Written by Sexy, edited by Otaku Apologist
Master of Ives, a free orb-matching sex game developed by ‘Institute for Vital Energy’. Released August, 2023. Play this now here. For internet browsers and Android. No voice acting. Uncensored genitals.
You go into dreams and help girls called “Ives” to remember something. I closely read the dialogue. It is very offhand, so it’s hard to focus on. The narrative tries, but it feels like just filling the space with words rather than using them to deliver a focused experience. I have no idea what I read.
Extremely appropriate music guides you into a slick and sophisticated graphical experience. It runs well and it’s lovely, it slipped on like a velvet glove!
A few clicks and we get to the gameplay of a match physics-based game and that’s when the velvet glove started to turn to shit.
On top of it being an awkward physics-based affair where you have to match orbs, that fall down when replenished with new ones. The play sessions are short burst-time races.
It pulled me out of the game like a kick in the ankles. Picture getting into a good nightclub, with a chill atmosphere, a good singer, and dim lights. You plop your ass into comfy seating, stretch your arms out, let the sip of whiskey go down as you go collect the relaxation through your different senses, you are already enjoying yourself and your lovely girlfriend massages your neck, you do a slow exhale of all your worldly troubles. Then, FUCKING BAM! Someone smacks a fist on the table and sends you to run a lap around the club. Then you come back to try and enjoy what they just interrupted for you. What the fuck?!
To tell you the truth, I have felt less annoyed being cock-blocked in my life, than this kind of experience. It’s just like you’ve done a great job cleaning your living room, you sit down and pop your favorite video game open, and now in 3 seconds, your dog starts throwing up vomit in astonishing quantities and slowly moving as a puddle toward your beautiful carpet. You either react fast and stop it with your bare hands, before it reaches the carpet and continue cleaning, or let it soak in the carpet.
If you want action-paced, you action-pace your atmosphere and music. You want a chill atmosphere? Remove or enlarge your timers. It’s not that hard to match your elements.
And you can really see the lean western design. While the Japanese will try to entice you with long and multiple sex encounters. These games flash you like 2 seconds of content and then throw you into a time-attack match-3 and the grind loop continues.
Effectively I have not seen a full sex scene. And the game managed to annoy me enough to not even try and get to one.
There is complexity to the systems and upgrades tied to the match game, but it is so unusual to casual gaming that barely 1 in 10 people would be up to speed with it, if they haven’t played such a setup before. Now, a player can learn, but this one here is annoyed, confused, frustrated, both overwhelmed AND underwhelmed. A combined mood that prevents me from learning anything from a tutorial.
What makes it even worse, success and failure are unclear. There is a score involved, but is it good, or bad – I don’t know. Either way, I have 30 years of hardcore variety gaming. And I’m having a hard time getting acquainted with all the mechanics involved and that is a problem. It’s taking me out of the game for one, and for two, I’m not sure if there is anything else I can do other than try to race the clock faster. And if that is the only thing I can do to improve, then it’s obfuscated under lacking presentation.
Not to mention that this game’s core and pacing might work well on a touch screen, but is a different kind of experience on mouse and keyboard, which I’m using.
I mean, matching bubbles against a clock is simple enough. But if the average player gets no sense of the significance of the scoring system or the upgrades – it all confuses people, and that’s one of the last states you want your players to be in.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the physics part is slow and clunky. The orbs fall slowly, there is no clear visual indicator of how much of a gap is allowed to chain matches together. And I’m also under the impression it’s highly inconsistent. Or it just appears that way.
Clearly, the designer of this felt that players would bring their clairvoyance pants on and grab all the relevant information straight from his mind.
You can get into a loop of gameplay without understanding, but then you are supposed to be offered knowledge pieces that you can engage selectively, to catch up if you are lacking something.
Alternatively, you have to front-load a tutorial to explain many things the player may not care about.
Let’s re-wind waaay the fuck back. Why does this time-attack exist in the first place? Why would the studio want me to spend as little time as possible playing a game session? Especially when I just landed in here. I’m getting to know the place.
It lacks all the good traits of a quick-burst game. It’s too basic for that. So it’s a classy and slow atmosphere with a slow pace. And its speed gameplay is without the benefits and niceties of a speed game.
In this day and age, anybody trying to do any sort of match-3, and they have not studied or learned ANYTHING from Candy Crush, I’m just going to call them crazy. The gacha pull is a loot box. And this loot box your character has to stick his dick in to open. So it’s kind of like a fleshlight, but with a Kinder egg surprise when you open it, that’s either some moronically cynical shit or fucking spaced way out there.
After a few failures, there is a multiple window screen with text that explains the systems. But fuck, I’m not getting into it now, so let’s finish up here.
Performance-wise, the game runs amazingly. The interface is mostly highly excellent, except when it comes to onboarding you to the actual gameplay.
The art is clean. It feels like a middle-ground between anime and Western. Judging by the few seconds of sex footage I got, the hentai would be quality stuff, if you stick around for it. And to top it all off, the loading screen blurbs read “Feeling your presence”, “Matching your rhythm” and “Aligning our energies”. Are you fucking kidding me?!!
As monetization, you have your affections, your energies your slew of upgrades. Surprisingly there aren’t that many girls to go around. Maybe in future updates.
Basically, it all hinges on whether or not you enjoy this speedy orb-match gameplay. The other shortcomings are fairly negligible. I am interested in immersion and atmosphere. Have to pop my The Prodigy playlist to rebalance my mood, cuz this shit right here blue-balled the fuck out of me.
You wanna try this on for size? Become the Master of Ives today.
Overall
- Graphics
- Gameplay
- Story
- Music
- SFX
- Hentai
