Topic on Reviews:Negligee

A surprisingly good game from Dharker Studios

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GethN7 (talkcontribs)

Dharker Studios (formerly known merely as A.J. Tilley) has a very checkered reputation. Some of their games are quite good, some are merely average, and some are cringe inducingly bad.

Thankfully, this one is on the quite positive end of the scale for quality.

For starters, the art is quite good. Some of the earlier games produced by this studio have been criticized for bland artwork that suffered very frequent copy-pasting and some uneven proportions, though this game features quite good art, especially for the characters, who are distinct and well drawn, with good backdrop scenery, and the game has animated scenes (if the adult patch is enabled) which I'm pleased to say are done well and don't look like a bad Adobe Flash project.

The gameplay is typical visual novel style, nothing unusual here that cannot be found in many other games using the Ren'Py engine, though it has the bizarre problem of no "hide the HUD" option so the scene can be viewed without the HUD elements in the way, forcing the player to have to save, go back to the main menu, then review these scenes in the CG Gallery.

Aside from this needing fixed, no bad marks here.

The music and sounds are of quite high quality and fit the tone well.

The writing is surprisingly well thought out, and while it does have heavy usage of meme references, most of these referenced memes are highly quoted and referenced in countless other media or are quite commonly referenced and have been for many years in most English speaking countries, so the game dialogue is unlikely to become dated anytime soon. It has a good grasp of comedy, and since it's told from the perspective of Hannah, whom the player see the world through the eyes of, it spares no expense at milking her oft shy nature for as much humor as possible, often to hilarious effect.

The game has multiple endings, and surprisingly, the game has a very worked out series of flags for the choices, and while some of the endings can be easily guessed at, some are difficult to acquire, with the bad ending being very easy to acquire, ironically only having a few separate flags separating it from the best ending, which can only be achieved after seeing all the other endings, so saving before every choice is highly recommended and the game will require multiple playthrougths to see everything.

The adult content is entirely optional in the Steam version (included by default with the Nutaku version), and the game does not noticeably suffer in quality from it's absence, though if added in via an official uncensorship patch, it merely extended a few scenes and is done very seamlessly. The actual portrayed content is lesbian in nature and quite vanilla, though somewhat hardcore in depiction, and the animated segments are no more explicit than the static images.

In general, even when not being outright adult, if you have a lingerie and/or lesbian fetish, this game is chock full of content to satisfy that particular niche.

Overall, this is highly recommended as one of the better products from this particular studio, and is well worth the asking price. The added DLC is not necessary for full enjoyment of the game at all, but are reasonably priced and worth picking up in a bundle along with the game itself.