The DeLuca Family: 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.