“Crush Crush: Moist and Uncensored” has arrived on Nutaku this week, breathing new life into the Adventure Capitalist-style dating simulator by fulling embracing its hentai potential. Developer Sad Panda Studios wisely made the call to offer the game for free, in all its fully uncensored glory, bringing this addicting dating game to a whole new generation of players with loads of boundary-pushing content.
When western players think Dating Sims, they usually think Huniepop and its many clones. In these type of games, the dates are simple match-three puzzles, and the pickup approaches are straightforward, like filling a questionnaire. There's none of the social anxiety and fear of rejection that's so often par de course for two virile human animals engaged in a mating ritual. There's only the excitement of meeting new girls, chatting them up, and skipping to the good stuff. Crush Crush is not a Huniepop clone, nor is it one of those shoddy, grindy, flash-based dating RPGs you can play on pirate sites. By now, fans of dating sims are used to clicking buildings on a map, going to work for money, buffing up strength points at a gym, and gaining knowledge points at school - but in Crush Crush these mechanics are streamlined for the player's enjoyment. You simply click on the jobs and hobbies you want, and your toon automatically starts grinding in-game cash and skill points. The money buys the usual gifts and dates you expect from this genre, and skill points unlock better-paying jobs. Skill points also function as prerequisites to enter the next relationship stage with your favorite girls. There's a whole range of increasingly exotic dates, beginning with a gamer girl and eventually reaching time-travellers and mecha pilots, each with unique personalities and hearts of gold waiting to be melted.
Meeting girls is as simple as destroying their motorcycle, walking on their cardboard box house, reking their arcade record, etc. These sequences are told in a skippable storymode format, never taking away from the actual gameplay time. Because these encounters are over so quickly, there's some humor to make the ridiculousness not feel out of place - it sets the atmosphere for a fun, non-serious game one can play casually. Crush Crush has a unique mechanic to speed up the leveling up of your skills, and your money in-flow. It's called "prestige", and it's the most addicting feature in the game. When you feel the need for speed you can strategically restart your progress in the game, and when you've already unlocked lots of girls and jobs or completed achievements, it gives a mad boost to speed. After only a few hours of playing, you can reset your game and receive everything back ten times faster, only to work towards another reset to gain a booster. It feels jolly like you're breaking the game with cheat codes, except that it's a core part of the experience.
The game has uncensored romance scenes not seen in the previous Steam or Kongregate versions, which is a big pull for those players who are dying to see how the relationships actually culminate. There are also new girls and outfits exclusive to Nutaku - oh, and there's even a hottie you can date called Nutaku-chan! She enters your life through the wall... the fourth wall. Love at first sight. It was destiny. The only thing stopping you from taking on every job and hobby is the time bar. Every activity takes ticks in the time bar. It adds a tint of realism to the game, in the sense that you can only work three or four jobs at the same time before you’re collapsing from exhaustion. Going on dates with girls also requires time, meaning that you’ll have to drop one of your many hobbies. It's a little less streamlined of an experience when you have to always toggle things on and off, but it adds immersion. If you unlock the "professional athlete" job for example, you can say goodbye to your hobbies.
Like all free to play games, there is a store in Crush Crush. You can grab extra ticks to your time bar, boosters to progress, and even eliminate the reset penalty. This function is completely optional, for the players that want to give some support to an independent studio, and to Nutaku for providing a competent website for hentai gamers to play on. If you've been aching for a dating sim that isn't a clone or just stereotypical, the girls of Crush Crush: Moist and Uncensored will hook you quickly.
