager. These flaws are all very easy to detect and, unfortunately, they discourage many newer players from properly appreciating the game as their attentions are whisked away to more modern and Daz-zling (sorry) displays of brilliantly animated bouncing boobs and drilling dicks.
But even with all these flaws, Depraved Awakening can be an extremely rewarding experience if you choose to properly immerse yourself into it, rather than just quickly rush through the content in search for the best scenes and the much-coveted harem ending (spoiler: there isn’t one, although some outcomes do give you more ladies than others). Let me try to explain what is the underlying "philosophy" here, because my own response to the game heightened tremendously once my brain headed in that direction — regardless of whether Philly himself intended it to be that way, or just accidentally hit all the right buttons.
So Depraved Awakening is a "noir" experience — dark, disturbing, uncomfortable. The world in it is run by the bad guys, who apparently think that the best thing they can do with their money is acquire and exercise unlimited power over other human beings, preferably of the opposite sex. The game basically paints a universe in which hordes of Jeffrey Epsteins rule the day, immune and unpunishable because they have everybody on their payroll. (It doesn’t really make that much of a difference that all the women in the game are strictly over 18 — that’s just a genre convention). We do not see a whole lot of those scenes, but we do have a taste from time to time (especially if you stumble upon one of several "bad endings", where your character surrenders to the bad guys or even ends up becoming one), and it’s not pretty. One little scene in one of those endings, involving two of the game’s loveliest girls and a double dildo, is almost directly copied from the ending of Requiem For A Dream, for instance, which is all you really need to know about the intensity of the message.
As a lone private investigator with absolutely no one to trust in this world other than the victimized girls themselves, you spend all your time in this seemingly bleak, depressed, utterly hopeless world where evil is completely normalized. Worse, your own morality is hanging on a thread, as the bad guys have their eye on you and make attempts to corrupt you and make you one of "them" starting from the very first chapter. How do you survive and keep your sanity in a situation where the odds are so completely stacked against you? Well, the game has a shocking answer for you here — you keep your morality by formally sacrificing it. "The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it", as Oscar Wilde said.
Of all the different character arcs in the game, the one which some people might find superfluous is the story of Judy — because it’s kind of out there by itself, not directly tied into the main criminal storyline — but actually, it’s the most important part of the game. Judy is made out to be your stepdaughter (or somebody even closer to you, if you apply the lewd patch) — a sweet, caring, 100% innocent (if not tremendously bright) teenage blond beauty with career aspirations in the big city. Since this is a choice-based game, you can, of course, keep your relation with her completely platonic throughout the game, but that’s not really how it’s meant to be played. The «canon» variant is, of course, that through the bad guys’ interference, both of you gradually lose your inhibitions and become more and more interested in exploring the physical aspect of your relationship. Eventually, you realize what is going on — but by then it is too late: like some modern day Tristan and Isolde’s magic potion, the «extra stimulation» did its job, and now father and (step)daughter find out that not only can’t they live without doing all sorts of «depraved» things to each other — but that, in a way, that’s the only thing that supplies meanings to their lives, or, at least, helps them escape from the cruelty, heartlessness, and cynicism of their entire surroundings.
Judy, with her special relationship status and starting out +50 to pure angelic innocence, is simply the clearest example in the game — with all of its visuals, music, and dialog beautifully coordinated so that somehow that pure angelic innocence still remains as a true asset even during the «dirtiest» of her scenes. But the same rule applies to all your other love interests as well — Stella, the rich widow who’s willingly condemned herself to a lifetime of depravity; Carli, the Irish call girl who wants to save her friend even if she knows it’s impossible; Mi-do, the Korean trophy wife who simply wants to be used and degraded by the right guy, not the wrong ones; and Christina, the red-headed vixen of temptation who eventually goes from the dark side back to the light, but is perfectly willing to take the dark side’s sexual arsenal along with her for the ride. (Because, you know, even sweet angels of the light can find their life boring if nobody fucks their holy asses from time to time).
As ridiculous as it may sound, the base philosophy of Depraved Awakening can be easily formulated as follows: beat your evil enemies with their own weapon — in order to defeat their lust for power and humiliation of others, you have to learn to humiliate and degrade yourself (or be humiliated and degraded, in a loving and consensual way, if you are one of the protagonist’s love/lust interests). The game features a separate "depravity meter", meaning that it can be played in two modes — "softer" and more conventionally "romantic", if you stay away from certain actions, or "rougher" and "dirtier", if you embrace them from a get-go. But while this does give you some agency and add some points for replayability value, I’d say that going full-in with the "depravity" is the most realistic way here. Depraved Awakening somehow makes you clean by making you as dirty as possible, if you get what I mean.
