Full Course: HuniePop

Content Warning: This article discusses sexual assault, not in the games featured but in discussion of subcultures related to said games. Reader discretion is advised.

…well, I’m about to talk about videogames made by chan regulars that isn’t the much beloved visual novel about living with handicaps. This series went in a weird direction, talking about sexy puzzle and tycoon games. Normally, this wouldn’t be writing about these sorts of games, since they’re usually too simplistic or crude to be worth the musing. When games informed by chan culture come around, they usually turn out to be pretty terrible irony games you can easy spot as trash from a glance (see “The Triggering”) or seemingly normal games that end up being incredibly idiotic social commentary that either misses the point (The Last Night, the product of a gater) or is informed entirely by ignorance (Aerannis, which includes the mascot of a harassment campaign as a celebrity cameo). But out of all of them, it’s HuniePop that’s somehow been the most controversial release, and possibly the most tame. That may be the secret to its success.

HuniePop and HunieCam Studio are games by studio HuniePot, founded by a developer named Ryan Koons. Pop was the result of a successful crowdfunding campaign, while Cam was a shorter, smaller release that experiments with a completely different genre. While Cam is mostly ignored by the wider market, Pop was a massive discussion magnet for a wide swath of reasons, good and bad. The project got attention initially for the novel premise of combining a dating sim with a puzzle game, not to mention the surprisingly polished art and music. It looked like a serious project to be released to a somewhat wide audience, and it turned out to be just that. However, controversy rose due to the game’s pornographic content, which would not be allowed on Steam, the major PC gaming storefront. Koons simply hid the explicit content behind a patch freely distributed on the game’s Steam forums, bypassing a wall more serious minded games with sexual content couldn’t due to how connected that sexual content is to the experience for said other games. With HuniePop, it’s just CG images as a reward for making progress. The main game itself was barely affected by this restriction.

This larger issue put HuniePop is an odd position. It was a trend setter. It helped bring to light a significant problem in gaming culture, both social and industry, and tried something nobody had really tried before, or at least with this many eyes on them. It was a game that came out in the right way at the right time, but it quickly found push-back due to two major factors, both in and out of its control. The first major issue was Koons and company’s open connection to chan communities, mainly 4chan, and – more importantly – 8chan. These are not cultures with a sterling reputation.

Chan sites have grown to generally hate sincerity beyond “I think X is cool” and embrace irony posting. Jokes are constantly made and nothing is considered to be told in a serious manner. It’s all one big dumb goof, which results in lighthearted subversion punchlines at best, and just straight up actual xenophobia at worst. The big open secret about these sites is that when someone says something horrible, they generally mean what they say. It’s why nazi groups and MRAs have become such strong presences on these sites, using this cultural norm to teach actual hate and ignorance to kids who don’t know any better. This ironic form of writing and content making has become a smokescreen for anti-antisemitism, racism, queerphobia, and a whole mess of other horrible things, and that cover is paper thin at this point.

On top of this, HuniePop’s other source of backlash was that it released during the mitts of a massive harassment campaign called GamerGate, which would go onto give a platform for many who would become architects for the “alt-right.” As stupid as it all may sound (and it genuinely is stupid, as is most US politico now), a spiteful man got a bunch of chan-goers to start a smear attack against his ex with a fake story about sleeping with a game journalist for a good review. A review that didn’t exist. For a game that was released freely for browsers to act as a teaching tool about depression. A bunch of people bought it through an insane amount of information jamming, and it wasn’t long before literal nazis got on board – or at least in the open – and this massive show of collective idiocy became a sign of things to come for an entire country’s political atmosphere. Like, people in the white house right now can be connected to this blazing inferno of ignorance and asshattery. It was very, very stupid, but it eventually became part of our everyday reality.

HuniePop was released during the middle of this insanity. Its devs would commonly hold AMAs on 8chan, a website now connected to the majority of the campaign’s planning and the open sharing of child porn. They seem to have stopped hosting AMAs on there these days, but they were certainly not prepared for the hellstorm that was 2014 to 2015 and what associating with that particular site would mean. While HuniePop itself was never connected to this event, the existence of the culture that propagated so much actual criminal activity in the studio’s own style and postings caused a lot of people to write the project off as a an extension of this horrible event. This reputation is somehow both not deserved, and also entirely accurate, depending on which elements you’re focusing on.

