Villa Party I Review

The ‘have sex at a party’ genre may only have two entries in it, but as a married introvert it is of interest to me. Villa Party I is the aforementioned second game in the genre, and it sees you heading to rich guy, Richie’s place in Florida. You’re Jason, amongst the lucky winners found from across the world, who won some kind of secret lottery, and get to live it up in style. With a secret competition between all of the guys over who can have sex the most. Sorry, a secret competition where “the point is who can make as many orgasms as possible for the girls”, as the host says early on.

I don’t really like name-checking other games in reviews, because I feel that it takes some of the review title’s thunder by doing that. But the game this is ripping off is the Early Access title House Party, by Eek! Games. A first person party game whose aim is to have sex with other guests, that’s literally House Party’s M.O.

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for games that riff on others. There’s no Saints Row without Grand Theft Auto III, for instance, and as a regular reader you’ll know how much I love Saints Row. Most of the time it adds it’s own style - Sleeping Dogs is a GTA-style game, but it’s quite different to both it and Saints Row.

Then we have Villa Party I. It certainly puts its own spin on things, but it seems like every choice they made was the wrong one. I’ll try to go through them in severity, because you’ll obviously want to know why I’m scoring this game the way I am.

All of the voice acting for this multinational cast of characters is done using text-to-speech software with American accents. I don’t mean it’s awkward and stilted (though it is) - it’s literally not being spoken by real people. I’m just glad they apparently fixed one of my issues, where the volume sliders literally did nothing, and even with my headset volume turned right down it was almost deafening. However, the voices are still terrible.

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To be fair, the voices are only doing what the script tells them to do. And the script deserved to be set on fire, not entered into a vocal synthesiser. One of the women told me three times that she was bisexual, two of those times was adding in that she’s only here to cheat on her husband. Who she’s been with for five years. The script was not edited by someone who could read fluent English as it’s missing many plural words and there are basic tense errors like “I understood” instead of “I understand”.

Then we have the gameplay itself. You have to complete tasks in order to get sex, and only in the order which you’re given them, making progression very linear. You can do other things, which I’ll get to, but the main thing is to pick up litter and dog poop. Because nothing says “sexy times!” like picking up excrement and putting it in the bin, with no way to wash Jason’s hands!

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Speaking of, when you get to doing the nasty in Villa Party I, it’s actually incredibly dull. The first lady you seduce, Charlotte, wants to go down on you, and does so for roughly five to eight minutes of real time whilst you have no idea how much longer it’s going to take. Jason seemingly gets bored and starts looking around the room - because you can’t control the camera yourself!

However, when I eventually resumed control, I was given the option to pleasure Charlotte and did so. This involved using the mouse to click onto an arm & hand and repeatedly thrust two fingers in and out of her. This, again, took far too long, but at least there was a meter telling me how long until her orgasm.

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Picking up rubbish gives you money - a few coins (yes, coins) for each thing you throw away. Using these coins will get you a few things. The most entertaining is the machine selling mushrooms - sorry, Magic Candy. Pay 100 coins, then get ready to trip balls as anthropomorphic food appears around the house, dancing! Don’t want it to dance? Then get a ray gun and shoot all of it for points! Then go outside and shoot the giant food that is just stood there in the near distance!

There’s another machine that allows you to select certain scenarios that the developer promises to update regularly. The first one is watching a werewolf bang a lady of your choosing, the second is having sex with a guy and the third is sleeping with Richie’s mom. The game claims the werewolf is a “Fury Wolf of famous legend (with human genitalia)”, and it’s honestly just crap. It uses two positions, each for a few minutes, while another “Fury Wolf” watches. Except, the first time I tried it out, the second one was suddenly standing sideways, facing away from the couple when they changed positions.

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When you choose Richie’s mum, you actually participate in the matter. Well, you get to watch as it happens for about 15 minutes. Having sex with the guy is about 10 minutes, but the Orgasm meter labels him as female, and for some reason it transports you to a workshop full of loud machinery so you can’t hear him moaning. All three of them teleport you somewhere, but that’s the oddest one - counting the weird room full of paintings and dolls that Richie’s mother is in.

All three of these events will wear down your survival meters. You have a thirst and food meter, both of which go down over time no matter what you’re doing. It takes about 20 minutes to get the thirst one to zero percent, and a bit longer for the food one. Once they reach zero, it starts taking your coins. What happens when you run out? I’ve no idea.

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The reason I have no idea is because I’ve never bothered to test it out. I’ve played this game for about five hours, forcing myself to open it up for multiple play sessions, because I wanted to be thorough for this review. But I’ve had enough of the synthesised voices, the too-shiny character models in the too-dark house, the music that can deafen someone from across the room…

Avoid Villa Party I. There’s more that I could say - I even made notes - but no, this is a bad game. It works, but from what I’ve heard there’s a reason most asset flips are based on Unity. The only fun I eked out of this was when I activated the Hide & Seek machine, which hid miniatures of all of the characters around the house, tasking me with finding them and putting them on the kitchen counter. It was a challenge, not made easier by the fact that you cannot move faster than a steady walk, and also two of the characters continuing their oral sex on a counter, despite all of the others disappearing.

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Okay, one more thing and then this is done. Early on in this game about orgasms, blowjobs and anal sex you’re tasked with finding a caffeine tablet for one of the women. You get it from Richie, then both you and the girl take it. You then get a burst of energy for about five minutes before passing out.

Turns out you almost died, as someone has to give you CPR. This is EARLY in the game, and they keep talking about how you must have had a bad caffeine tablet. CLEARLY it was NOT a caffeine tablet because you OVERDOSE. Villa Party I has you watching sex acts performed in front of you for 10 minutes at a time and “Magic Candy” that causes hallucinations - and it can’t do better than “caffeine tablet”?!

Screw Villa Party I. It is a bad game that is badly made, and despite saying they would have a new scenario “every month”, the game has been out for two months without an update. Go play House Party instead, it’s half the price and a lot more interesting and fun than Villa Party I. And the women are hotter with better character models. Oh, and you can save the game, unlike this hunk of crap!