"Wife Quest" Review - Mia Pheraspi, Hupermeneta!

Available for: Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

Longtime readers will know that I used to do a series called "Yes, I went there." In this series, I would scour the underbelly of Steam for the cringiest, loneliest-looking anime visual novels/dating sims, play them, have a good ironic laugh, then let you know if that ironic laugh was worth your money. I would do this because not only did I view it as a unique service I could provide, but it was also a surefire way to discover hidden gems. Take the game that started the whole series, Panzermadels: Tank Dating Simulator, for instance. There was legitimate good under the lonely anime surface. However, given Valve's decision not to ban adult content a couple of years ago, doing that series has been...difficult. The promise of a potentially good story underneath a deceiving exterior has mostly given way to the promise of seeing the cute anime girl(s) in the icon art naked, and that's not what I want this series (much less my content on a basic level) to revolve around. But still, there's always a spark of hope in me that one day as I scour the bowels of Steam, I'll once again find a hidden gem. And as of about a week ago, I found one: Wife Quest, the subject of today's review. It caught my eyes as I was scrolling through the new releases, and when I went in and saw gameplay that looked competent and no 18+ warnings (aside from the kind of fanservice that would've been allowed on Steam before they lifted the ban on adult content), I thought I'd finally found a spark to reignite "Yes, I went there." However, as you'll notice, the subtitle of this review is not "Yes, I went there". And dear reader, the reason is this: there's no irony or sarcasm when I say that I recommend Wife Quest. It isn't ironically good, it's just plain old good with no lonely or cringey asterisks (unless you view standard anime fare fanservice as cringey, in which case take that as an asterisk to my recommendation). So it doesn't really belong in that series, and I believe it deserves its own review without being shackled to the dating simulators of the world. As we'll get into, the game isn't perfect, but for all its imperfections, there's a major counterpoint that I'll talk about before the conclusion. Let's get into it!

It's hard being a farmer's wife. Our protagonist, Mia, knows this better than anyone. The days are long, the work is hard, and every single day a cabal of various monstergirls raid your farm and kidnap your husband to try and convince him to sleep with them (all of them, they're ok with sharing). Then you have to venture out, sword in hand, and violently punish everyone involved in the kidnapping like some kind of moe Kratos. But that's just life. Anyway, the game begins on a day much like any other. Mia and her husband, Fernando, are fast asleep, when the dark elf Morganna suddenly strikes and carries off Fernando's still-sleeping body with Mia in hot pursuit. But this time, Morganna has made a pact with the monstergirl rulers across the land to make a unified effort to keep Mia at bay so they can all get a piece of that sweet, sweet Fernando lovin'. Not that they're actually gonna get it, because Fernando is a good boy who always turns conversations back to his beloved wife, but they're gonna try anyway, so sweet is the promise of that Fernando lovin' reward. So, after being bested by Morganna in an initial battle in the grasslands near home, Mia strengthens her resolve and sets out on an adventure across the world to rescue her Fernando and maim any skanks that dared to so much as flirt with him along the way. As a story, it...doesn't exactly pass the Bechdel test. Sure, the entire non-Fernando cast is women, but he's all they talk about and I'm sure Bechdel didn't have maiming in mind as the interaction between women. That's not a problem for me, because girl power is girl power, and if you're even considering playing a game that looks like this, chances are it's not gonna be a problem for you either. But I still like to put that out there...and I thought it was a funny couple sentences...moving on. 