While Koons and HuniePot seem entirely on the up and up from what I’ve researched (with Koons even helping a friend with a much more lighthearted adventure game project that I’m genuinely interested in now), there’s no denying that their work was heavily influenced by chan culture, and the cultures that heavily influence chan culture in return. This is the root of all the worst aspects of both Hunie games, and why I kind of hate that I genuinely like the first of them. Heck, I may even *love* HuniePop, based on how many hours I pump into it whenever I pick it up. The thing that keeps me from wildly recommending it and instead has me condemning it all comes back to the chan culture influences, because they stick out like a sore thumb.

But let’s backpedal a bit. HuniePop is a tongue in cheek mixture of gem puzzles and light dating sim elements. Your character, who can be a straight man or gay woman (your choice), is approached by a girl named Kyu at a bar, and you completely mess up the conversation horribly. Kyu, however, turns out to be a love fairy and trains losers like you on how to act around women and date, though she admits that training you will be her biggest challenge. From there, you’re introduced to the main gameplay elements and meet eight women living in your character’s town to woo. As time goes on, you can also find an alien woman and a cat-girl, plus gain the option to go after Kyu and her boss, the goddess of love Venus herself.

HuniePop is a puzzle game first, dating sim second. The puzzles work similarly to Bejeweled, with a board filled with tokens you can manipulate. Selected tokens can be moved straight vertically or horizontally, pushing other tokens in and out of the way. The goal is to make a match of at least three, destroying the tokens and adding more to the board. This fits into the date theme by dividing tokens into normal affection tokens, passion tokens, sentiment tokens, joy tokens, and broken heart tokens.

Affection tokens are used to fill the affection bar, which will end the date in success. They’re further divided into four types (romance, sexuality, flirtation, and talent), with every girl having different favorite and least favorite attributes that affect how much affection you get from matches. Affection scores also grow larger with passion, which builds by matching the heart shaped passion tokens. Sentiment tokens are used to build sentiment points, which allow you to use date gifts and make use of their various powers. Joy tokens give extra moves when used, absolutely necessary in later game challenges due to how fast you run through the base twenty moves. Lastly, broken heart tokens do a massive hit to your affection bar, so you need to avoid matching them. There are also power tokens to consider, stronger versions of affection tokens that can be made randomly by matching four or more affection tokens together.

The difficulty ramps up as you have more successful dates, so you have to keep up by collecting “hunie,” the game’s experience points. By gathering hunie, you can improve the scores on certain affection matches, take less from broken hearts, have a better chance at spawning matches and power tokens, make power tokens stronger, and increase your maximum passion level and how much you earn from passion tokens. The twist is that you don’t get hunie from puzzles, just “munie” (the game’s currency). To get hunie, you have to converse with the various girls you’re trying to get with. This is where the HunieBee comes in, a magical cell phone Kyu gives you that acts as your menu system. Using the girl finder app, you can see who is up at the time and where, travel to their location, and either interact for hunie or ask for a date.

This part of the game is fairly simplistic. You can give gifts, which can also net you extra hair styles, outfits, and date gifts from Kyu, or have a short conversation. Sometimes this leads to a question, where you need to try and answer properly based on what you’ve noticed about the selected girl’s personality to get extra hunie. You also get the chance to ask questions and gain information, stored on the HunieBee, and can answer questions about previously fished out information. However, the game won’t let you look at the notes saved in the HunieBee during these quizzes, so it’s important to pay attention. This goes especially for Kyu and her boss Venus, who quiz you on past actions and easily glossed over facts on the girls you’ve met. Catgirl Momo and alien bounty hunter Celeste also throw in curve-balls by asking you trivia on cats and outer space, respectfully (which is honestly a cute touch).

There are also three other buyable items of note. There are unique gifts, with each girl having a set amount that increases hunie earned from talks. Food can be bought to fill their hunger meter so you can have more conversations, with a full hunger meter granting extra moves on a date. Lastly is the game’s big controversial mechanic: alcohol. You can buy drinks and fill out an intoxication meter, which nets not only more hunie from talks and gifts, but gives you six starting sentiment at the start of a date when maxed out.

