Hentai World

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Hentai Games Collection, along with Hentai Girls, Hentai Golf, and Hentai Stars.)

Hentai World is a Puzzle Game released on Nintendo Switch in 2023. And as the title indicates, yes, this is also an “ecchi” game featuring art of attractive anime-style girls, with said girls wearing increasingly revealing outfits and depicted in cheesecake poses, including some topless artwork. Anyway, beyond the titillation, the gameplay here is a basic tile-sliding puzzle game. Yup, that’s it.

Okay, as I’ve said before, I’m not a big fan of ecchi games, but I’m not necessarily opposed to them either, as long as they’re a decent game and as long as the sexy stuff works for the game. When it comes to Hentai World, I suppose the sexy stuff does work well for the game… but only because that’s pretty much all there is to this game.

To be fair, the anime-style artworks this game presents are nice, and the girls depicted do look attractive, although I feel like the faces are a bit overly-cartoony. This artwork is backed by relaxed rhythmic music that seems like it’s out of a porn video. Unfortunately, this low bar for presentation is quickly undone by the fact that anyone reading this review can easily find countless images of similar or better quality in a quick web search, and since there’s no animation, no character, and no real niche this game fills. Also, these artworks are joined by text bubbles having the girls saying laughably cheesy, stereotypical, and poorly-localized and misspelled things when you complete a puzzle, such as “I feel something sleeping out” and “put sunscreen on my sweet tities” (no, that’s not my typo, that’s how the game spells it).

This is made worse by just how limited this game is – it features only 17 unique artworks (and that’s stretching the use of the word “unique”), as well as 4 variations of each of those works (varying states of undress for the girl depicted in said artwork). Players looking to actually play this game and not pause a lot to… er… “admire” the artwork… will find this game can be completed within 30 minutes, easily.

Of course, that gets me to the actual gameplay, if you can even call it that. There are children’s games with more complex gameplay – again, this is just a tile-sliding Puzzle game. There’s no nuance, no skill involved, not even a timer. In fact, each puzzle begins by showing you how its tiles are mixed up, making it easy to go through that path in reverse. Often, the puzzle doesn’t even mix up all the pieces, making things even easier.

Even this stupidly simple gameplay is something Hentai World gets wrong too. The game keeps placing your cursor back on the first spot you selected when selecting a pair of spaces, making for completely unnecessary disorientation. This disorientation would be resolved if the game supported the touchscreen, since this sort of gameplay seems ideally-suited for that… but of course, this game doesn’t support the touchscreen. The gamepad controls here are terrible too, refusing to recognize directional pad inputs and often missing the other inputs you try to put in as well.

Oh, one more thing. You will see the eShop flooded with no less than five different “versions” of this game. If you are reading this and for some reason still want to get the game, and are wondering which version to get, you needn’t put too much thought into it – the only difference between all versions of the game is which of the free DLC is included with the game. However, since all this DLC is, once again, free, then whatever DLC you’re not getting can simply be downloaded after the fact at no extra cost. The multiple copies of the game seem to just be a sleazy attempt to flood the eShop with this game in hopes of spurring on more sales.

Even for a bare-bones ecchi game, Hentai World is pretty terrible. Not only does this game use one of the simplest puzzle types as the basis of its gameplay, but it proceeds to mess up even that simple task. And of course that’s ignoring that this game’s main selling point, the sexy girl art, is something made completely obsolete by the wealth of such images to be found on the internet. And yet, despite this pointless, poorly-made game, we are still forced to see it repeatedly on the eShop thanks to a really cynical attempt to try to drive sales by making multiple identical copies of the same thing. Even if you’re looking to ogle some anime-style girls, you should have more self-respect than to support such a disgusting attempt to inflate this game’s sales. Skip this one.

tl;dr – Hentai World is nominally a Puzzle Game, and as the title makes clear this is also an ecchi game with artwork of scantily-clad and topless girls in compromising poses. Unfortunately, the tile-sliding gameplay is more brain-dead than a children’s game, with terrible controls and some poor game design choices, and while the artwork is nice, it’s nothing interesting enough to sit through this boring gameplay just so you can ogle it. Trust me, if you want porn, just look for porn. If you want an actual game, get something else. If you can, that is – the way this game was released multiple times just to flood the eShop is particularly gross. Don’t reward this trashy practice with any of your money.

Grade: F

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Game, Worst Monetization / Scam, Most Overpriced ($15), The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award (975MB)

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