Whenever I’m shown a naughty game that involves spanking large-breasted anime girls as a gameplay mechanic, my eyes tend to glaze over. Yes, you’ll find loads of games like this if you start looking for that stuff. If you don’t believe me, just start Googling (you might want to clean up your search history afterward, though).
But if you show me a pixel-art 2D platformer — no matter how absurd the premise — well, now you’ve got my attention. So I almost passed over Wife Quest when I assumed it was the former type of game (an anime-girl spanky game). When I discovered that it’s actually the latter (a pixel-art platformer), and that it was only eight bucks, I signed up.
And boy howdy, I’m not sure what I’ve gotten myself into.
You play as Mia, the flat-chested heroine of this naughty little tale. And when I say “flat-chested,” that’s not my own observation; the game references this at every opportunity. The creators of Wife Quest really, really want you to know this specific fact about Mia.
Now, before you get too excited, know that the image above is probably the sauciest thing in the entire game. No, you’re not going to find nudity or anything overtly sexual here. This game suggests a whole lot more than it shows. In fact, there’s more nudity in Infernax than in Wife Quest.
Anyway… Mia is married to a man named Fernando, who as far as I can tell is the only male character in the entire game. Apparently, there are tons of “orcs” (by which I just mean “large-breasted women”) who want to have their fun with Fernando (and by “fun” I mean… well, you can work that one out yourself), so he’s constantly getting kidnapped by them and brought into suggestive situations. Mia is not having it, so she embarks on an adventure to “punish” these “orcs.”
Whenever Mia kills an enemy, you are given the option (by pressing down on the D-pad) to “punish” that creature. This will usually trigger a surprisingly violent animation of Mia strangling or jumping on or tearing the wings off of said enemy. Whenever you punish a new enemy, you unlock that animation for your gallery, which allows you to rewatch all these animations at any time you’d like… if you’re into that…
You still with me?
So, all of this is a bit much, I must admit. However, there’s a collectible element of the game that is like catnip for me. Every level contains secret photographs to collect — these are really just slightly animated character portraits that you can browse from the game’s main menu. You can also unlock additional music tracks for your gallery. There are tons of secrets and side paths, and a lot of them only open after you’ve unlocked an upgrade, say a pair of fairy wings or a club that smashes through weak walls.
You can also buy upgrades at a shop in the overworld map. These give you more health and mana, improve the power and distance of your sword, and increase the amount of items you can hold in your backpack. There are even cosmetic upgrades that just change your outfit, and you can, of course, buy pictures here for your gallery.
And every world has completion challenges that ask you to open every treasure chest, defeat every enemy, and complete the world in a specific amount of time. These challenges unlock even more photographs for your gallery.
This means you’ll want to revisit worlds you’ve already cleared to see if you can beat your previous best time and unlock some of the secrets you originally missed. And that, my friends, is where Wife Quest really gets me.
It’s honestly super fun to go back and explore these worlds to find the stuff you missed, while working on completing your gallery. And it’s really satisfying to replay a particularly tough section of the game once you’ve purchased a few upgrades and can now breeze through it. If you play Wife Quest as a collectathon platformer, it’s actually a pretty decent one.
The controls are a bit too floaty for my tastes, but Wife Quest is more about exploration than about precision-platforming, so that’s not a huge deal here. The music can get repetitive, and the stage layouts are pretty straightforward point-A-to-point-B affairs, but this is an eight-dollar game — it’s not Super Mario Odyssey.
So yeah, here I sit on a Thursday afternoon, dealing out punishments to large-breasted anime women. And honestly, I’m enjoying it a lot more than I would have expected. I just hope this isn’t the beginning of a new path for me — the first phase of a transformation into a sleazier version of myself. The very thought makes me shudder.
