Original Release: Calunio, 2011, PC
A romp through a Dante-esque sex hell in that inimitable RPG Maker 2003 style
Polymorphus Perversity (PC, Calunio, 2011)
Where to Buy: Freeware (donations requested)
Review by: Master-B
Created by an actual psychologist (and the designer of Marvel Brothel), Polymorphus Perversity opens with a bit about being based on Freudian theories of child sexual development. That might set off some alarm bells, but the game’s content is grown adult stuff. That’s not to say it doesn’t take some very dark turns, but it’s not a pedo game.
We open with our hapless hero just playing a little palm pinochle before bed, when the glowies bust in on him and drag him off to parts unknown. He then wakes up in a dreamlike world where the id runs wild and there is no sense of anything pleasurable or carnal being “wrong”; everyone runs around in some state of undress in what appears to be a giant hippie love-in (complete with LSD visuals).
We take control with our hero seeking to raise funds to buy a ticket for the Phantom Train in the hopes of escaping, and soon learn that thots about the landscape must regularly be slayed (in the sexual sense) or the character’s gradually engorging member will eventually explode and bring a swift Game Over. This entails an “active time battle” combat system in which enemy sex techniques drain stamina, but yours do as well. And you get bonuses for actually pleasuring the enemies with the right combination of moves, but you’ll have to periodically rest to recover your stamina and resting in the midst of a move chain greatly decreases its potency. So it’s surprisingly strategic for weird sex combat.
You eventually work your way to a city hub, where the game stops being merely jokey and trippy and starts taking on some occasional unpleasant elements. For example, you can stumble across a house in which parents have tied up their daughter for non-consensual shenanigans, or a house of prostitutes lamenting their fate.
From the hub you can head out to several dungeon areas, unfortunately the first one tripped me up and I couldn’t find any kind of help online anywhere. I couldn’t figure out what the One Weird Trick to Marble Zone was, and had to give up; the game becomes very tough to take when you’re stuck in finding some obtuse progress flag, due to the constant Pecker Timer and the need to engage in repetitive battle to slake it as you roam about trying to figure out what the hell the designer intended.
Cash is also a problem, potentially an even bigger one after a while. It doesn’t drop from battles, the only sources are very occasional one-time treasure chests, and a very stingy mining mini-game that takes forever to make any money of consequence. You need to buy a steady supply of items, most notably condoms for every new opponent (which you also have to remember to equip with your first move of each battle or they are useless), which are not cheap but if not used will eventually slap you with an STD that gimps your stats and costs a crazy amount of money to cure.
Polymorphus Perversity is clearly more of a message game than a T&A game, and from my limited experience of it I’m not entirely sure what that message was supposed to be. But from what little I did see, it seems like a game that now exists out of its own time. The apparent themes of porn addiction, instant gratification and a loss of the sense of what relationships are supposed to be fit better in the roaring 00s when tube sites and Big Sausage Pizzas and such were riding high. The culture really seems to have swerved hard since then; a big chunk of the developed world is just plain giving up on sex and relationships, often due to material concerns, and those that long for it are increasingly either taking a “trad” turn to idealizing monogamous marraige and the 2.5 kids as the dream once again, or turning to fringe gender-bending escapism that usually seems accompanied by a strong dose of associated mental illness (which is far more commonly encountered than I ever remember it being like pre-2010).
Does it have some sort of explanatory power for, well … anything? I don’t know. It’s well-made and unique enough that I want to play more to find out, but it’s also actively irritating and obtuse enough that I don’t. Some kind of an online walkthrough would do a lot to help.
Links
- This game has the power to make weirdos have complete meltdowns apparently (example 2 )