A thing I need to note on the story front is the game's writing, which turns out to be a bit difficult to judge. I ended up doing some research pretty early on and I found that developer Pippin Games is a three-man (obviously) team in Brazil, so english is probably not their first language. The entire reason I did that research was because I noticed some drastic shifts in tone in the writing. Early on, Mia refers to some of the monster girls as "b****es," which sets her up as a pretty mature, foul-mouthed when angry kind of character. But then, as she interacted with Morganna, she referred to her as "you stinky witch." Which made my skin crawl a little bit because now Mia kinda seemed like a little girl. That made me think there had to be some kind of translation misunderstanding or something, and it wasn't the only sign. As this is a game with anime-inspired artwork, it naturally adheres to certain tropes, and the trope most often done in Wife Quest is the...tracts of land-wealthy monstergirls making fun of Mia for being...a pirate's dream..............in other words they tell Mia her boobs are small. And on several of the occasions where they do this, they'll say things like "Fernando, do you really enjoy going to bed with such a skinny/scrawny woman?" That seems like a pretty understandable mistranslation of something like "small" or "flat" to me, but I'm not Brazilian, so I can only speculate. So there are oddities like that in the writing, but given the potential  not-a-first-language aspect, I can let it slide. What I won't let slide, however, is how repetitive the writing becomes by the end. The interactions between Mia and Fernando's various captors are amusing, but after a couple levels you realize that it's pretty much the same structure of "give me back my Fernando, you {insult}" and "no need to be jealous...and I'm not {insult}" every time. It's a minor thing, but it did start to overstay its welcome by the end. 

The gameplay in Wife Quest is incredibly simple. As a retro-style sidescroller, gameplay consists of platforming and combat, and as the game progresses, you unlock tools that make both of those things a little simpler. Let's talk about the platforming first, since there's less overall to say. Until the end of area 2, platforming is as basic as can be. Once you acquire the new ability at the end of that area (and then the ability at the end of area 4), platforming challenges become more complex and require you to think about how to use your abilities. Pretty straightforward stuff, right? The only issue is the lead-up to that first ability I mentioned. The second area is beyond frustrating on a first run-through specifically because of some of the platforming sections it boasts. At first there were two things that frustrated me about that level, but as it turned out, thing 1 (getting a high jump on springy mushrooms) was beating me up so much because I was being stupid about it, and I immediately was able to handle it with no problem once I realized what I was doing wrong. Thing 2 (jumping between falling leaves) was consistently a problem. Maybe I'm just more of a stereotypical game journalist than I thought, but I didn't have nearly as much trouble with the more complex late-game platforming challenges as I did with the falling leaf platforming. Mia is perhaps a bit too floaty for the precise maneuvering that this particular brand of challenge demanded. When I came back to area 2 with all the upgrades in the late-game, I was immensely thankful to not have to use the leaves to get where I needed to go anymore. You'll notice, dear reader, that in this section I discussed two initial complaints: one as a result of me being stupid and one that remained throughout. This dichotomy of stupid me versus valid criticism will now continue in the combat section. 

