Review: Babe Quest

Ed's H Game Review!

Babe Quest

Game Type: Twine HTML Real Porn

Creator: BabeQuestDev

Version Played 0.5

Satire is hard. Anyone who's seen one of the dozens of Zucker-Abrams-Zucker "comedies" from the Mid-2000s can tell you just how hard it really is. It takes nuanced writing, and a real understanding of what made the original work for audiences in the first place. There's a world of difference between "Dracula: Dead and Loving It" by Mel Brooks, and ZAZ's terrible "Vampires Suck." It all comes down to heart. And if you don't have heart, if you just want to make fun of something you feel is inferior, then you write something like Babe Quest.

The general idea of Babe Quest is to make fun of porn games and porn game creators, by creating a porn game. The main character wakes, up, realizes he's in a porn game... and that's the whole joke. And it's a joke that barely works to begin with, told as inartfully and mean spirited as possible. The jokes are all variations of porn game cliches, played painfully straight and using surrealism only to highlight the cliches. But with a joke as thin as "let's make fun of basic games and bad creators," all that means is that the creator is deliberately making a bad game and making it somehow less fun, just to show how not fun they think the problem is in the first place. It's a self-defeating cycle. 

I'm not going to talk about the characters. The game and writer don't care about them, so why should I? The map works. It's supposed to just barely work. That's the joke. The scenarios are cliched, but they're supposed to be. That's the joke. It's all just the same shitty joke.

I'm reminded of an old Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis game called Earthworm Jim. Much like this one, it thought to make fun of the games of the day by playing its problems as straight as possible, coated with a healthy dose of the same sort of surrealism. The result was a very frustrating and deeply flawed (deliberately so) and difficult platformer. But even then, Earthworm Jim was still a very playable game, its surrealism being its key, standout feature. Its main character was incredibly likable (GROOVY!) to the point where he got his own (actually pretty good) Saturday Morning Cartoon Show, and people ended up liking the game for itself, in spite of its original stated mission. Hell, the game even got a sequel. Which brings me right back to my original point. Earthworm Jim had all the same failings as Babe Quest, with the same stated mission, and yet, Earthworm Jim had heart, and the developers cared when making the game, and I can't see any evidence that either is true of Babe Quest. If you don't care about the game your making, why should your audience?

The issue here is the same issue with the popular perception of hipsterism over the years. If your nature relies on you reacting to what other people are doing, by nature you're at the whim of other people's likes and wants. You're not trying to make or do something original, you're just trying to react to or even create backlash. And honestly, what do you even get out of that? What's the end result? Is it anything worthwhile?

Let this be a warning to creators, no matter whether you're making a cutesy platformer or a hardcore porn game... care about what you're making. Spite can be a great motivator, but it is a terrible creative fuel source.

Pros: It's a porn game! Hooray porn! Also it remembers Zoey Nixon exists.

Cons: Creator doesn't seem to care about making a quality project or even a quality satire. Joke wears thin quickly. Just a mean spirited slog of a "game" that amplifies its own flaws in trying to expose others.

Overall: 2/10

https://www.patreon.com/BabeQuestDev