Secret Wives' Club

Chisato is the mastermind behind the "Secret Wives' Club"Game Concept: After more than a year of reviewing Hentai Games I have to admit that my recent hiatus from playing them was beginning to make me almost miss doing the reviews. I needed something nice, boring, and bizarre to refresh my memory as to why I hate Japan so much. I mean just the other day I walked past a Japanese guy on the street and I didn't even contemplate chasing him around with a comically large sword. Such madness thankfully came to an end when I found waiting in my mailbox a copy of the latest hentai game from those kidders at G-Collections. That game was of course "Secret Wives Club", the perfect title for anyone obsessed with having sex with married women and with either giant head and gaping anus fetish or really bad vision.

In "Secret Wives' Club" you fill the shoes of Issei Ozaki, a bright young man who is looking for a job at his father's company and has taken work as a tutor of the CEO's son. The whole tutoring gig is quickly relegated to the occasional one sentence mention after you encounter Chisato Takasugi, the mother of your young apprentice. You see, while on vacation in Bali young Issei unwittingly had a fling with the married Chisato, so Chisato knows what kind of a huge-cocked stud her son's tutor really is. She's got bigger plans for him then just an affair though, together with her friends Kagari and Nana she wants Issei to tutor them on the finer points of having a sexually fulfilling life.

Nana is the cute and shy one who has a husband that is "too serious".The setup for the game's plot actually isn't too bad and seems almost like the plot of a movie you might see on the Lifetime channel. That's pretty progressive for a game that originated in a country where women live in barns and have to iron the grass or their husband will throw shurikens through their skull. Wait, maybe that was just a dream I had about Japan, either way the game sticks to the individual stereotypes but at least makes an effort to add a little bit of female empowerment to the mix. The Judith Light in "Uncommon Woman" façade vanishes once you get into the meat of the gameplay and the awesomely hilarious character selection menu.

The character selection menu is the entirety of the interactivity in "Secret Wives' Club" and the choices you make here determine the ending you get, the number of "extra encounters" you have, and the order in which you view the entirely linear story. Each girl has a different set of areas in which you can train her with an associated progress bar. Once the progress bar has been filled in a given area it unlocks the next area you can train her in and in a few cases unlocks more than one area simultaneously. This idea actually isn't that bad and reminds me of the first game I reviewed "A Maid's Story". In concept anyway, the execution is actually pretty fucking horrible.

Kagari is the outgoing and normal wife with an impotent elderly husband.First of all the menu options are sometimes vague, with descriptions like "service" and "sensitivity" that really have nothing to do with what happens when you train the lusty housewife in that given area. Other descriptions like "anus" and "torture" are comical and leave you wondering how it could possibly take five attempts to get one of these women to understand how to have anal sex. The training sessions are an even bigger failure because they often seem to be less a "session" and more just a random start and stop point of the story with a sex scene thrown in the middle. It's obvious that the overall game adheres to a linear script and at times this produces bizarre continuity problems.

A good example of this is when, after trying to warm up good old Chisato, we were interrupted by her damn son and she said something to the effect of "I'll come by your place tonight and finish this". Being a stubborn bastard I was having none of that, so when the game returned me to the selection screen I spent several days training the other two wives in the fine art of anus. Not only was Chisato not mad (or even aware of me ignoring her) when I encountered her on the street in one of the game's pointless random events, but when I finally decided to return to tutoring her I was met with the evening tryst that had been promised. I don't expect a lot from a hentai game, but if you're going to devise a gameplay mechanic like they did for "Secret Wives' Club" you could at least frame the goddamn vignettes so they would make sense in any order.

There are a few events that can occur based on how you handle the training. For example, when you manage to train all three women in Sensitivity you are rewarded with a pretty dopey foursome. If you concentrate all your efforts on one woman while totally neglecting the others this woman will eventually fall in love with you, while the others will still act like you are having sex with them in all the scenes you meet up with them in. It makes very little sense and not in a good way. After nearly every training session you get a random encounter. Sometimes these are just entirely pointless dialogues when you bump into characters on the street, other times these are linked to how much time you are spending with a given character or just who you saw last.

Anus. Click the image to see the full selection screen in all its glory.Probably the most annoying thing for me in the game was that it has a mysterious timing mechanism. After a while the Secret Wives Club just ends, there's no warning or real explanation, so you just have to hope you've done things in the right order to please the mysterious gods of Hentai. This was particularly frustrating because you can't train all of the women at once to their maximum, or if you can it relies on some totally arbitrary order of training that I failed to achieve. That forced me to play through the game three times, not something I would recommend to anyone who particularly enjoys their free time or their sanity.

The last mystery with this game is the "Extreme Lesson" option at the bottom of each girl's training column. I have no idea what the ever-living fuck the "Extreme Lesson" option even does because I was unable to unlock it. Maybe you have to train all three girls to the maximum by jumping through obtuse and invisible hoops that, knowing hentai games, are probably also on fire. I can only assume that the "Extreme Lesson" options introduce a level of perversion beyond the repeated and disturbing wide-open anuses and semen covered faces.

Difficulty: "Secret Wives' Club" is one of those games that can't be called hard or easy because its difficulty exists in an entirely different dimension. This dimension is full of randomness and at any moment a giant explosion like the birth of a sun might envelop you. You just click you way through the "Secret Wives' Club" and regardless of any effort you put into winning, or lack thereof, the game arbitrarily determines whether to reward you or suddenly and mysteriously end the game in tragedy.

Defining Moment: This would probably be as good a place as any to discuss the artwork in "Secret Wives' Club". Throughout much of the game the artwork is fairly good, but when the clothes come off and the sex starts the artists seem to lose all proper sense of perspective and human anatomy. Arms bend at crazy angles, faces take on bizarre shapes and proportions, and often the bodies appear to be less a human cartoon and more a technical diagram of a sack made from wet leather full of metal cubes of differing sizes. The defining moment of this game is actually several, and it relates directly to the quality of the graphics. The designers of "Secret Wives' Club" love to show off their ability to draw the human colon, and what better way to showcase this talent than to draw women with flaring assholes in a variety of painful or fatal looking positions? There are at least ten scenes in the game where the player is treated to nice detailed artwork of the curved and segmented interior of women's digestive tracts.

Final Thoughts: Some hentai games are absolutely torturous to play, whether it's their horrifying content or their gameplay mechanics. "Secret Wives' Club" managed to dodge the bullet on the former, maybe only because I couldn't get to the "Extreme Lessons", but it has bucketloads of the latter. I almost enjoy a game like "A Maid's Story" or the almost classic "True Love" where at least you're doing more than plodding along a branching path that splits with no respect for logic. "Secret Wives' Club" doesn't even have that, it's almost entirely linear and its training menu is nothing more than a trick to make the player think they're doing something interactive.