Combat is a standard hack-and-slash affair that, like the platforming, is gradually upgraded with new abilities. For instance, at the end of area 1 you unlock a magic shield that pulls its uses from your mana pool, which all new abilities share. This shield blocks absolutely everything and sends it back in the direction it came from, making it invaluable for survival, but that mana pool means you need to use it conservatively if possible. From the world map, you can purchase upgrades to your attack strength/speed/range as well as progressively larger packs to carry progressively greater amounts of potions, upgrades to your health/mana pools, and health/mana potions to use while you're making your way through an area. That's all there is to say about how combat works, it's that simple. So now let's actually discuss it, starting with the bit that resulted from me being stupid. When I ran into the first story boss at the end of area 2, I considered it a massive difficulty spike. And you know what, it probably is a difficulty spike even if you aren't being stupid. But I was going into it with absolutely 0 potions, having only spent my coins on sword-centric upgrades. I was losing over and over and over again, despite mostly having the attack patterns down pat, and I kept thinking "what am I doing wrong?!" Then it hit me. Let's name a few of the supremely enjoyable games I've played lately: Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Ender Lillies: Quietus of the Knights, Death's Door. What do these games have in common? 1) I was greatly enjoying them and 2) They're all entirely skill-based, where survival is dependent on you mastering timing and the like. Because I was, in fact, enjoying Wife Quest up until this point, I had been approaching it as if it were an entirely skill-based soulslike or metroidvania....and that's not how it's supposed to be played. You're supposed to load up on the advantages provided to you. That means going back to previous levels to try and find coin chests you hadn't found before and get as many coins from enemies as possible so that you can get every upgrade you can and go into these boss battles armed with skill, yes, but also the advantages that the game is clearly signposting you to get. Once I stopped being such a huge dunce and played Wife Quest the way it asks to be played, I beat the boss on my first try. So that initial complaint is entirely on me. But unfortunately, like with the platforming, Wife Quest's combat has some issues that are its own fault. Let's start with the really big one that's going to drop this game's maximum possible score down to a 9. I'm sad to say that Wife Quest commits what I consider to be the cardinal sin of game design: having the player take damage when they touch an enemy that isn't on fire/covered in spikes/etc. In a 2D game like this, where contact with enemies is nothing short of an inevitability due to the essentially one plane of movement, this cardinal sin is especially egregious. And do you know what's puzzling about this? I'll be talking about this more in a little bit, but after beating the game, you unlock a sort of 8-bit minigame rendition of the first level. I haven't beaten it yet because it's difficult and plays differently from the base game, but this minigame doesn't commit that cardinal sin. So these developers are clearly good enough to create challenge in a 2D sidescroller context without resorting to this. It's sad to say, but for every game that commits the cardinal sin, it's a non-negotiable full point off (for those who are new, I take off between 0.1 and 1 point for any given negative depending on how much it impacted me, or a maximum of 2.0 if the game is supremely small). A smaller thing that irked me about gameplay is something I was planning to talk about in the technical section, but I think it actually falls under the gameplay banner. When you kill a new type of monstergirl, Mia performs a finishing blow animation, and from that point on you have the option of skipping the animation if you want. The problem is that if you even remotely make contact with the defeated body of an enemy after you deplete their health bar, the animation starts playing without your consent. Now, as I said, you can skip it if you've seen it already, but it's not a simple button prompt. Rather, you have to hold the button down for approximately two seconds before you can get back to playing. And now I'd like you to remember what I said about how this game wants to be played: going back through levels to try and get lots of coins and upgrades. This means accidentally triggering and having to sit through two seconds of these animations hundreds of times. It's the same problem as in Scarlet Nexus, where if you depleted an enemy stamina bar you had to trigger a small cutscene to kill them, and you had no option of just hitting them again to get the job done. It's much less of a problem in Wife Quest, thankfully, but having an option to turn off animations after the first time or even just not a holding button prompt would've gone a long way. I once again have to refer to that minigame you unlock after completing the story for the first time. Just like with the cardinal sin, the minigame is free of this particular problem. These animations would've been a treat if, every time we came up against a new enemy, we got to watch Mia go full-on Kratos, and then it didn't happen again until the next new enemy. I personally think that the restraint in presentation under those conditions would make her look like even more of a badass than she already does. But as it stands, these animations end up wearing out their welcome pretty quickly, and more than that, they have a habit of interrupting the player in the middle of jumps or in the middle of trying to collect their coins. And before I decided to change the layout of the next section, that would've been a flawless segue, but I digress. 

I've decided that I want this review to end on the highest notes it can. After all, I am strongly recommending this game, so I think it'd be best to leave the reader with my intended tone in mind. With that said, I'm going to start off the technical section on the negative points so we get all the rest of my criticisms out of the way and I get to talk about the positives for the rest of the review. Thankfully, the technical negatives are all incredibly minor, but they do still need to be brought up. The first issue may be specific to my rig, or it may be universal. As I tend to say, I'm not a "pc gamer," I don't know pc technical terms, but when I first fired up Wife Quest, there was a distracting bar of visual distortion that was quickly crawling up and down my monitor (cue the actual pc people instantly knowing what I mean and making fun of me for not knowing it). I went into my settings and tried a couple things, and turning vsync on solved the problem for good. That's not going to be a point against the game, it's just there so you know what to do if you experience that as well. Secondly, the control layout is reeeeeaallly weird, but that's not actually the problem. I ended up using a PS4 controller and had to do some re-mappings, and if you do the same, know that it's kind of a gamble if the game is going to save your mappings between sessions or not. On more than one occasion I had to go back into my settings if I wanted the pause button to....be....the pause button on the controller. And finally, the HUD, while great-looking, does have a tendency to obscure important information (a mid-game boss fight where the boss causes stalactites to fall from the ceiling comes to mind). So as you can see, nothing major to complain about on the technical front. So let's move on to the positives!

