Unity - Hush Hush - Only Your Love Can Save Them [v0.320] [Sad Panda Studios]

Story 2/5
This is proberly one of the best dating sims ive seen, but to me personaly i just dont like forced LIs even less in dating games since whats the point if you cant either turn down someone or fuck it up somehow, the thing is if you fuck it up in this one it will result in game-over making it very very kinetic which is to bad since game has alot going for it.
I just dont like whores of any kind and when you cant turn down those types its just not for me and i dont get why they would put that type in as a forced LI.

Also the so called sex scenes are the most boring you will ever see, when you finaly get the chance to have "sex" with a girl all you see is a nude girl and then some text saying your now playing with her? im not kidding thats really it....scene over....hell even when they kiss it happens off-screen? i mean you never see MC not once, not even hes fingers/tounge/dick in sex scenes? so you really should consider this as a none sexual game since all it has it nude girls like in a playboy magasine......

For a game with the animated tag you would expect alot more but all thats animated is just small movements from the girl, like when you fuck one of them she has her hand on her pussy and it never leaves and text starts saying your now fucking her? and thats it....theres just no rewards for a game that should be an adult game.

Not really a fan of the interface either, no auto save, no scroll back which is annoying most will just save and reload if they fuck something up, so no real point in not having scroll back.

Game is fully voiced and its pretty good really.

Girls 3/5
They look ok and the art is kind nice but theres not much diversity in builds.

Animations 1/5
H-scenes not really animated since its just a girl on a bed showing some very small movement thing, when MC is fucking a girl you never see a dick or anything, i cant even call it softcore....

Choices 2/5
You dont really have much choices your have to go after the 5 girls which is ok if they dident have a whore among them, that killed it for me really and to make it really annoying is that you can fuck up with girls or miss an event with someone where game then some time later just goes to game-over or maybe you dident pick the right stats which will lead to a failed date which is then again game-over, really not a fan of that stuff either, so you need alot of saves to be sure not to waste a shitload of time restarting due to game-overs.

It feels a bit unfair to judge Hush Hush as an eroge because it really doesn't seem like it's trying to be one. This is a shame because it is so close to being an amazing eroge, but it's limited by a few glaring design decisions and a general lack of eroticism.

The premise is that you are a gender-unspecified nobody sent to the town of Subrosa on a divine quest to save 5 girls from certain doom. You are told to get close to the girls by any means necessary to learn their traumatic secrets, as this is apparently the only way to help them avoid their fates. Your divine benefactors are only willing to comp you for exactly 1 month of lodging so you need to work quickly to fuck some sense into these girls. You are always given the option to pursue a strictly platonic relationship, but essentially you are on a sex quest to deliver post-coital catharsis to 5 girls under penalty of both theirs and your death.

At the surface level it plays like any other dating sim: you raise stats, earn money, and choose dialogue options from a list that net you the most affection with the npc's. The game map will offer a selection of events to choose from that are fixed based on the time and date. The events advance time and are often mutually exclusive with each other. You are implicitly encouraged to save scum frequently to check all events options because they can have wildly different quantity/quality of rewards that can change the outcome of your playthrough. This aspect of the game is much more similar to a VN and introduces optimal "routes" through the game. My issue is that there is little deviation allowed from the optimal route since failure to meet an upcoming stat/money/conversation check usually results in either an immediate or eventual game over.

Since most events appear at a fixed date and the stat/money requirements are unknown ahead of time, you will find yourself game over'ing constantly if you are not following a guide that describes both ideal stat progression and event choice. There’s no benefit to leveling stats other than meeting event requirements, so starting the game feels like you are randomly allocating points until a failed stat check causes you to game over. Playing the game blind was a truly masochistic challenge that involved recording the dates/time/and requirements for every single event in the game so you can properly map out a path to get through the game. The amount of trial and error required to reach the "true" ending without assistance is legitimately impressive and the lack of rollback just exacerbates this pain. At a certain point all the eroticism is gone because the game has been reduced to a mundane choose-your-adventure gamebook and you're just skipping through dialogue to spam different choices. It is then that you realize Hush Hush is actually a Groundhog Day-esque time loop simulator instead of a dating sim for people to get off to.

So just use a guide, right? Sure. I highly recommend it, even. But something gets... lost. So much of the game is built around it being this pseudo-time loop trial and error sim that once you take that aspect away all that's left is a middling VN. And really it's more like a kinetic novel with how little deviation you can afford in dialogue choices. Most dialogue options don't have any choice flexibility if you want the best outcomes and there's no gift system or similar to fix mistakes. The limited choices you have for correct dialogue and the 1 month time pressure put on the MC makes it feel more like you're manipulating the girls than establishing any genuine connections, even if it's for their own best interests.

The game is fully voice acted and directing for the VA's is surprisingly decent. Most lines are delivered as plausible dialogue with appropriate inflection/sarcasm. That said, sometimes the voices get a little wild with accents or tones. Frankly the only main girl whose voice doesn't outright annoy me is Iro's. I don't blame this on the voice actors. There's only so much you can do when the game designers want you to talk in an exaggerated New Jersey accent. Or like a vtuber. Or like a deranged person that thinks she's a kitten. The main characters are so set in their assigned stereotypes that it makes them a bit off-putting at times. Meanwhile the side characters are mostly great and I found myself wanting more interactions with them.

