Hello, fine people of the world!

Hamrev emailed me about some underground game (and so can you) he was testing and I could give a look too.

I’m thinking – what could he/she means by underground – and it’s getting me curious. So, we arrive at Brothel King.

I don’t, like, have to go to the dark web to get it or hook up to usenet or offer sex favors to kinky solicitors to hook me up with it. Anticlimactically found it by myself on google. So how underground could it be?

Brothel King boots up and immediately there’s a revelation. The game introduces us to our slave/servant and immediately Patreon’s erection drops dead as if they are waxing its hairy ass unannounced. So do the other crowdfunders that are happy to exploit the sexual revolution when they go to hookup up via sex-match tinder-like apps, but still pretend on being in the 18th century about morals in public.

Once you hit even a slightly hardcore theme, they take their dildos out of their butts and pretend they are all saints that wouldn’t hurt a fly, as they kick you out.

This game looks a bit sketchy, but manages to introduce me with casual writing accompanied by some sound effects and extra illustrations here and there.

Basically, the creator understands that some amenities are necessary in a game industry drowning boring text box exposition. That’s really a good sign, given that most people don’t know how to welcome players in the first moments of their games.

Music is hit and miss, but the game says version 0.15, so there is plenty of road to go on placeholders.

In case Captain Obvious is your arch enemy, the game is about you becoming a whorehouse tycoon. Which, as you can gather from earlier, is a bit of a rarity, given that crowdfunding sites feign in horror if you are above milktoast naughty.

Spending a bit more time goes through a variety of illustrations. Basically, the dev is just downloading whatever catches his eye on rule34 and is using it, so he can have quite a lot of graphics every step of the way.

Something eased by the fact that he is not profiting in any way that I could find, so we have an interesting strategy of someone making a title that can pursue hardcore themes and consume large amounts of art, which opens him up to focus on the managerial aspects of the game. With the tradeoff of not being able to make money off it and limiting its production and growth potential.

The game has a reasonably developed system of stats for each of the girls and operates on an ingame day-to-day basis. It has a variety of characters, that can also be expanded by end-users with their own custom ones by simply pouring prepared files into the game. You use those to move your own story, satisfy customers, cover expenses and basically service some level of the economy. Some would say it’s one of the many games that got inspired by Corruption of Champions.

Occasional minor voice-overs and environment audio help keep it on the edge of not totally mute and somewhat alive, which I would say is a good move, even if they are placeholders.

I played for a solid 90 minutes, despite the large visual style gaps between each illustration, and still managed to not get bored with it at any point. Some interface complaints can probably be made as indeed it brushes your tits the wrong way. Aside that, Brothel King has a remarkably low amount of annoyances which holds a person’s attention even in its raw state, and it does that without any big advantage to show off with.

The variety of graphics being crammed in together is balanced out by the amount of them.

Yeah, I guess you could say it’s underground. A very curious hobby project indeed. I may have to stop mocking ducttape and cardboard quality games, because this developer has managed to use those crude tools and create a place that’s actually somewhat comfy to play, at least for the hour and a half I put in. And given the number of reviews I’ve done so far, that’s hard for games to do, especially if they slap you with a 20$ bullshit items promotion 10 seconds after you walked in.

Having the piece of mind that you will not be bothered about money has a surprisingly chill out effect on it all.

Here’s the “underground” corner where it’s at 🙂

https://www.henthighschool.com/brothel-king/playable-version-(alpha)-download-and-information/