So yes, there is a mechanic in this game that makes dates easier through getting a girl drunk.

Yeah.

I guess this is as good a time as any to address that elephant that’s been stomping around this article.

ugh

When I referred to cultures that influence chan culture, I meant hate groups. As I said before, groups like white supremacist movements and MRAs, or “Men’s Rights Activists,” have become regulars on these sites, making memes and running “jokes” out of hateful propaganda. It’s why you often see these circles pass around old anti-Jewish propaganda (what with the caricature with large nose and greedy hand pose) or images making fun of the appearances of women in activist spaces, not to mention “gay” and homophobic slurs still commonly used as an insult. HuniePop does not mix any of this in, thankfully, but it does have the common problem you always find with chan informed media (outside the unicorn that is Katawa Shojo). For HuniePop, the problems come in the form of a truck full of casual racist stereotyping and a basic framework informed by lingo and ideals popular in the “seduction” community (the sleaziest version of the MRA subculture).

You instantly see this in Kyu’s dialog, which is bloated in already tired chan speak (and this game is only from 2015). She talks in ebonics, mentions her racist sexual preferences (such as having “yellow fever” when you meet the Japanese Aiko, or saying she likes “chocolate” when you meet Lola), and is basically teaching you how to “conquer” women. In the game world, she’s fundamentally harmless, a lustful fairy who aims to give people confidence to meet women. However, all of her methods and what she wants you to do all mirror far too closely with pick-up artist ideology, which is now openly filled with men who objectify women so much that they don’t even see them as people, or at least people on some sort of equal footing as them. Some achievements also use one particular bit of lingo from that subculture: “Alpha.” The ideal manly man, someone who has sex with as many women as possible. There is no emotional fulfillment in this ideology, and while it’s fine enough for a simple smut game, there’s been a massive cultural shift where these circles and those around them have gained actual cultural clout and impact in the real world. This makes a light-hearted sexy puzzle game feel uncomfortable in the details. The game’s saving grace is that Kyu rarely speaks after the initial character introductions, and the awful chan lingo is downplayed a bit more. However, this doesn’t solve every problem, thanks to unique gifts.

See, these items represent the given girl’s greatest interests, and sometimes even reveal significant parts of their character. For example, it’s interesting that the highly sexual cougar archetype, Jessie, likes Christmas decorations more than anything else. It’s an early hint of her surprisingly sympathetic family troubles (which was going to be part of a route at some point in development). However, Akio and Kyanna get the short end of the straw. Despite their being some interesting theme stuff to base their unique gifts on, like Akio’s obvious hedonism or Kyanna’s work out obsession, they get gifts based entirely on their race. It makes no sense with the Latino Kyanna, who never once gives the hint she’d be interested in owning a sombrero or a lucha mask (seriously, what even the fuck), but Akio may be worse because the game makes a winking joke about it by sometimes having her laugh and playfully say “you’re so racist!” This does not suddenly make this not racist. This continues on with costumes, to the point it barely makes sense outside racist viewpoints. Beli, the Indian woman, gets tossed in Native American gear simply because of her skin color (a problem you may remember popping up in a skin for Overwatch character Pharah). HuniePop’s worst elements are a series of micro-transgressions tossed between entertaining puzzles and character moments, and they never fit at any point. They only serve to remind of toxic, genuinely dangerous ideals currently destroying political discourse and the lives of millions of people around the world right now.

It’s endlessly frustrating because the characters are surprisingly interesting. Audrey is refreshing for being such an openly terrible person, Lola gets to avoid any racist moments (outside Kyu’s “chocolate” comment when you first meet her) and stands out as a motivated go-getter, and even the stereotypical gamer girl Nikki feels a tad relatable if you’re a bit of an introvert. The school girl themed Tiffany and aforementioned Jessie even end up having an unexpected connection that explains some areas of their personalities that line up. There are good ideas here, but the game’s sense of humor constantly keeps popping up and causing problems. Some of these gags work, like the stupid lines you can use to keep Akio’s attention or reacting to Kyu appearing in your house by calling the police, but then those uglier moments pop up. It’s in much of the comedy that the more disgusting elements sneak in.

