Hundreds and hundreds of adult oriented games are produced every year in Japan. The great majority of them are so called visual novels where the player reads an interactive story and where the goal is to unlock sex scenes. There are a few companies that specialize in 3D games. One of them being Illusion. Their early catalogue were typical visual novels with 3D movies but recently they’ve done more interactive 3D games.
Most notably is their Artificial Girl series, which lets the player design their own girls and place them in a virtual environment. These games have been very successful as I can testify they’re as fun as titillating. But this is not a review of that game. This is their latest release and a new franchise: Hako, or "Box" as it translates to in English.
I haven’t actually finished the game prior to writing this. But then again, Hako is not a game you can necessarily finish as it will go on for however long you wish to play it. With Hako, finishing is all in the hands of the player, literally. The game’s job is to help you along the way.
Hako is a game about having sex with dolls. Agalmatophiliacs rejoice! (Yes, I looked it up). You can have up to three dolls living in separate boxes at once. You’re main job is 1) to feed them, and 2) to play with them. The latter could either be sex or simply petting them on the head until they’re satisfied.
Playing with the girls is sort of interesting but grows boring fairly quickly. You have a set of actions you can perform on her (pet, poke, poke breast, tickle, etc). These actions will raise and lower one of two bars on the left. If either reaches bottom you’ve failed the interaction. If the blue bar reaches max she will smile and thank you. If the pink bar reaches max she will invite you down into the box.
This brings us to the most important part of any hentai game: the sex. Is it any good? Well, I should start by pointing out that Illusion keeps improving their graphics with every game and Hako is no exception. It looks great. The boobs all look and bounce nicely. The animations are nice and convincing.
What brings the experience down is how shallow the interactions are. Gone are the clicking and rubbing from AG3 and all we’re left with is the scroll wheel. You use it to go faster or slower. There are a range of different positions to use they’re all available to you right from the start. Unfortunately there’s not enough meat here to keep my interest going.
There is one thing that’s new to Hako, which I thought was fun. I don’t know the actual name for it but I like to call it the rage button. You will occasionally gain the ability to rage during sex, in which you will grab hold of your doll and fuck her really hard.
She can come as often as she wants, but the player character can only come once. Once you’re done, the sex is over and you leave the box. This really inhibits anyone who wishes to have prolonged sessions with their girls but at the same time the game doesn’t offer enough gameplay to make long sessions any fun.
Short-term is a word that keeps coming up in Hako. Not only is your sex limited, so is the time you can spend with your dolls. Spoiler warning! They all die! The average lifespan of a doll is about a week. Not taking care of the doll through feeding and petting will only kill her faster. If you manage to keep her alive for more than a couple of days she will be "remembered" and accessed for insta-sex at any time in the main menu.
I had a really hard time playing this game at first. I had a lot of expectations for a game that came after AG3, which is a fantastic game (by hentai standards). There is another side of the gameplay that I haven’t touched much which is the dollhouse stuff. There is a store where you can buy clothes and furniture for your dolls, but to get to the good stuff you need to do a lot of feeding and a lot of sexing, which feels like grinding. When I have to grind in a hentai game something must be wrong.
I can’t recommend anyone to pay the $90(!) for this game. While it’s not a terrible game it leaves too much to desire. If anything you should take a look at the rest of Illusion’s catalog.
Score:
2/5