If that aesthetic has one thing going for it, it’s that it oozes tone. In Broken Heart Bordello, the aesthetic and the narrative are king. There is a significantly teensier whore training element though, so almost all of your time in the game will be spent advancing the revenge plot and talking to people. This is especially true in later chapters, where the UI becomes basically identical, with even the same system of quest subdivision. All of them use Akabur’s classic mechanical system of clicking around town, talking to various denizens and making progress on various quests that the game assigns you. Chapters are divided so that each chapter is essentially a different game. The game presently has five chapters available, but hunting for them through Smersh’s Patreon can be a chore, so I included individualized links at the end of this preview. Secondly, from a mechanical standpoint, the game plays like Akabur’s other games and clearly uses large segments of the Princess Trainer code. This is all important for two reasons: firstly, the strange nature of the original story is probably the cause of many of the game’s stranger points.
Years later, the two decided to turn it into a visual novel. The way the story would move was based on the choices the readers made. The whole thing is based on an odd webpage-based online interactive story the two made some time back, which - for any Russian readers interested - is still up today. This game started before Akabur struck it big, and he and Smersh are apparently childhood friends. Broken Heart Bordello is a visual novel by two Russian devs: writer Smersh and artist Akabur (the same Akabur who made Princess Trainer and Witch Trainer). That means one can expect to see monochrome shots, men with stubble gazing upon things with their dark eyes, rough, violent fucking with worn-out whores, and - surprisingly enough - kooky sports tournaments? It’s the story of a man returning from a city he was once exiled from to get vengeance on his family’s killers.
Lines like that are no stranger to Broken Heart Bordello. You imagine him saying it while smoking a cigar, drinking whiskey and staring off into the distance with a glare that could melt steel beams. The sentence above is pretty much one of the most noir things to come out of a character’s mouth. Smersh and Akabur are making Broken Heart Bordello, a visual novel where you play a man on a path of vengeance, sex, and handball.
0 kommentar(er)
