"Virtual Date Girls: Lucy" A Review"Lucy" is a great Chaotic game; it may be his best game yet.
"Lucy" is a typical "Zork"/"Adventure"-style game. There is a maze that must be mastered, specific objectives along the way that must be found, and ultimately a goal to be achieved. In fact the game may be replayed three times from the beginning with different goals each time.
It is a very short game, easily playable in one evening, but that is one of its strengths. There is no need for a guide or a walkthrough; all options can be comfortably exhausted in a matter of hours. Furthermore Chaotic gives more hints to the player in this game as to the correct course of play than he has in his most of past games. For instance:
However players must carefully observe images and text to pick up clues, and, as always in this sort of game, players must consistently check every square inch of each image for clickable areas.
Another advantage of a short game: saves are unnecessary. If a player blunders, starting from scratch and returning to any point in the game is literally a matter of seconds.
As to the game itself, the idea is simple, and we should see have seen this sooner and hopefully will see it more often in the future in html dating sims, Lucy is going out for the night looking for fun. There is no complicated set up. It is just a typical weekend night played out three different ways. There is one unusual hazard: Lucy will fall asleep if she's not keep stimulated enough.
Let's call the three different versions of Lucy's night out "A", "B" and "C".
In version A the goal is obvious, but the prerequisites to achieve that goal are somewhat obscure. This is the ending that almost everyone who plays the game achieves relatively quickly.
In version B the goal is less obvious, and the prerequisites are much more formidable. After the ease of the first ending, players may be expecting a second easy ending. Sorry, players have to work for this one. Even so, this is a small game and
all options can be exhausted in a relatively short time.
In version C the goal is the easiest to achieve of any of the three, but the goal itself is very obscure. It is easy enough that a player may stumble across it by accident early on, or a player may do like I did, and in frustration go through the game exhausting every clickable space on every page that hasn't been tried before. All the while asking, "Why am I doing this? If there was any chance that this could lead to something good, I would have already done this," until suddenly Lucy is naked.
The gameplay is very clever. Each replay involves a different "strategy." That is a different attitude towards the NPCs. For such a small game that does not seem possible, but Chaotic achieves it.
Ok, that's the good. But this would not be a Chaotic game if he didn't have women performing acts that no human female has ever done since Homo sapiens first evolved 200,000 years ago. To avoid spoilers I won't go into details, but it's like nails on a chalk board. Frankly, some of the male NPCs aren't much better. This is the main reason I call this a "great
Chaotic game" in the opening sentence of this review: a good game with Chaotic's foibles for spice.
To be fair some of Chaotic's foibles are completely absent in this game. Players of Chaotic's previous games know that he tends to lead them a long way down dead ends before acknowledging that a wrong choice was selected
somewhere earlier in the game. For a game that does not provide "saves" this endlessly frustrating. There is none of that in "Lucy". If a player goes into a dead end or makes a wrong choices, he is notified within a turn or two. I didn't realize how frustrated I was with this aspect of Chaotic's previous games until I encountered its absence.
But an even bigger improvement over many of Chaotic's previous games is that "Lucy" is bug-free. That's right: a Chaotic game with zero bugs.
Chaotic needs to do more of these small dating games. He seems to be very good at this genre. If he had a site filled with games similar to "Lucy", he would have my money.