I’ll just illustrate this with one example from the game, to make my point stand out clearer. (SPOILER ALERT). In one of the "bad endings", where the detective surrenders to the bad guys and lets them rule the world forever, we see Judy and Christina basically re-enact the "ass to ass" scene from the aforementioned Requiem For A Dream, with a large double dildo, in front of the gawking onlookers — a dark and painful scene, symbolizing their complete and utter spiritual defeat and moral (if not physical) demise. But then in one of the "good" endings, after the bad guys have been taken down (or at least temporarily pacified — remember, this world cannot ever be completely cured of its evils), after the celebratory dinner scene with Judy and Christina, they proceed to play sexy games with the MC — and Christina takes out that very same double dildo, doing more or less the same things with Judy as in the "bad ending", only this time, it’s a show of genuine sexual delight and happiness. This is how you tame and harness the Dark Side to work for the good of humanity, not for taking your own vicious power trips.
This is all very controversial, but that’s how the game works and this is why most of its sex scenes, even with all their technical deficiencies, are among the most intoxicating and hypnotic sex scenes in any 3D games I’ve ever seen. Probably the weakest link is the dialog — Philly is great at thinking up storylines, not so great at coming up with sex dialog that would be more stimulating than the usual "will you be my whore tonight?" and "now I want you to cum deep inside me" clichés — but I can tolerate that as long as I have this mental image of the gorgeous 18-year old (step)daughter deepthroating my cock for the greater good of humanity. It’s an absolutely insane feeling if you let yourself explore it to its depths. If you don’t, well, then, Depraved Awakening will probably just remain another visual novel for you — no better and no worse than the average fare.
Still, it’s not all just about the plot and the careful steering of your sexual energy and emotional response into the same haven of heavenly bliss. On the visual front, Philly may be working with pretty limited assets — standard Daz models, generic backdrops, etc. — but he knows how to make them tick. Most of the girls are gorgeous in their own unique ways, with wonderful combinations of «noble» facial features and dizzying curves. Bodily proportions are exaggerated only for a select few characters (one thing I’ve noticed is that the more genuinely evil a female character gets, the bigger tits she is sporting — apparently, for Philly, the Devil is really in the cleavage). My personal favorites are Judy (who, as I said, is particularly wonderful for preserving that innocent expression on her face until the very final stages of her complex sexual education) and Christina (who is quite obviously modeled and named after Christina Hendricks — if you were a fan of her in Mad Men, this game’s VERY much for you!), but I know Carli, with her somewhat more dominant and mature features, is also very much a fan favorite. The only slight misfire, I think, is bad girl Kira, whose face is a bit too much plastic-doll for my tastes, but there’s plenty of renders that focus more on her tits and ass than facial features, and if that’s what her personality is most adequately represented by, well, that’s fine by me too.
All of this gorgeousness compensates for the sub-standard quality of the animations, and if not, then one more asset that puts things over the top are the music tracks, particularly those by Kai Engel — I almost feel a bit embarrassed for the guy, since, unlike the omnipresent Kevin McLeod, Engel is clearly an aspiring and ambitious composer (the "Modum" piano piece, playing through many of the gentler and more sensual sex scenes, is a modern minimalist masterpiece worthy of Philip Glass, which I never get tired of hearing). Even so, the seriousness of the music lends extra seriousness to the game — there’s this mix of beauty, sadness, hope, and hopelessness which presents a perfect blend to illustrate the "let us save our immortal souls through the cleansing of sexual damnation" overriding theme of the game. Sometimes it makes you cum, and sometimes... it makes you cry. I actually like it when you can’t quite separate the two.
As far as Depraved Awakening’s potential as a "game" is concerned, there’s nothing to write home about: Philly is all about writing stories, not setting up challenges. The simple choice-based system is really about two things only — which girls you are interested in romantically (there will still be 3-4 unskippable scenes with several of them, but mostly you’re free to choose) and whether you want or do not want to go the «fully depraved» route, which adds kinkier / dirtier options, but does not drastically deviate from the more «vanilla» route. Toward the end of the game, you will have to lock in your primary romantic interest — the waifu — which is where it is most advisable to have a permanent save slot (you’ll easily understand where). Other than that, no mini-games, no grinding, no secret renders or anything, very bare-bones, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You do have plenty of agency choices during the sex scenes, though.
Of course, this does not make the game any worse than hundreds of similarly-structured AVNs with weakly engineered player choices — what makes it better than most of them is that when you choose whether or not to enter a romantic / physical relationship with one of the girls, or whether to stick it up her ass or keep it vanilla, it feels as if you’re making an important decision (for yourself or for humanity). Of all the AVNs I’ve played that have some sort of artistic ambitions, Depraved Awakening is probably the only one that taught me something new, and actually made me think on issues of good and evil, moral and immoral, absolute and relative. Even its glorious final scene, which seems to be there only to present you with one final mega-fap session and nothing more, somehow reinforces the message — how, through understanding, unleashing, and harnessing your own "depravity", you can actually "awaken" the love, understanding, and selflessness within yourself. It’s a pretty complex message, and one which should be passed around with extreme care, but I think the game handles it very expertly.
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