In the Mood

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

In the Mood is a Match-3 Puzzle game, a Puzzle-Platformer, and an Ecchi game, the latter of which would surely have been given away if this game kept its original title, Booble Hentai. Yeah, not subtle. For whatever reason, the name was changed prior to launch, with the 2021 PC release of the game going by the name Booble H, with the Nintendo Switch version getting the far more innocuous name In the Mood. And yes, this game does feature nudity – cartoony images of topless girls as well as fully nude girls with parts below the belt either obscured or left blank like a Barbie doll.

Okay, so here’s where I give my usual spiel about Ecchi Games. I do not inherently like or dislike a game just because it was made with titillation in mind. All I want to know is, is it a good game? And as a secondary note does the titillation make sense within the game? Believe it or not, at least a few Ecchi Games have passed both of these tests… but most fail both of them.

The gameplay of In the Mood starts with the base formula of Puzzle Bobble AKA Bust-A-Move, with players flinging colored bubbles from the bottom of the screen to the top, trying to make matches of three or more to clear them, with any bubbles suspended underneath the ones cleared falling away without support from above. However, rather than just copy this formula, In the Mood actually shows some creativity by working in Platforming elements.

This is because the bubbles aren’t shot out from a stationary turret like in Puzzle Bobble, but flung by a seagull that walks around on the floor of the stage. In some ways this can make the game easier, as you can walk wherever you can reach to get an ideal shot. However, in other ways it makes things harder, as you now not only lose if the bubbles drop down to a line near the bottom, but also if your character falls down a pit or touches one of the placed bubbles.

While I applaud the originality here, there are a few issues that make this less of a success than it could have been. A lack of multiplayer is a big one, as well as the game only having 30 stages, meaning you can see everything the game has to offer in under an hour. However, another issue is level design, with later levels cranking up the difficulty by making players contend with stages that depend on the pure luck of getting the right bubbles – fail to do so within the first half-dozen bubbles or so, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose, through no fault of your own.

When it comes to the visuals, the foreground gameplay is rendered using decent and colorful 2D pixel art, with the background featuring images of girls in increasing states of undress, backed by absolutely terrible repetitive music. The art style for the girls is cartoony but not bad, though there doesn’t seem to be any sort of theme here – one girl is an astronaut, one girl is skiing (in the Stupid Sexy Flanders pose, no less), one girl is a succubus or demon or something… and none of them have anything to do with the seagull (well, the first girl is at a beach, but I suspect that’s just a coincidence). None of this is bad, just sorta’ random – this game could have had anything as a background, but it went with a bunch of undressing girls.

In the end, the choice to make In the Mood an Ecchi game… well, it doesn’t hurt the game, but it doesn’t seem to be greatly helping it either. What this game really needed was for its developer to further flesh out the gameplay and options, and work on making the later levels challenging without depending on luck. If this had all happened, In the Mood would have actually been an inspired take on a classic Puzzle game formula. As-is, it’s a decent but short-lived experience that’s probably best substituted with a better Puzzle game (and if you were mainly interested in the naked girls, just look for porn on Google instead).

tl;dr – In the Mood is a Match-3 Puzzle game, a Puzzle-Platformer, and an Ecchi game that mixes classic Puzzle Bobble gameplay with Platforming elements, along with cartoony nude girls in the backgrounds. There are actually some good gameplay ideas here, but they’re undermined by a lack of content, a lack of multiplayer, a lack of options, and some unfortunate level design choices. This game can be completed within an hour, and you’re better off playing another Puzzle game that will last you longer than this.

Grade: C

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