Original Release: Skullgear, 2018, PC/Mac
Other Releases: Linux (2019), Android (2020)
The everyday adventures of NOT HIGH SCHOOLER as he attempts to hump every woman in his small town
Dandy Boy Adventures (PC, Skullgear, 2023)
Where to Buy: Pre-release version free at Itch.io
At a glance you’d probably assume Dandy Boy is a zany Earthbound-style RPG, but it’s really more like an open world adventure scattered with mini-games. We’re dumped into the Dandy World as our hero simply prepares to head in for another day of school (kept rather ambiguous as to whether it’s high school or college, let’s just assume everyone is at least 18 since we’re not being told otherwise), and you kinda get into the quests and side quests at your own pace as you stumble across them while roaming about the town from there.
The universe operates on a sort of Groundhog Day “rift in time” logic that is entirely convenient to the hero’s prospects of getting laid. The game cycles through days of the week, with each day having four time slots (morning, afternoon, evening and night). Quests often involve a character meeting you at a certain time of day, but if you miss it that day the event just kinda pauses and continues to be available on future days at that time. Which is a good thing because you’ll sometimes either unwittingly miss an event, or have schedule conflicts with multiple quests needing you to meet someone in the afternoon or whatever. You can manually pass time by napping in your bedroom or doing one of the several jobs scattered about town, but it also automatically passes with certain events; this aspect is kinda unpredictable, but if it involves dating or sex of some sort that usually means it’s gonna move time ahead to the next block.
Really, the whole point of the game is to search around the town for all the girls you can possibly rut with and then follow the quests that eventually lead to the rutting. There is eventually a subplot that involves tracking down the main character’s missing father, but that also involves a sexy alien lady, so. You just sorta run around like a spastic barging into people’s houses at random to meet all the game’s viable characters and start their quest lines. Once you’ve actually initiated quests, there’s a helpful menu to keep track of them and you’re often led by an arrow to the next necessary destination … actually initiating them can be quite visual novel-y, though, as it really involves just combing the town on different days and times to see if new stuff has popped up (or just looking things up online).
With arrows literally leading you to the destinations in most cases, and no RPG combat or anything like that, there isn’t much challenge save an occasional mini-game tossed into your path as part of a quest. Certain of these can be absolutely maddening even with a good gamepad, however, and I can’t even imagine trying to use a phone touch screen. A couple of the optional jobs to earn money (you’ll sometimes need to buy items to complete quests and improve the moods of ladies) are mini-games inspired by some other vintage game, like a Paperboy clone for delivering the local rag and a block-pushing puzzle game in the manner of SMT’s Puzzle Boy … they’re both kinda rough, though, and fortunately you can find a lot of money by rifling through trash and later digging holes (after buying a shovel at the mall). The best of the mini-games is a full-on retro-style Castlevania/Wonder Boy clone that you can play from the computer in your room, which features several full levels and is actually pretty well done.
The game sports quite an appealing and well-designed world; sometimes it feels a bit empty of things to actually do for how big it is, but it’s smooth and fairly quick to race around in it (and use the convenient bus system for instant teleports). That aspect may well be addressed by the final version, as of this writing it’s at version 0.65 and some of the outer reaches of the overworld is blocked off (along with some quests abruptly terminating a couple segments in). The whole thing is programmed extremely well and shows a level of polish and consideration that is rare in the H-game world.
The biggest issue, at least to me, is the H content. With little else going on in the world, questing for lewd pics and sex animations is kinda a central focus. The art style really doesn’t reward you appropriately for your efforts. I’m reminded of a passage from Al Lowe’s “The Official Book of Leisure Suit Larry” (one of my favorite video game biographies) in which he describes the initial design plan for Larry 5 being for the girls to be drawn in the same exaggerated cartoon style Larry wound up with; this was scrapped because, as Al put it, they couldn’t make the girls look sexy, just weird and ugly. I wouldn’t go so far as “ugly” here, they’re competent but very basic and not sexy.
That’s kinda where this game is at. It’s a low-detail, not-tremendously-skilled cartoon style that’s just not very erotic, particularly when it gets down to the difficult-to-draw naughty bits. There are some odd stylistic fetishy choices, like having every MILF in the game have some preposterous rhino body. But the most iffy of the fetishy bits is the game hitting you with NOT MOM and NOT SISTER right out the gate and making them major central characters; they default to “landlady” and “roommate” as relationships, presumably to allow this to be listed on Steam and such, but you can also manually change that text. I really don’t get this fetish and I don’t know why it pops up so often in these Itch.io type games, is there some legion of freespending coomers out there that demands this stuff in return for their money, or is this becoming a (disturbingly) common thing in the internet / undersexed age? I really don’t know if the kids are alright.
Anyway. As a free sandbox to play around in, it’s a very intriguing project that shows a lot of potential. Given the effort and skill put in thus far, the final version may well be a substantially improved product. But at the moment it’s kinda in a no-man’s-land of having this nice game world and engine but not enough to do in it, and the central thrust of the game saddled with an unappealing art style and some “taboo” fetishes that not everyone is going to be comfortable with. I’ll be happy to take another look when it’s all wrapped up, though.
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