Features two pixel-art scenes of futanari selfcest (don’t google this unless you’re ready for some wacky NSFW content). Recommended.
Wait, I guess you might want to know a bit more. Well Alternate DiMansion Diary is a game developed by Sprite Hills, and brought to us Westerners from our longtime friends Kagura Games. Another genre expansion for them, Alternate DiMansion is a puzzle game, where your goal is to escape the titular mansion. You do this by continuously finding useful objects, and unlocking doors until eventually, you find the key to the front door.
It’s a simple time-honored goal, and this game does a reasonable job with its game elements. There’s a directional puzzle, a couple math puzzles, and a lot of pattern recognition to figure out how clues work together. There are also a series of poems that are unlocked as clues for the locations of four bonus items, a series of medallions, used to unlock a door in the mansion that is uninvolved in your escape but reveals truths about the story. The puzzles aren’t particularly hard, but walking around the mansion to get from one to another, especially when you’ve done it a half-dozen times already, can get a little tedious. Thankfully the main character Sae can run around the mansion.
Well, she can usually run. She can’t when she’s naked. Gotta cover up the vital bits.
The DiMansion Sae finds herself in seems to have a lewd imagination, because there are a number of sexual encounters Sae can stumble into. Sometimes she ends up having to explore naked for a bit afterward. A couple of these scenes are optional. In fact, once you’ve beaten the main game (on a specific route) there’s an entirely optional process of scene hunting. These scenes include Sae’s hyper-energetic friend Yuuki, and her calm busty friend Tomoe. The scenes in this game are pretty good, with quality pixel-art in play here. If pixel-art doesn’t do it for you, you might consider skipping this game, because all scenes use it. I personally like pixel-art, and the facial expressions and body language in particular both show effort. Sae’s exploring poses don’t offer much variety, but during scenes anything becomes possible.
The audio work in this game is reasonable. I was never annoyed by the mansion music, which is a huge success because you’re hearing it all game. The voice work for all three girls is quality, and in fact carried a few of the scenes that, for me, would have been mediocre otherwise (just a fetish thing). Though I should note that the ‘voice’ work is restricted to sound effects, from gasps to, well, other kinds of gasps (screeches, moans, etc…)
There are a number of fetishes here. Along with the aforementioned futanari selfcest, there’s plenty of surprise sex, there are scenes with toys, and there’s group sex. The main storyline also involves corruption. Oh, and tentacles, the thing that I can play through, but don’t usually find entertaining. To be fair, along with the voice work helping those scenes out, the tentacle scenes had some of the best sense of humor, and have a variety of poses, so if you like them, I think you’ll like these scenes.
The writing is good for the genre too and makes Sae a very believable young woman. She’s worried, fearful, desperate, and more, and all of it is expressed only through pixel-art cues, and writing. I didn’t notice anything that seemed out of place with the localization either, which is always nice. There are a couple of plot oddities, but I can’t tell if it’s just to emphasize the strangeness of the game’s universe, or if it’s because of the game’s length.
Alternate DiMansion Diary is a short game and because of this I got stuck a couple times looking through the whole mansion for hints at what I should do next to progress the puzzle, and it still only took me around an hour-and-a-half to do the main game. I didn’t really keep track of the post-game, but there are no new puzzles in it, so it’s a lot shorter. In total, I’d say the whole game shouldn’t take most people more than two hours. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed in the length. While the scene quality is good, and I had fun with some of the puzzles (I found some too easy), the short game means there isn’t a lot of any specific thing. The game isn’t expensive, but if it had had even another hour of content, I think it would have felt a lot more substantial.
I do recommend this game, but with some caveats. If you are a fan of pixel art, of combining puzzles with adult gaming, or of most of the available scene themes, then you’ll probably get enough out of this if you buy it any time. If you’re unsure about anything, maybe wait to pick it up when it goes on sale. Scene replay becomes available once you beat the game by the way, so no need to keep saves from throughout the game.
It’s a good introduction to puzzle gaming, or to pixel-art adult gaming. It’s fun so if you’re looking to try something new, I personally recommend it.