Pushing the envelope…with your breasts
Ohhhhh…now I understand why Sony only wanted a censored version of this game on its console.
Omega Labyrinth Life (Nintendo Switch)
Developer: Matrix Software
Publisher: D3 Publisher
Released: August 1, 2019
MSRP: $59.99
From developer Matrix Software, Omega Labyrinth Life is a breast touching simulator with some light gardening and dungeon crawling thrown into the mix. You play as Hinata Akatsuki, the first-ever transfer student at Belles Fleurs Academy, a prestigious school of legacy students and faculty members with breasts of all size. At the center of the academy is its world-famous Grand Garden, a colorful and diverse flowerbed that’s always in bloom. The plot, much like the pants of many people playing this game, thickens right out the gate when the flower field suddenly dies and the beautiful girls and women of Belles Fleurs think Hinata is to blame.
Clearing her name and finding the real culprit behind this plant plight will send Hinata and friends deep into the various roguelike dungeons scattered across the garden. If you’ve played Pokemon Mystery Dungeon or any of the Shiren games, you should have a good understanding of what is going on here. Dungeon maps are generated procedurally, enemies only move when characters move, and players have to deal with a host of traps as they venture down, down, down into the unknown.
As I have stated with every Mystery Dungeon game I’ve reviewed on this site, I’m a huge fan of the genre and am appreciative of the strides it has made to genuinely improve on what is often seen as unrefined and boring. Unfortunately, none of those improvements made it into Omega Labyrinth Life. Dungeon crawling here is very much “roguelike 1.0” with long hallways connecting to mostly square rooms. The lack of diversity in whatever piece of programming creates these dungeon floors is actually more evident the further you get into the game. Perhaps this would have been a negligible complaint if the developers bothered to add any sort of the challenge to the experience.
This is, by far, the easiest roguelike I have ever played. The main story dungeons pose no real threat to players outside of a particularly stringent inventory limit. Enemies are incredibly sparse on each floor and the game introduces a few mechanics that do away with much of what can make the genre so punishing. There are monster rooms here — rooms filled to the brim with monsters and traps that you sometimes stumble into — but those don’t pose a problem when you unlock one of Hinata’s special moves that allow her to do damage to every monster in a room. Just activate it and watch the bodies disappear. Another playable character has an ability that will randomly reveal the entire floor map, removing much of the mystery in these Mystery Dungeons. Those abilities aren’t exactly new to the genre, but they’re unlocked far too early in the game, with Hinata’s room-wrecker breaking what little challenge players will encounter.
There are optional dungeons that provide a bit more pushback, but even they pale in comparison to what the genre has previously produced. I’ve heard the original Omega Labyrinth was punishingly difficult and I can’t help but wonder if the developers decided to go in the opposite direction for their first international release.
But of course, the point of Omega Labyrinth Life was never to challenge players with increasingly difficult dungeons as they learn to master the genre. Nor was Life meant to be a satisfying gardening sim as caring for the Grand Garden is lackluster and undercooked. No, the point of this game is fanservice and goddamit that’s something it has in spades.
At any time during your adventure, be it when you’re walking around the garden, diving into the dungeon, relaxing naked in a spa, or watching a cutscene, you can make the girls’ boobs jiggle like Jell-O with the poke of your finger. As you explore dungeons and defeat enemies, you’ll collect Omega Points that will occasionally increase the size of your lead character’s chest until it’s literally bursting out of their shirt. Seeing their girls go from grapes to gonzagas actually takes a great while because chest size, as well as character level, will reset each time you exit a dungeon; so if that’s something you’re interested in checking out, you better be prepared to tackle the 99-floor dungeons. Early on, I thought that would be the most scandalous aspect of this game, that you could grow a high school student’s breasts so big that they put Dolly Parton to shame.
Then I titty-fucked Hinata.
As you explore the various dungeons, there will be items you collect that are unidentified. This is a tradition of the genre, but how you identify them is completely unique to this game. Firstly, these items are described as soft and useless. In order to harden them up and reveal what the item is, you have to place it in between your lead girl’s breasts, then squish and rub it with her tits until it grows hard and red before shooting a great, white mist over her face. And no, that is not an exaggeration.
Holy shit #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/u1K0sPiUwF
— CJisbadatEVERYTHING (@CJisbadatlife) August 8, 2019
My jaw dropped when I saw first that and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Anime booby games have been pushing the envelope on salacious content for some time, with even relatively tame activities drawing the ire of objectors. But while other franchises have been restrained by decency standards or a fear of going too far into straight-up porn game territory, Omega Labyrinth Life pushes the boundaries of what’s allowed in console gaming from the cheesecake sexy fun of its contemporaries into something that is actually pretty smutty. Because that mini-game above isn’t even the most shocking sight in the game.
As you grow flowers in the Grand Garden, you’ll collect nectar. Nectar is used to unlock new abilities for all of the girls. When you buy a new ability with the Omega Points you collect in the dungeons, you can take your girl of choice to the campus greenhouse for a little heavy petting action. As you touch spots on the screen with your finger in handheld mode (or with the cursor using the Joy Con controllers), she’ll start to get excited, riling herself up if you press the perfect points on her body. After you’ve touched enough of her special spots, you’ll have to start touching her as fast as you can to rack up points. Time slows allowing you to get some last-second rubbing, and once she can’t take it anymore, the girl cums sprays her juice all over the screen. And then you use that cum juice to water the garden and help the plants grow.
There is another mini-game called Tit-for-Tat, which is Rock, Paper, Scissors with breasts, but compared to making these girls gush, that might as well be a game of Pat-a-Cake. I sat there in disbelief the first time I made Hinata shoot. I couldn’t believe I had just witnessed that on the same device I use to play Happy Birthdays. I’ve played other titles before that include petting mini-games, but this is the first time one ever made me feel as though I needed to Lysol the hell out of my console. I would eventually pick my jaw up off the floor and press on into the next dungeon, but not before I started asking myself if this game had simply gone too far.
It would be easy for me to gloss over these thoughts lest I invoke the wrath of Reddit, but in the early hours of Omega Labyrinth Life, I couldn’t help but think Matrix Software created something even I would get up in arms over. Whatever lingering sense of subtlety remaining in these anime booby games was clearly gone as I watched a z-cupped teacher spray the screen in satisfaction due to my devious digits. But each time I made a girl wet herself or boob-fucked a sword into existence, the impact of these activities diminished. Not that I became numb to them, but rather, they quickly failed to rile up any reaction at all. And that’s when my thoughts changed from the game going too far to maybe not going far enough; that perhaps it plateaued too early. After I made Hinata squirt like a lemon wedge being squeezed into ice tea, nothing else in Omega Labyrinth Life pushed against the acceptable limits of abjection, eventually turning the outlandish into something almost ordinary.
Whether or not the fanservice is too much for players or just a natural evolution of the boundary-pushing booby game genre, one thing that is certain about Omega Labyrinth Life is that it is not that good. The dungeon crawling, which is how you’ll spend about 75% of your time with the game, simply isn’t up to snuff with its contemporaries and tending to the Grand Garden lacks the depth an activity like that should have. It’s just a top-to-bottom boring experience, and no amount of lady spray on my Switch screen can change that.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
