Written by ThatCheesyBastard, edited by Otaku Apologist
Girl and Chainsaw, a hentai survival game developed by Mistilteinn. Released July 18, 2022. Download on DLSite for $15.47. For Windows PC. Japanese voice acting. Censored genitals. Free demo available.
Hime, or Princess Amano as she’s known online in this fictional world, is a schoolgirl streamer who suddenly finds herself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse! Her school is infested with the undead! Wielding nothing but a chainsaw, she must find a safe way to escape this infested city and save other survivors along the way. Can she beat this cataclysmic event and bypass the city’s lockdown?
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STORY
You control Hime, a streamer barricaded in a school filled with zombies. Where did the zombies come from? Who knows. The game never really explains it. Hime finds a chainsaw somewhere and uses it to fight the ghouls and rescue the other people still alive within the school.
Once you find Luna and a few more goals the game requires of you, it’s established that Luna has connections with Mistilteinn Gakuen and that your objective is to find a way to communicate with them while trapped in this zombie-infested city. It’s a trope I’ve seen quite a lot in these apocalypse-type stories and this doesn’t really do much to separate itself from the pack.
Is that a bad thing though? No, not inherently. I’ve enjoyed plenty of games with simple stories utilizing tropes I’ve seen before. What matters is the overall execution. Does the game have entertaining characters or a good sense of comedy? Does it subvert any of its tropes in ways that are at least somewhat fresh within the genre? These things are necessary to carry a game built on common and expected themes. Girl and Chainsaw unfortunately doesn’t understand this.
The characters are forgettable. Hime is at least somewhat peppy and sassy so she’s somewhat interesting. The fact that she’s a streamer was a welcomed take that I wish they expanded on more. Every other major character feels very underdeveloped personality-wise. It’s hard to even think of what a defining trait or key moment for any of them would be.
With the premise being so familiar and the characters lacking much depth or ways to stand out, I struggled to actually care about what was going on. Dialogue just blended together and the more that characters exchanged lines, the less invested I felt.
GAMEPLAY
Gameplay acts similarly to that of a low-budget survival horror game. You’ll be exploring a typical Japanese school setting, going from room-to-room to find keys or resources that let you see more of the story. While doing this you’ll have to avoid getting killed by the zombies that roam the halls.
This isn’t difficult in the slightest. As long as you keep Hime moving in one direction, the zombies won’t be able to attack fast enough to harm you, even if you end up brushing against them while running away. You can practically treat the zombies as non-threats. It’s only in the individual rooms where you’ll have to actively deal with them, but even that has its problems.
For a game with somewhat of a focus on combat, fighting enemies isn’t particularly fun or engaging at all. To start with, Hime has 3 moves: a weak attack combo, a chargeable spin attack and a lunge attack performed out of a run. This is almost the entire move list. Sure, you can upgrade these abilities as the game progresses and sometimes you’ll get something new, but this is the grand majority of what gameplay boils down to.
To spice it up a little, Hime can perform a “limit break”. This is a state that makes all of your attacks flashier and more damaging at the cost of needing to build up a meter to use it. This meter can be filled by grabbing certain items or defeating zombies, but this is only really useful when faced with hordes of enemies. Even then, just taking them on without limit break isn’t much of a challenge, as long as you know what you’re doing. The main problem isn’t really the difficulty though, the issue is how the game feels.
Hitting enemies in this game doesn’t feel great. The sound effects are basic and appropriate enough, but I rarely felt like I’m making an impact on any zombie. There’s two reasons for this: Poor hit stun animations and lack of effects.
Every zombie you hit (with the exception of bosses) have incredibly subtle and hard to actually detect hit stun animations if they aren’t actively being pushed backwards. Sometimes they don’t flinch at all! If you’re fighting a horde of enemies or simply are in a camera angle that obscures the zombie, your only indication that you’re even hitting your opponent is that their health bar is going down. This leads to a lot of scuffed situations where you don’t know if you should back off, how many enemies you can prioritize at once, if your combo will kill, etc.
But it’s not just the combat that’s off with this game, it’s also the exploration. This is where being in a generic school setting really bites this game in the ass, because everything looks the same. The three floors you can explore all have a near identical layout with no way of differentiaing which door leads to what room unless you’ve already memorized it. There’s such a distinct lack of any landmarkers or key features in every area. The only way you’ll know what room you’re entering before you go in is by reading the name of the room.
Luckily you do have a map, but it doesn’t keep everything from feeling same-y. You NEED to check the map everytime you want to go somewhere and you can only see the layout of the floor you’re currently on. If you’re on floor one, you can’t see floor two or three. I can’t imagine why the developers chose to have a limitation like that. It makes exploring in this game tedious and unexciting.
