Original Release: Alibi, 2017, PC
Possibly a porny riff on cult indie title “Beholder,” Shelter has an interesting strategy/moral choice premise but doesn’t do a whole lot with it
Shelter (PC, Alibi, 2017)
Where to Buy: No longer commercially available (was on DLSite previously); try Internet Archive
Review by: Master-B
Shelter is a strategy game that casts you as a landlord in some fictional Eastern Europe-esque shithole circa the ’80s, trying to survive a 60-day political upheaval while keeping your cash flow going. It’s a bit like hentai classic The Maids Story, except a military junta might randomly knock on your door and search the place for illegal guns and liquor.
Each game day begins with a lineup of hopeful refugees outside your door, looking to rent one of your six rooms. They are shrouded in varying degrees of mystery, however: where are they from? How much money do they have? Are they smuggling illicit goods? These questions will soon be very pertinent, as the military junta gradually adds new rules about what countries of origin you can’t harbor and what counts as contraband. Occasional surprise inspections by them can lead to a quick game over if you’ve got the wrong nationality in your rooms, and also their concealed contraband is blamed on you for some reason.
You have a limited amount of “action points” each day with which to onboard new tenants, evict bums and rabble-rousers, search their rooms or call them in for having contraband. You never know everything about a tenant when they move in, so you’ll have to do a room search at some point when they’re out, hopefully before your next military inspection. You don’t lose any money on unoccupied rooms, but if a broke tenant is in one you’ll start losing considerable money in upkeep fees.
Then there’s the H stuff. When a female tenant’s money runs out, you can threaten her with a good time. If you have film or video tapes in your inventory, you can also do some amateur pornography with her, though there seems to be no purpose to this but selling it for a profit. A guy with a top hat sometimes appears outside your home, he might want to buy and sell goods, or he might be on a mission in the flesh trades. Female tenants you’ve intimidated can be sold to him as prostitutes, and inconvenient men you’ve buckbroken can be shipped off to the work camps for a profit.
There are also three “named” potential waifu girls that are part of the story and are added to your house at certain times. Eventually they’ll ask for a particular item, and if you play your cards right you might choose one of them for a loving relationship at the end of the game.
Getting to those “good endings” is an extremely opaque process, though. As it turns out, and as I wouldn’t have known if not for some random YouTube video, what you have to do is not do anything at all dickish over the course of the game – don’t rob people’s rooms, get into sex slavery, etc. While also meeting the other necessary conditions of each girl’s story. That’s contrary to the game’s tutorial, which openly instructs you to be Dirty Landlord, and is also a path that gets you almost no H-scenes whatsoever.
Shelter really is an interesting concept, but it lacks complexity and feels like one of those ideas that a developer kinda half-baked before deciding to toss it up on DLSite for a couple bucks and move on to their next project. It’s extremely easy if you just play as Bad Landlord and try to uncover maximum H scenes. Being Good Guy Gregor and trying to woo a girl adds a little more strategy but is still pretty easy, especially if you’ve played the game previously since most of the events happen at predictable times. It could have used a little more randomization and thought about strategic trade-offs, also not having the refugee girls all look exactly the same would have been nice (total H content is very much on the minimal and basic side). So much more could have been done with this idea but it seems more like a demo put together to attract Patreon money for the real game rather than, y’know, the real game.
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