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I came across Flipwitch when the soundtrack came into my YT recommended, and wow, it really goes. Absolutely recommend checking the soundtrack out, it's amazing. The art looked pretty good, and people in the comments were talking about how good of a Metroidvania it actually was, despite being "just a porn game TM". That was all very intriguing, so I checked it out.

Now, I'm not like an expert on Metroidvanias - I've played two Metroid games and failed to get into Hollow Knight - but this seemed mediocre at best as one of those. The actual movement and controls are good, there's some interesting stuff you can do - I think I got a couple treasure boxes before I was supposed to cuz you can toy around with coyote time and whatnot. However, the movement at the start of the game is nearly the same as the end. You get a side dash and a triple jump (you start with a double jump). I didn't think that this changed the way I interacted with the world really. There are some spots you can't reach without an upgrade, but not very many. When the game wants to lock you out of an area, it'll do it by locking it behind a key you have to find instead of an upgrade you need. This just makes it feel a lot flatter, sometimes I felt like this was less of a Metroidvania and more of an Open-World game, if that makes sense. The quest log certainly didn't help in that regard.

There are two progression paths: the ability upgrades, and the wand/damage upgrades. The ability upgrades are just like any other Metroidvania, mostly. You explore around and find stuff you can use. There are also merchants you can buy from that'll give you magic items, but I never really interacted with them. At the start when their items were useful, I never had enough money to spare, and by the end I had already figured out not to bother with combat. The only good thing I bought let me use fast travel starting from anywhere - the only good thing I bought let me skip more of the game. The wand upgrades come from doing quests. There are a bunch of NPCs around, you do some stuff for them, and after you've done a few, you return to your teacher and raise your damage output. Mechanically, you could probably ignore this. It's just a damage buff, and it doesn't do much more than make combat less tedious. But those quests are where most of the porn in this porn game is, so the game does want you to interact with it. I did do all of them, but mostly cuz I wasn't sure if they were important to do or not. For a while, it was unclear how important these were to progression. They aren't normally super interesting either. Some of them require exploration, you need to find an item and bring it back, so you might need to backtrack and use an upgrade, but most aren't. Most of the quest entail of finding someone who's into catgirls, so you put on your catgirl costume and have sex. You can collect a bunch of these costumes and wear them in normal gameplay, but tbh I stuck with the defaults most of the time.

I found the combat really uninteresting. You have two attacks, a melee and a ranged. You can get magic items and upgrades that will enhance your ranged attack, but since you have to rotate them into activation and then charge them, it means they're not that useful in gameplay. Using them is so slow, so it's almost never worth taking the extra seconds swap them in, charge, and then activate. I also had issues with some of them where they wouldn't activate properly, so I'd have to start again. It didn't take long before I just stopped bothering. Since the combat is so uninteresting, the boss fights also really suffered. I died a few times on the first boss, but from there on out I cleared each boss in one or two tries because they all had almost the exact same tells and patterns. I actually thing normal exploration is more dangerous than boss fights, but not even for a good reason. The main reason I died was that I was unaware I was so low on health. You get a ping if you're very low health, but every single attack does more damage than that ping accounts for, so even if you don't hear it it's possible to die in one hit. On most of my deaths I had heals in the bag, and plenty of time to heal, I just didn't realize I needed to. Obviously there's a HUD as well, so I can always check visually, but it's small and in the corner, so I didn't really see it passively. Personally I just found it rather annoying.

The porn was also really disappointing. The art direction is on point at all times, the enemy designs are super cool, the level art is great, the soundtrack again, rules, the sound design is also really awesome. All of this together should combine into porn that's like, interesting. But it doesn't. Maybe it's just me being queer, but it's just boring. This has a fantasy setting, there are demons and angels and minotaurs and slime monsters and mushrooms and goblins and moving statues and living plants and the game somehow made those all boring. One of the biggest game mechanics is that you can switch your sex - that's what the title of the game means! So all together this should be incredible, but it isn't. Your player character mostly has the game animations across genders, but the boy's idle animation has him gently his hips swaying from side while the girl's is doing that, but also like, I can't even describe it well, breasting boobily? Find me a woman who ever stands like that and I will pay you. When you kill a male enemy he makes video game death sounds, but when you kill a female enemy she makes video game sex sounds. It's just really superly duperly made for straight guys. The PC's male sprite is actually pretty cute, but when he's in a sex scene it's always whatever girl who's the focus. It's all PIV or blowjobs, over and over and over again in the exact same way. There are a few lesbian scenes, but those are clearly made for dudes to watch. Is there any male gay sex? No, of course not. Again, fantasy setting, all sorts of fantasy creatures, and it's all straight PIV.

What's annoying about that is that they all look super good. The animation is incredible, the style is amazing! It's all very cutesy-chibi-ish, but it toes the line to where it's still hot. It is obviously executed well, but they just weren't interesting in anything else.

Anyway, go listen to Hieroglyphmix, it's amazing. It's got a whilhem scream, amen break type stuff, fun synths, full orchestra to loop it back to the top, it's great.

I like this game more than Hollow Knight, but that's cuz I'm a weirdo and can't stand that game.