On the most basic level, Wife Quest is beyond competent. I experienced no animation issues, no glitches (other than the controller remapping sometimes not sticking), no frame drops, no hard/soft crashes, no texture pop-in, no audio glitches, and to boot, as if conscious of the game's occasional difficulty, load times are basically nonexistent. On a similarly basic level, the game simply looks gorgeous, and the designs of the monster girls, while obviously leaning heavily on fanservice, are at least unique. This is further enhanced by a varied and unique soundtrack that somehow manages to sound professional despite the fact that I doubt these developers hired an orchestra. So if that's true, then whatever software the composer used to create this ost must be excellent, and the composer deserves a massive pat on the back for their equally excellent utilization of it. A particular standout track for me has to be the theme that plays in the final area, utilizing a gentle rock drum and an understated choir to truly sell the stakes of "I've made it, I'm gonna save Fernando!" We'll briefly come back to sound in a minute, but on a more important level (no pun intended), the level design in this game is exactly as good as a game centered around re-visiting old levels needs to be. Each level contains its own enemies and its own unique obstacles to overcome, and I was consistently pleasantly surprised by the amount of variety the developers were able to put in Mia's way. Usually with small indie titles like this, what you see at the beginning is basically what you get, but when I got to the second to last area and the devs threw an entirely different kind of environmental threat at me for about the 3rd or 4th time, to say I was impressed by the clear vision and effort would be a colossal understatement...and we haven't even gotten to the kicker yet, but that's a topic for the next section. Furthermore, the levels are intricately designed in such a way that searching for secrets anywhere will almost always yield fruit, and your curiosity about, say, what might happen if you glide around beyond that ledge that seems to be out of place at the side of where you are, is usually rewarded. And "rewarded" is the key thing I want you to take away from that sentence. After a night spent grinding up coins and trying to complete side challenges in older levels, I wondered why I was having fun doing it. It wasn't the gameplay, because I'd already cleared out these enemies several times. But then it hit me: it was the sound design. When you pick up coins, it doesn't make the most earth-shatteringly original sound ever made, but it makes one of the most satisfying coin sounds I've heard in my lifetime (which is not a sentence I thought I'd ever write). And when you open up a whole row of, say, 8 large coin chests, causing bags upon bags upon bags of coins to fly out, the sound of it just sounds like a reward. If this seems like a weird bit of praise, I agree with you, but I couldn't help but notice just how rewarding the fruits of my labor felt because of how the sound was designed. The final technical note isn't really a technical one, but I couldn't find an organic place to put it. The credits sequence for Wife Quest is completely adorable, and it's exactly the kind of bow that was needed to wrap up this particular package. 

