Original Release: Calunio, 2010, PC
Professor Xavier turns pimp and whores out the women of the X-Men in an outside-the-box attempt to create peace between humans and mutants; you manage the day-to-day operations.
Marvel Brothel (PC, Calunio, 2010)
Where to Buy: Freeware, download from Gamejolt
Review by: Master-B
Marvel Brothel takes the gameplay and concepts of your typical boring Japanese business/time-management sim, and spices it up with hooking and the Marvel universe. Two great tastes that taste great together!
Professor X decides that the best way to bridge the gap between mutants and humans is to open a reasonably priced brothel where humans can be serviced by the lovely ladies of the mutant world. The game takes place over 30 days in which you manage your stable of superhookers. At first you’ve only got Storm, Rogue and Jubilee at your disposal, and Rogue can’t work the shafts due to the whole “kills on contact” thing. There are more that join as the plot moves forward, though, for example Jean Grey shows up in the first couple of days. You also soon get contacted by Mojo who is running some sort of space sex trade and will sell you the services of other superheroines.
So each girl has their own ratings in Appeal, Stamina, Kinkiness, and Combat. Rogue actually turns out to be useful as a bouncer in the latter department as her Combat and Stamina start pretty high. Magneto objects to your brothel plans and here and there he sends a supervillain to stomp through your establishment, which scares all the customers into a panic. To get rid of them someone has to step up and chase them around smacking at them like a bothersome fly, until they run out of energy and retreat.
Those incidents are pretty few and far between though, and most days consist of five minutes of real time in which you match incoming customers up with a girl. The girl has to have enough Stamina to handle the customer’s Lust level, enough Kinkiness to please their requirements, and also be priced within their budget (you get to set the prices at the beginning of each day.) Customers are more willing to go to the upper extremes of their budget the more Appeal a girl has. Also, sometimes they have a special request, like they want a black girl or a mindreader, in which case the normal stat requirements are mostly waived if you have what they want on hand.
Girls get experience from each successful lay, which can be used between days to upgrade their stats. You can also buy upgrades to the facilities that add all kinds of buffs and effects in the background, like a sex toy collection that gives a boost to everyone’s Kinkiness level, or a bar that collects drink money in the background. There’s even a stripper stage to give poor Rogue a way to earn money… at least until the final game day where suddenly she becomes really useful.
The game uses the creaky old RPG Maker 2003 engine so it’s limited in a lot of things, especially graphics. Old mid-1990s SNES tile-based movement is the style here and the graphics are all pretty simple. The characters are all recognizable even in scrunched form, however, and I like the comic book clips this guy dug up for the cutscenes. No original music but the selection here is great, mostly a bunch of R&B loops from somewhere or another that fit the theme perfectly. Very little in the way of sound effects and they are all pretty basic.
Where the game really shines is in that it’s actually fairly deep and playable. The clunky RPG Maker engine does make everything a little more of a pain in the ass than it should be but on the whole it works out pretty well. You have to do a lot of mental juggling once your whore roster expands to the maximum of 10, to remember who has what stats and what their price is set at so as to not waste the very limited amount of time in each work day. The hilarity value of new Marvel characters constantly busting in helps a lot to smooth over the rough and repetitious patches in the gameplay.
The game wasn’t really designed to have any erotic value and there’s no sexual content on-screen whatsoever. If you get the “sex screens” upgrade there are some pixel boobs here and there on it but otherwise there’s not even any nudity. Language and themes and all that but nothing visual.
Initially I thought the game would be a winner in the replayability department, since you can only have 10 girls on hand but there are 16 total that you can get, and in all the various different upgrades you can choose to the brothel grounds. However, as it turns out the end game really forces you to play one way. You have to field a team of girls with the highest Stamina possible and constantly build it through the game or you won’t survive the brutal final day, also you’re forced to upgrade the Brothel to maximum and get every upgrade (other than the EXP Bomb) since it’s necessary to eventually get a 5-star rating, and a 5-star rating is necessary to get an item you need to get through the final day. So really, the game has to be played pretty much the same way each time or you won’t survive the final encounter!
I know this is a little free thing made by a guy either for a competition or for a birthday present for his brother or something. If it came out as a commercial product without any of the Marvel references it would be too short, buggy, clunky interface and repetitious to really bother with. Adding all the Marvel-related humor plus general lowered expectations for being both an H-game and a freeware RPG Maker project make it one of the better games of the sex crop though, just for being fairly playable and entertaining. It’s a great concept, I just wish it had been fine-tuned better, particularly with regards to the ridiculous final challenge and the general clumsiness of the interface. Still worth checking out for some good times and good laughs, though.
Videos
Gameplay Video