Being a game from the
Play Series, we already know what to expect from this upcoming title : a 3D visual novel in which the protagonist rapes girls into decadence and submission.
This title seems to be a spiritual successor of good ol'
Rapelay (and, to a lesser extent,
Play Club) : you'll play as a molester exacting revenge on the snitch who told him to the cops by raping a family of two young sisters and their mother.
With a slight twist : while in
Rapelay, you were reported by the eldest daughter, in
Play Home your resentment is directed at the brand-new stepfather of the family, a poor guy who never touched a girl (it's mentioned he's a virgin in his biography) and seems to have some trouble being around the teenage daughters of his second-hand wife...
This new character can potentially add a lot of dirty fetishes to the mix : some glorious NTR, of course, but also some nice inseki action, since at this point it's already confirmed that our new friend Kouichi will assist the player in the rape of his step-daughters (see Amazon page and H-scene previews).
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Now, there's a big issue with the
Play Series : it went downhill pretty fast since the infamous 2007 game. Back in the day, you had to train the girls by performing specific actions and actually play the game to unlock all the content. Meanwhile, in 2015's
Play Club, you could exit the H-scenes without even touching the girls and still unlock everything in less than 10 minutes.
Sure,
Rapelay was grindy and ugly, and it didn't include any customisation options nor many sex animations, but at least it was a little bit more involving for the player than the most recent games. The modern Illusion titles are way too simple : you click to choose a position, then click to cum, rinse and repeat a couple times and you beat the game.
In this regard, I can't consider a title like
Play Club being a game any more : its lack of interactivity makes it more of a "3D sex scene player" than a true game.
Honey Select, with its complex "feelings system" was much better in this aspect : at least, what you did to the girls actually mattered and could totally change their state of mind (and their relationship with you).
But I'm hopeful for
Play Home : there are a lot of signs showing that this game will feature some nice interactive elements. After reading everything that was posted on Illusion website and decompiling the game binaries, I found references to various interesting mechanics :
- Making the girl cums repeatedly will make her switch to a "tired" status her and change her animations. If I'm not mistaken, this is a feature that first appeared in games like SchoolMate 2 and Wakeari! and was resurrected in Honey Select. They didn't take a step back here since this will also be present in Play Home.
- There's an "AHE" state in there : our favourite "Ahegao Mode" may be back in full force in Play Home. This is big news since it's been years they used that feature in one of their game (HaremMate, IIRC). [NOTE : Confirmed with the update from this week.]
- There are also flags with weird names like "flasher", "likeSperm", "likeFeratio", "feelAnus", "indecentLanguage", or "weakness". Illusion announced some kind of "habituation" system where you can trigger changes in the girl behaviour by repeatedly using the same position and its probably tied to those flags (eg. facefuck her till she loves it).
- There are plenty of "checks" at the end of the H sessions, with counters for the numbers of time you made her cum (vaginally and anally), as well as the number of times you came in her various orifices. There's even a counter for the total amount of semen the girl "absorbed" during the encounters. I'm eager to know what they'll use those numbers for.
- There is an "onlooker" system : you can force another character to witness the scene, and thus screw Yukiko in front of her husband or have Ritsuko watch her beloved little sister being butt-raped. Having a spectator will change the dialogue, but for now I can confirm if it will have an impact on the gameplay.
- There are references to "girl initiative" and some variables whose names hints at the possibility of the girls asking for sex and/or the player asking the girls to take the lead.
- While not as intricate as the underlying mechanics from Honey Select, training girls seems much more complex than in Play Club. It feels to me that the "breaking" won't be linear (ie. automatically gaining hearts after each session) but rely on training various aspects like in Rapelay (ie. breaking their resistances one by one and training various parts of her bodies).
The demo unfortunately doesn't include the full source code of every system and mechanics in place in the game, so there are still a lot of shadowy areas, but judging from what we currently have, this game will feature a much richer gameplay than the usual "click and watch" games from Illusion.
Basically, it's going to be a modern version of
Rapelay with a graphical quality on par with
Play Club and the character customisation system from
Honey Select. It isn't going to be anything spectacular but will still be a title that you absolutely want to have in your library if you like dark-themed games.
