Title: Outside The Box
Platform: PC [on the Steam Store]
Price: $11.49 CAD
Game Length: 30 – 90 minutes.
Summary: “Play” through hot garbage to see cluttered and confusing gay sex scenes.
Level of Lewdness: High, I guess.
Is It Sex Positive? Meh. Yeah sure. But it’s not sexy cause the game blows.
If you can’t tell from my mood already: this is an absolutely awful, terribly bad game adaption of an awesome porn comic. Outside The Box, as a “game”, which it only technically qualifies as because it’s so unenjoyable, fucking sucks and I’m genuinely both sad, and a little mad, about it.
If you’ve been following me for a while you’ll know that I absolutely love furry femboy porn and I’ve enthusiastically recommended artist Tokifuji’s sex comics on multiple occasions. He’s got a real knack for drawing super cute anthropomorphic queer boys, with beautiful cocks, making big cummy messes of each other. It’s glorious!
So, when I heard that they were making a point and click visual novel adaption of one of his most iconic stories, Outside The Box, I was stoked! It’s a very basic story about a hot and horny femboy name Milo who walks in on his cute queer roommate, Tracey, getting railed by a rando from a hookup app. Milo then proceeds to masturbate in the shower and eventually has hot gay sex with a cute boy named Adrien who, under the guise of being a computer repair dude, confuses Milo for Tracey when he shows up for a consensual non-con scene. It’s quick, dirty, and I’ve jerked off to it many, many times. How could they fuck this up!?
Easily, it seems.
There are literally almost no redeeming qualities of the whole adaption, in my honest opinion. It’s glitchy, clunky, not at all intuitive, broken, with numerous graphical errors, and some of the absolute worst panel overlaying I’ve ever seen. Like, there are multiple moments when there’s upwards of four or five versions of the same character being shown, each of them with different expressions, and different continuity for what they’re wearing or doing, all on the same confusing and cluttered screen at the same goddamn time.
Like, okay, look at the following picture of Adrian and Milo moments after they’ve fucked.
Adrian is not wearing his hat in the foreground as part of the dialogue box, but is fucking wearing his hat just behind that as a character model, but then is not wearing it again in the greyed out panel, and also his fucking hat is somehow on the left corner of the fucking couch, where, if you can’t tell in the final panel, Milo is supposedly fucking sitting, with what appears to be the salmon pink window curtain over his left shoulder, that’s actually on the right fucking wall of the room, and none of this even fucking matters because his character model is also shown as fucking standing directly to the left of the couch…
Holy shit… it’s so, so, so, soooooo bad. None of that makes sense! The room doesn’t make sense, the panels don’t make sense, the character depictions don’t make sense. It just doesn’t make any goddamn sense. And this is just a minor example of the wonky inconsistencies and massive continuity issues. There are a bunch of other instances of it that just end up being so damn distracting it makes it impossible for the game to actually be sexy.
As for the “gameplay”, that exists solely to drag out a small comic into a 30 to 60 minute “experience”, you basically click around on stuff, drag things from your menu to “interact” with the world, solve a couple of “puzzles”, then watch a bunch of poorly presented sex scenes. You’ll notice that I put “gameplay”, “experience”, “interact”, and “puzzles” in quotations because all of that shit was terrible.
Where and how you need to click on things is super finicky and unclear, the environment and mechanics often just outright don’t work, and the puzzles? Fuck me… there’s two of them and they’re literally just really boring versions of lights out and a slide puzzle. They were clunky and excruciating and not at all worth the effort to work through. I ultimately ended up skipping them both by using a walkthrough.
In total, I wasted about an hour on this. I got 100% of the achievements in that time, including the really ridiculous one that requires you to click on a fucking random spot on the wall in the hallway at the beginning, that’s completely and utterly impossible to discern as being even remotely important or interactive cause it’s just patch of goddamn beige wall, and it gives you a random “you found the secret spot!” message and achievement….
I know this review is harsh but it genuinely does not do justice to explaining how horrendously made Outside The Box is. And I really hate that it’s so poor quality because the original comic is just so simple and sexy and all ya had to fucking do was let me click through some hot scenes with a chill soundtrack and maybe some very basic animations. But nooooo, we got this crap instead.
Boo.
I was excited for a game recommendation till I read the review. Now I’m a little heartbroken. Thanks for taking one for the team, and playing this hot mess to spare us the disappointment. Genuinely sorry they didn’t do a sexy story justice though. I know that’s gotta be heartbreaking.