House Party Review (Harris)
House Party is Skyrim of adult games. It's been around, it's gone a long way since its first release... and it's got poor and frustrating game design.
To get chicks, you talk to them and do quests for them. This is fine at first, until you realize your wiggle room is as tight as a virgin. You picked a single suboptimal line in the dialogue and came a tiny bit short of a full "attraction" bar? Oh boy, hope you have a save from like 30 seconds ago. Savescumming wouldn't be that bad if it wasn't for the fact that even running a nvme saving/loading takes so long you can take a nap. This totally disrupts the game flow and makes it impossible to play without 5 open browser windows with walkthroughs. It would be great if there was a strategy guide of sorts provided in game like those adult VNs do this days, hell I'd even buy one as a DLC - but that unfortunately doesn't exist. As a result, you might as well get yourself an Excel spreadsheet for a gaming session.
Don't get me wrong, the story and humor is fun, but you can't really get into it, because when you see an annoying guy you want to punch - you realize you can't do that, because he will no longer do a favor for you and that's gonna lock you out of two chicks, making you go back half an hour and replay the whole thing. The questlines also commonly branch out, locking you out of half the girls for a given playthrough. And while that normally would be good for replayability, here it just means you have to do everything leading to the branch AGAIN, which feels like a chore.
In the end, while the chicks are fine and quest endings are often hillarious, there is so much padding here that by the time you get beyond it you feel too exhausted to enjoy the reward. Which is why I don't reccomend this.
If fine gentlemen from Eek! are reading this, I hope Office Party improves on this by:
- giving more leeway in getting desired outcomes with chicks and not locking them out unless you're really been a major dick to them;
- ensuring each of them gets at least a couple opportunities to hook up with, so that a single mistake didn't make you replay the whole thing, even if it means there won't be as many characters (less is more);
- optimizing the game for a comfortable saving time and/or providing a guide so that the player didn't have to dig through half of Google and Steam Guides section.