So those are a whole lot of words that don't have anything to do with the real reason anyone is here: the porn. I'm a sucker for dating sims so I came in hot and ready for a good time. I left completely and utterly unsatisfied. The art was good enough for me, but between the tedium of the gameplay and the insistence of the game on a gender neutral MC, I couldn't get anywhere. When you spend a long day slaving away over dialogue trial and error, it really saps most of the appeal from the brief sex scenes. With how much time and effort obviously went into crafting this game it is just bizarre how much of an afterthought the sex seems compared to every other feature.

The CG looks nice but very little of it is lewd and none of it is explicitly intimate. The romanceable characters each get 2 Live2D sex animations but the Live2D character art has a noticeably different (imo worse) style from the sprite/CG art. The scenes just have the npc doing those bad Live2D undulating animations solo accompanied by text describing how good the MC is at sex'ing them. Problem is that we never get the option to choose whether the MC has a penis or vagina so we have to settle for vague, agender text descriptions of the act. Every scene follows the same formula of: describing how good the MC is at oral followed by saying "and then they had sex for hours". It didn't work for me, but maybe it works for you. Oh and there's no gallery for the Live2D animations either so that's cool. It's a shame that so little effort went into the 18+ components of the game. The game is meant to function standalone without the 18+ content, but it's still impressive just how tacked on it feels. I almost wonder if it would be better to play without the 18+ content just to spare the bitter disappointment.

Speaking of “tacked on”, I hated the ending. I was left unfulfilled but maybe I just missed the point of the story and future dev plans to use the characters/universe. I would have liked an epilogue. I would have at least thought it was funny if our divine-ordained MC of the night rode off into the sunset blasting Goodbye Stranger. Instead we got… not really much of anything. It didn’t feel like any of the characters tried to achieve a resolution they were happy with.

This review isn't exactly glowing because I'm focusing on why it fails as an eroge. Even so, I still mostly enjoyed listening to the characters and having their stories unfold. This is honestly a 2/5 eroge but I can't bring myself to do it knowing how close it came to greatness. I would have loved to play a version of this game that was more open-world. Where the choices weren't so fixed. Where time and events weren't so strict. Where there was more porn, or at least porn where I could see the MC's genitals. That would have made it a better eroge, but I don't really think that's what the goal was. This is a game about solving the dialogue tree puzzle of how to save these 5 girls and maybe seeing a few boobs along the way. If the art and voice acting are up your alley then it’s an ok puzzle/story game even if the end is somewhat unsatisfying, but I would not recommend this as fap material.

Each character has their own unique story that does have some depth to it. I recommend following a guide if you want to unlock everything by the end of the game since some things are easy to miss. The art is also great in the game!

This is a decent VN, but it's a bad H-game. Honestly, you might as well not even bother with the 18+ patch. Your character is an amorphous nondescript creature without even a gender, so if you expect the H scenes to be particularly good, I've got some bad, if extremely obvious, news for you.

The "random" abrupt gameovers make the lack of rollback & autosave incredibly frustrating (having 20 pages of saves does not make their omission less glaring). Do NOT play this game without a guide unless it's your intention to reread dialogue some 500 times.

The characters are rather likeable, but the MC is so utterly blank slate that it really kills any kind of consistency or immersion. That doesn't matter to some people, but there it is. Unless you're feeling nostalgic for the stat based dating sim flash games of yester year, maybe pass on this one.

Hush Hush is an impactfully emotional VN about helping emotionally broken people, which I wasn't expecting coming in from the dev's previous NSFW clicker game Crush Crush (where the romanceable girls of Hush Hush come from.) In the previous game, the girls had a more lighthearted comedic aura with nowhere near the seriousness as is presented here.

Because of the cast, Hush Hush does beg comparison to its predecessor, but I believe it stands on its own. The sprite art is some of the best I've seen, and the writing is executed very well, up to Sad Panda's usual standard. If there were a weak link, it might be the NSFW CGs that were clearly drawn by someone new. They look slightly off-model, especially Mio's NSFW scenes where she looks a lot younger. But otherwise, this is the culmination of all of Sad Panda's efforts.

The gameplay essentially boils down to managing a busy schedule and standard dating simulator mechanics. Trying to ace every date and uncovering every secret, as well as achievements, mean this game has plenty of replayability. Each girl has something unique about them that is very rewarding to uncover-- and the stakes of seeing a brutal and gory death scene at the end means you need to avoid fucking up. To that end, I found you need to get your stats grinded as early as possible to make sure you're not locked out of any beneficial options in the dates. Since those options also raise your stats, not picking them is essentially a built in difficulty system for how much you want to juggle.

All in all, this is all I'm looking for in an emotional VN and then some. I just wish Mio had a nude sprite because damn that girl is fire.

As the one who requested this, played several times, and has (almost) every girl in crush crush, this may be a bit biased.

I waited this game for so long.
I followed Sad Panda Studios for years seeing how they have developed as a team, dipping a bit into the VN genre with Cabin Fever, and the announcement of Crush Crush inspired VN, I was delighted.

I'm reviwing the game as a game, not a porn game.

From where the girls came from, the story is deeper than I imagined, I thought that it was going to be a lighthearted, funny VN but it was the opposite, meanwhile there are some funny moments, the history is dark, to the point where the heroines get killed or you even get killed.

The romance is well written, and god the voice acting.

Fully voice acted and they sell the characters to a point where is top notch.

Not much to say, I loved this game, one of my favorite vns ever.