The one word that best describes Maggot Baits is “disturbing.”
Maggot Baits is a visual novel available from Mangagamer that starts with the revenge story of Tsunuga Shougo, and transforms into a horror-fantasy story relying on some tired stereotypes. It does contain a decent love story, but you have to get through a lot of weaker content to get at its meat, involving liberal use of the skip button.
Maggot Baits takes place in a city called Pandemonium, in which illegality and vice rule. A decade ago, beings called witches started to appear in the city. Unable to be killed, extremely deadly, and living without human morality, the witches forced the Japanese government to abandon the city. Fugitives, illegal immigrants, black marketeers, and worse, started making the city their home, since it exists outside of Japan’s laws. Tsunuga Shougo wants to dismantle the source of Pandemonium’s depravity, a mysterious group that he feels are behind it all. He can do this safely because of a single allied witch, Carol, who has decided to live for his sake.
Shougo’s vendetta is the focus of Maggot Baits’ story as he encounters witches, allies, and enemies, and learns about the deeper conspiracy at work in Pandemonium. While functional, his vengeance makes Shougo into an emotionless blob who is difficult to care about even when his backstory is revealed. The witches are similarly difficult to empathize with. They are amoral creatures who do what they want, usually with a single motivation. Their simplicity makes it easy to get a feel for their personality right away, but makes their changes on the game’s three routes seem extremely fast.
While there are technically three routes, the bulk of the game is linear, with no choices. About a quarter of the way through the game you make a choice which leads to the bad route. Getting the true ending requires going through the linear main story, and then once you’ve finished the game’s neutral route, doing it again while making three correct choices. That leads to some minor changes in the story at first, before changing the final third into a completely new route.
Normally, I enjoy doing bad routes early, and then seeing the good/true ending, but for Maggot Baits I advise players to avoid it. The route comes up so early in the game that if you play the bad route you are exposed to spoilers that I wish I hadn’t known of. You’ll know you’re on the bad route if Shougo’s allies are all captured after your first choice.
The idea behind Maggot Baits’ witches is very interesting, and learning about their past is cool, but it doesn’t make up for most of them being boring. As the story’s focus though, Carol becomes a character you can really feel for, and her suffering is touching. Carol saves this game’s story for me because, while it has some serious flaws, learning about Carol and seeing her grow emotionally is the heart of an enjoyable journey.
The other character who really shines is Sandy, the main antagonist witch we get to watch. She’s vicious and dangerous, but has a hidden weakness that really humanizes her when you learn about it. Villains can be a real joy, and Sandy is a good example of that.
The game’s art is excellent, bringing all the erotic scenes — and many violent ones — to life. Ahegao fans have a lot of content to enjoy here, as well as anyone into detailed sweat, other fluids, and physical distortions.
Maggot Baits was labeled top fetish game by the 2015 Moege Awards, and it’s obvious why. Violence is common, and thorough enough that turning on the censorship filter for it turns some scenes almost entirely black. There’s also some futanari here, pregnancy, tentacles, rape, a little foot fetish, domination, self-fellatio, and I’m sure I’m forgetting more.
Unfortunately, the violence is overdone in Maggot Baits, with repeated violent scenes between extremely short story segments. It also isn’t used as successfully as in games like Euphoria, made by the same developer, to build a story: mainly because the witches are less humanized characters. Having inhuman perpetrators of the violence doesn’t help either, whether its the tentacle monster Maggots, or nameless rapist guys. I can only see Carol tortured by tentacles, or by sadists, for so long before I tune out, and that happens faster for the less sympathetic characters.
Sound design is good, feeding the sex scenes with plenty of powerful effects. The voice actors all did well, whether it was running through mundane dialogue, or grunting (and screaming) as their character is mutilated. The music is mostly effective, but some pieces are haunting, even emotional, and are elevated above the rest.
As a fan of the developer Clockup, I don’t regret playing through Maggot Baits, but I am disappointed by it. Clockup improved their artwork, and expanded the boundaries of unusual and disturbing content, but the story doesn’t do it justice. I don’t suggest this novel for those inexperienced with heavy fetish content.
