Original Release: TheWorst, 2017, PC/Mac
Manage a stable of DC superheroines as they make that money, cater to your whims, and search for legendary artifacts needed to travel through dimensions
Girls In The Big City (PC, TheWorst, 2017)
Where to Buy: Freeware, download at Itch.io
If you’ve ever fancied playing as an evil Speedster using his powers to manipulate and molest women … I guess Girls In The Big City technically fits the bill, though it’s really more like making them get up and go to work every day. Wonder Woman better have my money.
The setup is that you play as a corrupt Speedster named Zoom, who I initially assumed was an original creation but turns out to actually be a DC character, who somehow gets himself stuck in one of those interminable DC Earths where super powers only kinda sorta carry over sporadically and randomly. Other super heroes also occasionally appear and get trapped in this dimension, coincidentally all attractive super heroines. Zoom sets up shop in locating and manipulating them from his private investigator’s office, while also searching for magical artifacts that might open a portal back home.
You start out manipulating a now-powerless Wonder Woman to do your dirty work (really more your boring and tedious work) for you, and the game has her juggling making money to pay her rent in the Big City while also following assorted quest lines in the search for moar mystical artifacts. Eventually a handful of other DC heroines wind up in the mix, some of them also coming under your control and influence. A notably more chesty April O’Neil winds up in there too, even though that’s not DC, though I guess it counts due to those Batman crossovers. Anyway.
The long and short of all this is a time and money management game, though not a particularly demanding one. Your only recurring bill is paying Wonder Woman’s once-weekly $200 rent, a fairly trivial task. Plot developments sometimes require you to buy something more expensive, but you can take your sweet time with that.
Other than that, you also need to do a little grinding of some of the other characters to get them through plot-mandatory battles. Raven has a simplistic but OK little sh’mup mini-game to build her stats, Harley Quinn gets a little SRPG type thing (which eventually becomes the game’s main battle mode) that doesn’t level her but does allow you to pick up extra money and some optional nudie pics. And then, of course, there are all sorts of simple sex mini-games, a few of which are mandatory to advance some plot objective or another.
It’s thus more of a patience-tester than anything else, as a relatively small amount of environments and overall game content is stretched out by repetitive grinding. Wonder Woman endlessly does photo shoots and beats up some horny alley bum for money, you’re required to do Raven’s sh’mup about 10 times to advance the plot (though probably more like 30 or 40 is a better idea to get her powerful enough for the rest of the game), Harley repeatedly visits the fight club every night, etc. Herbert the Pervert eventually randomly pops in to solve most of your money issues, but after that you still have to grind away at Diana and Harley’s nightclub dance job for a good while.
What helps it is a good sense of humor, appealing art (comic book style isn’t my first choice for H games but this is at least high-effort and pleasant to look at) and an overall very good level of polish for a Ren’py game. I didn’t even know the engine could do sh’mups or readily handle character-switching and multi-character battles, the creative stretching of its boundaries is pretty impressive on its own.
That, and it’s free to the world. So if you like the DC theme it’s probably worth checking out, though it kinda feels like they ran out of steam halfway in and decided to just wrap the whole thing up and call it done.
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