With unsatisfying combat and a bland and confusing space to traverse, there really wasn’t anything here that I would call “fun”. The best thing that I can say about it is that it didn’t frustrate me, but that shouldn’t be a highlight of your game. The experience is lacking in clarity and ways to ease the burdens of the player.
Girl and Chainsaw lacks a lot of polish. There were plenty of times where I ended up clipping through certain objects and getting wedged in between set pieces that normally should be solid. One time I even managed to get stuck for a solid five minutes before finding an escape. If something like that exists in this game, there’s a high likelihood you could find yourself in a situation where you’ll be stuck forever and forced to reset the game. That’s just a poorly made product right there. I understand that this is likely a small indie studio without much backing, but wasting time trying to get out of a glitched area is annoying.
GRAPHICS
This game is mixed bag visually. The environments and CGs are fairly well-made as a whole. The UI in particular is simple yet stylish with a pink-on-black motif and a presentation that reminds me of a manga cover. The art direction got me to play this in the first place and it deserves some praise.
Things get a little shakier once you get into the actual game, which has some lackluster character models. While the school setting is nice to look at, the zombies, NPCs and even the main character are a bit rough. This is made all the more noticeable during the character interaction scenes where the models are scaled up, giving you a full look at how polygonal they are.
The models themselves are also lacking in a lot of creative expressions. 3D models are inherently harder to create unique expressions for due to the fact that they’re 3D. You can’t just draw a new face and pose most of the time, it has to be crafted. For that reason, I understand why the characters are lacking in distinct features, but that doesn’t mean I like it. A lot of dialogue is spoken during unimpressive animations, making it hard to get invested in things.
The scenes that use actual 2D illustrations however are some of the highlights of this. Made me wish the whole story was told through these scenes. Definitely would have made for a better experience.
VOICE ACTING AND SOUND EFFECTS (SFX)
Every prominent female character has a Japanese voice actress and they do a solid job at selling their characters. Hime has a fairly gal-like voice with a lot of energy and pep, while a more graceful character like Luna has a more mature and subdued tone. It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s at least pleasant to listen to and doesn’t detract from the game’s mood.
The sound effects are very basic. Hime swinging her chainsaw sounds pretty much exactly what you’d expect someone swinging a chainsaw to sound like. This would work for me if it wasn’t for the lack of sound effects emphasizing hits.
Making contact with a zombie yields the same sound as making contact with nothing, with a few exceptions. The main difference is that you’ll get additional sounds of blood spurting from the enemy after hitting it. This isn’t enough to sell the power of Hime’s attacks. I feel like I’m simply flailing around and casually draining an enemy’s health while doing it, rather than chopping a zombie to pieces. Some slashing sounds would have vastly improved this game’s feel, even if they were stocks.
MUSIC
The music is similar to the voice acting: It’s good without being all that noteworthy. Songs aren’t very memorable, but pleasant enough that I don’t feel like that detracts from the experience. The main track you’ll hear throughout is a somewhat futuristic song with some good energy behind it.
The music makes the less than stellar combat feel more impactful than it actually is. You’ll be hearing the same tracks quite a bit though as this game only has a few tracks. It gets repetitive, but tracks blend in well enough to not get annoying.
HENTAI
Girl and Chainsaw has around 10 sexual events that can occur. That’s an incredibly low number, but the quality of the actual hentai itself is fairly impressive. Each scene has at least one animated portion and it makes the characters feel alive. The developers seemed to want to prioritize quality over quantity for these scenes and it shows. It was a shame they couldn’t do the same for the main game.
Most of the zombies used in these H-scenes don’t look like traditional undead people. They’ve got their own flair and are more like standard monsters than zombies. They’re always different from the normal zombie enemies, who all look like what you’d expect. Even when they don’t do this, however, they keep the camera angles of these shots conservative enough to show the main sexual act without showing who’s doing the fucking.
You’ll see the main girl of the scene and what’s penetrating her, but you won’t be able to see the zombie. The only time you’re even able to see the full body of the fucker is during a futanari scene. It really seems like they took into account how unappealing this enemy type can be and kept the hentai as pleasant to look at as possible. Major props for this, I just wish there was more to admire.
CONCLUDING WORDS
Girl and Chainsaw is a disappointing journey overall. It has a lot of the pieces needed to make a fun game, but falls flat in pretty much every category. It feels like the creators knew exactly what they wanted to make, but didn’t actually know how to properly execute it. Even the H-scenes, which are great, are few and far between. I struggle to recommend this, but maybe you’ll like it.
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Overall
- Graphics
- Gameplay
- Story
- Music
- SFX
- Hentai