HuniePop is a fairly lighthearted raunchy puzzler, so not seriously exploring relationships isn’t the issue. Some of the moments where you just talk to someone at a coffee shop and try making insignificant conversation are actually kind of refreshing. The issue comes with the idea of sexual conquest. This is an inescapable element of toxic masculinity, seeing more worth in somehow proving you’re more “man” by being with as many partners as possible than having an actual fulfilling relationship (an ideal often combined with a Madonna-Whore complex for full on hypocrisy and self-loathing). Pick-up atrtist culture is supposed to be based around casual flings and how to get them, but it also creates a ridiculous standard that mostly leaves its followers empty and without a a partner they have a genuine connection with. It also teaches men to judge women based mainly on appearance and seeing them as a prize to win, denying them their agency and making them into some sort of puzzle or challenge to figure out. It’s why you see so many musings from these guys trying to figure out the “female mind.” HuniePop is that incarnate, partly because of basic game structure and partly because of the culture’s actual influence on the project, but further muddles things through the influences of Japanese visual porn novels.

Porn VNs have been getting made for decades now, and they’ve created their own tropes and common toxic occurrences. Even titles that manage to avoid sexual assault tend to have issues with character archetypes, creating particular personalities that get reused constantly to appeal to as many tastes as possible. It’s fine enough if it’s just personality traits, but a cultural problem rises up when a western studio tries translating that practice to western smut trends. Because Japan has been culturally cut off from much of the west for so long, at least compared to the changing scales of today in the internet boom, they have very rarely had ethnic stereotyping beyond the occasional blonde European girl who occasionally speaks in Engrish. Western pornography, however, has had a huge race problem pretty much since inception, with may sites today still having tags for different ethnicities. It is here where HuniePop’s racism problems explode into an uncomfortable undercurrent, and that problem is only going to grow worse in the third planned Hunie game, which will include a Muslim girl who’s basically the westernized version of the slutty nun archetype that has become so popular in Japan. Basically, they’re doing an ironic sexualization of an entire religion. The worst part is that they already started on this trend in earnest with HunieCam Studio.

HunieCam Studio is definitely the weaker of the two games, and one I had no desire to replay for this article – and so I didn’t. Replaying it wouldn’t really change my perspective any because you see everything you need to see after two playthroughs, which happens fairly quick. It’s an ugly, weirdly mean-spirited game, and oddly mostly by accident. The combination of the game and its marketing is like some sort of performance art meant to show you just how ugly ignorance really is, except it’s completely sincere. Few games have let me feeling as disgusted years after playing as HunieCam Studio, and while I know I’m sounding mean, I think it’s called for with this genuine piece of trash.

This game came about when HuniePot decided to try making something small for the sake of having content while they figured out what to do with the franchise next. They announced it in a baffling terrible news post, with such horribly unfunny “jokes” like “up to 20 unique girls who don’t mind showing a little skin to pay off that liberal arts degree” and “abandon your morals and die of a coke overdose.” HunieCam Studio has none of the polish or, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, class of HuniePop. The entire game is Kyu dialog from the writing and into the mechanics. It is a genuinely morally repugnant game. I tried being backhandedly dismissive about it in my HG101 piece (which should be up one blue moon), but since this my my own platform, let me make it clear: I genuinely hate playing this game.

Studio switches to a tycoon game design, with the goal being making as much money as possible in a given time span in a cam girl enterprise. The game is mechanically broken once you realize you can have one or two girls do nothing by get cigarettes or alcohol and have everyone else work or train as necessary. See, the trick to the game is that girls with better starter stats you can recruit tend to smoke or drink a lot, so they only work as long as their habits are supported. This limitation is easily broken, causing the game to be a mostly boring breeze. All the rest is just making sure everyone rests regularly at the spa and buying new items to give girls new fetish appeals to draw in more customers. Also, ads, training, blah blah blah.