But that's kind of a flawed metaphor, because once the credits roll, you'll find that the package is not as wrapped as you thought. Once you complete the game for the first time, you unlock both that minigame I've been referring to as well as an entire other campaign mode that serves as a reward for trekking through the game's difficulty by giving you unlimited mana and a handful of new unlockables for the gallery mode, which we'll discuss in a second. I'm a sucker for games that consistently reward you, and after you beat the game, these developers reward you with two new ways to play that are different from what you just experienced, so needless to say, I was impressed. In my wireframing for this review, I referred to this section as the "value" section, because I have a few things to say about the value of this package. First is what I've already discussed, the fact that you get basically three (or more accurately, I guess, two and a half) campaigns for the price of one. Second is something I offhandedly referred to earlier: the gallery mode. Now, gallery modes in games aren't really my thing, especially in games seemingly inspired by anime, because there's always the potential for what you unlock in that gallery to be...unsightly. But the mode in Wife Quest is...somewhat different. Yes, it does contain images you unlock of the various monster girls, but for the most part, it actually serves as your progress tracker for 100% completion. On page 1, you have all of the kill animations you've unlocked. This serves as a way of taking stock of how many types of monster girls you've defeated thus far (which feeds into an achievement). Page 2 contains all of the music tracks you've discovered hidden in the game's levels. As I've already discussed, the soundtrack is great, so having a way to listen to some of it in a way that the developers seem to condone as an acceptable free alternative to purchasing the soundtrack is notable. Page 3 contains a list of achievements and your progress towards completion. And finally, page 4 contains the monster girl/Mia/shopkeeper pictures you've unlocked. The sprites lean pretty heavily into fan service already, so needless to say, these larger-than-sprites images are a bit more NSFW, but they still aren't pornographic, at least. Again, that isn't really my thing, but that page of the gallery mode also serves as a progress tracker as well. That feeds directly into the next point I wanted to bring up about the game's value: side tasks. Don't get me wrong, there's only three side tasks per level and it's always the same thing, but due to the intricate and varied level design, completing these tasks looks a little different each time. The three tasks are: defeat every monster girl, find all chests, and beat the level within a certain time constraint. So once you finish a level for the first time (9 times out of 10 not having done any of those tasks), when you go back to try and grind up more coins, you have some things you can try to do for completion, and when you complete one of these tasks, you're granted a new picture in the gallery. So even though I didn't much care for the pictures I earned, I was still being rewarded with something other than just bragging rights for going out of my way to beat these challenges. And now we come to my final point. With all of the positives I've mentioned and all the value that comes with this package, how much do you think it costs? You might be inclined to say the $15-$20 range, as lots of content-rich indie games tend to go for that window, but you'd be wrong. You might be inclined to say $10. After all, the developers who made Behind the Frame charged that much, and that was just a predictable story with one or two animations that got reused over and over again. Again, you'd be wrong. All of the great stuff I've mentioned so far comes at the low, low asking price of $6. My friends, that's a steal, and for charging that little I can only hope that either the developers have other jobs or are more popular and get more purchases than it looks like they do, because with the amount of passion and effort that clearly went into Wife Quest, these guys deserve to be able to eat. The value-for-money proposition here is off the charts, and with every negative that I came across, I found myself thinking "it's still really competent for $6." And as I grew to like the game more and more but was still coming up against negatives, I'd think "it's still more competent than Cyberpunk 2077 was." Negatives need to be addressed, and negatives need to result in lost points, but dear reader, for pete's sake, you get all of the good stuff for flipping $6, and I would personally have felt comfortable paying $15 for the amount of content and clear effort. Like, what do you have to lose?

Folks, this review has gone on for....way longer than I expected it to. I would start writing about a topic I highlighted in my wireframe and just find myself going off on a tangent about it, so it's clear to me that I enjoyed this game even more than I realized. I like to think of my reviews as a second-hand thing, where maybe, months after a game releases, someone who doesn't trust the mainstream outlets looks for an opinion from someone smaller, sees my work, and ends up getting something that they have a great time with or avoids something they might've otherwise wasted their money on as a result. I like to think that I can be that person for AAA titles, of course, but also for these smaller titles that people might not have even heard of. When I come across a legitimate hidden gem like Wife Quest, I want everybody to know about it, and if possible, I want the developers to know that somebody out there loved their work so much that they screamed its praises from the rooftops and tried to convince their small-but-dedicated readership to give it a shot. I usually go over the key points from the review once again in the conclusion, but I don't think I need to this time. Wife Quest gets a hearty recommendation from me, and if you shell out the $6 asking price, in addition to getting to play something you might love, you also might be helping a couple passionate developers in Brazil put food on the table. 

Let us review:

Repetetive dialogue/animation - 0.3

Cardinal sin - 1.0

Platforming/non-cardinal sin gameplay woes - 0.5

Minor technical issues - 0.2

The final score for Wife Quest is...

8.0/10 - Great

Congratulations, Pippin Games, congratulations!