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Lastly, I can't help myself but have a look at the game from a developer point-of-view. And to think that they're taking a few steps forward with this game.
Until now, Illusion used to maintain two different sets of models and animations for their semi-realistic games :
- On one side, they have their "Real Body / Ero Real Shader" combo that was first featured in Real Play (and introduced on their "Illusion Lab" page in 2014) then later refined during Play Club development. This is a set that was designed with graphics quality as a main focus, and since it was tied to the Play Series, it comes with a truckload of fetish/rapey sex animations.
- On the other side, they have the "chara-custom" models they created for SBPR and that they later reused in Honey Select. Those models were slightly less impressive visually but featured way much more customisation options. And thanks to the "Party" expansion pack, this set now includes hundreds of clothing pieces and accessories (and even battle-oriented animations).
With
Play Home, they are merging those two different sets and streamlining their production. This is going to ease maintenance and portability : the Illusion guys now have a large asset library that can be reused in all upcoming game. They could make a full-fledged heroic-fantasy RPG with scenes ranging from consensual sex to rape without having to create a single new model nor any new animation.
Thanks to this standardisation, their 3D artists and animators will be able to spend their time creating new content instead of having to rework and maintain their asset catalogue. If they don't deliberately limit the number of animations / customisation options, players will be able to enjoy much more content. On top of that, modders will be able to port their content from one game to another much more quickly.
This change will benefit everyone and I'm surprised it took them this long to rationalise their pipeline. The next big step here is to rebuild their anime-styled / cel-shaded characters to implement the same level of graphical details and customisation.
On top of the streamlining of their modelling+animation workflow, there is another good news with this release : they now have a much better understanding of physically-based rendering and are considerably improving their materials.
After having a look at the assets with SB3UGS, it appears to me that they're using 4K textures in linear colourspace for all the body/skin materials. In
Honey Select, they completely butchered that part, using low-resolution sRGB texture with a realistic linear renderer, and this is the reason why you had to use plasticmind's mods to fix their mistakes and get proper results.
To further enhance the visuals, they also have been using the Alloy Shader Framework and its excellent subsurface scattering implementation. Those shaders were already used in
VR Kanojo and really help increasing the overall quality.
There are still a lot of discrepancies, since the materials used for clothing and backgrounds still appears to be flawed, but at least they're making significant improvements. Let's hope they'll be able to convert and clean up all of their other textures before the game release.
And let's hope that one day, they fully understand how modern rendering works and design physically-correct materials : even if they're getting better, it seems to me that they're still making pretty big mistakes, like using metallic reflectivity to simulate wet skin when they should toy with surface specularity and roughness/smoothness.
Unfortunately, there are also aspects where
Play Home will only get really little amelioration, if any. The good thing is that they, at least, are not taking steps back.
Lighting, for example, still looks as bad as usual. But I can't really blame them since getting proper illumination is insanely difficult and Unity 5.x has been notoriously bad in this aspect. Starting with version 5.6 of the engine, substantial refinements have been in the pipeline (they're now basically copying features and implementations straight out of Unreal Engine), so let's wait and see if it helps Illusion making a better job at lighting their scenes.
The same goes for physics. We still have immovable buttcheeks (no love for assmen makes me sad), gravity-defying boobs, clipping hairs and clothes... Proper physics is hard and resource-hungry (even if you rely on NVidia-only shenanigans), but they could at least try to make things a bit better.
The technology isn't there yet for correct physical simulation but with a little work, you can find tricks to "emulate" proper behaviours. For example, using a vertex shader to calculate the distance to the nearest surface can be used to correct the simulation and prevents clothes and hair for clipping through. You can also use it to emulate soft bodies, like a mattress deforming under a character or breasts "flattening" against a flat surface. It's too bad that Illusion doesn't have a well-trained graphics programmer in their team, since you can do some pretty crazy stuff with good shader knowledge nowadays.
But, hey, at least they're trying and getting some nifty enhancements. The themes in
Play Home may not suit everyone's taste but it feels like the game is going to be real nice from a technical point of view.