The one truly disgusting element added in is just outright prostitution, which I would have been somewhat fine with, considering what game we’re talking about, if they had no made STDs into a mechanic. Yes, really. The only incurable one is AIDS. Yes, they turned AIDS into a game mechanic. Someone thought that would be funny and put it in the game. Needless to say, it is not.

It does not help that thanks to the shift to the tycoon formula, requiring far less narrative, the new girls didn’t get the same fleshed out personality or voices of the original cast. Every single new girl is a lazy stereotype of some sort, and most of them mean spirited. I’m honestly shocked they decided to reuse the weeaboo girl for their next title, a character introduced here solely to be made fun of for being enthusiastic about her interests, never mind the team’s own obvious influences from the realm of Japanese culture. However, the worst of them is definitely Zoey, a thinly veiled Tumblr parody drenched in transphobic and homophobic humor in her description if you know just what they’re actually parodying (aka queer women in social justice circles).

This was already outdated two years before this game released, and it wasn’t funny then either.

HunieCam Studio is nothing but the worst comedy bits of HuniePop strung out in both text and gameplay, and not much of it works. There’s some immature laughs to be had from such ideas as being able to capitalize on cake fart fetishism (heh), and the art shift has its own charm, but none of this can fix the game’s foundations. HuniePop worked in spite of itself through long spaces of puzzling and small talk, giving the team less chances to embrace their incredibly hit and miss humor. HunieCam is nothing but indulging in this humor, and it does not work at all. It’s a game that ages worse over time, and it’s not that old to begin with.

HunieCam is definitely the weaker and less popular of the two titles, yet it manages to retain strong positive standing on Steam. That seems odd, but it’s easy to figure out why. The major reason is that both Hunie games make it very clear what they are, and they attract an audience that has more tolerance for this sort of humor mixed into them. You can easily look at their advertising, some screenshots, and basic description to understand what you’re getting into. There’s not much in the way of surprises for the average buyer. What remains is that core audience who will eat this crap up, or at least tune it out.

But HuniePop is far, far more popular and has generally stronger word of mouth, and that can’t be solely because of its identity and how it’s presented. No, HuniePop also benefits from word of mouth. It’s either a so bad it’s good game, or a surprisingly good game that can be easily recommended to audiences who normally aren’t interested in erotic games. HuniePop has a sense of balance to it. It has chan humor, but it’s not suffocating. The less desirable elements, particularly the adoption of seduction community ideas, are all subtext and easy to miss. Even the drinking mechanic isn’t as creepy as it could have been because the bonus given for the puzzle is minor. It reels itself back, so most people who play it simply don’t see the worst aspects of it.

As strange as it sounds, HuniePop feels elegant at points. The backgrounds are lovely, the music is subtle and creates a pleasing atmosphere, the art makes good use of lighting and colors, and the women you can pursue all express their sexual side in mostly healthy ways. If you didn’t know much about the rather vile influences on the game, you would never pick up on them, and you probably wouldn’t get any messages on them in the process (especially since the team has no real interest in any sort of intended message). HuniePop simply lacks a lot of the common toxic tropes that tend to follow along with most heterosexual erotic games, or paints them very well so they become unnoticeable. It doesn’t even toy around with fetish stuff much, outside Momo and Celeste. HuniePop is sleazy, but that sort of sleazy you see at a high-end Vegas show, not at a common strip bar. It just gets the balance right to create something with a surprisingly wide appeal.

HuniePop may have played a large role in Steam weakening its restrictions on erotic games, allowing openly queer titles like Ladykiller in a Bind and Mutiny!! to eventually find their way there. It was a game changer of a title that introduced people to a world they would usually never venture into, and maybe even helped erotic games reach wider audiences just by the precedence it set. HuniePop came out at the right time and in the right way, becoming historically important. It’s still a subtextual mess of misogyny and racism, but it held back just enough to be a quality title in itself.

It’s hard to say what to expect from the next Hunie game, as the art has improved, yet the team seems to be going down further into stereotyping. But no matter what happens to the franchise from here, you can’t take away the impact HuniePop has had on the gaming world. I just wish it was a bit less gross. Like, seriously. Who thought Kyu talking about her “yellow fever” was funny. Who thought that was a good idea. What the fuck.