Happiness Double Room

One feels that if they review visual novels, they are bound to stumble across a game about incest at one point. Happiness Double Room is that game, cropping up on the radar no matter how much you try to avoid titles with taboo themes. Well, we all understand the demographic for this market, so clearly, there will be people attracted to the premise.

Happiness Double Room is a visual novel loaded with more than 100'000 words of text. It brings an extensive story to warm the heart rather than make it sink. That's an uncommon theme in this genre, where you usually have a tale touching on darkness and despair. The main characters are brother and sister, leaving you on a tightrope of morality. For science, I guess we have to jump into the world of Happiness Double Room.

Strange Runaway

Let's go ahead and get this oddball narrative base out of the way before we go any further. Happiness Double Room is a visual novel about a young man tired of life's stresses and the ethical problem of loving his sister. Your sister decides that enough is enough and nothing should keep their love apart. She kidnaps you to a magical beach house together to live happily ever after.

There's no objective to achieve your happily ever after; it's already there. The entire game is a story about living and loving your sister, where the player will choose activities based on the narrative's mood. But that sort of sweetness overrides that absolute weirdness that entails if you're not accustomed to how these visual novels tend to pain out. There's no backing down from the fact this game is about fetishizing incest.

Much of the actionable activities revolve around sexual acts. For those that aren't quite aligned to this kink, it's pretty damn weird. The narrative spends too much time justifying this, and the cutesy static art style makes things rather uncomfortable. The railed progression of the story doesn't leave much room to back away from what goes on either; you're going to be intimate with your sister, whether you like it or not.

So is Happiness Double Room a good game considering the mechanical restrictions? Well, it's a simple mechanic set that works fine. Visually it's sound, but the narrative will only attract a tiny segment of genre fans. Incest is a niche topic - one that the majority of gamers won't be on board with. But let's not forget, just about enough would be interested.

The Stuff Documentaries Are Made Of

You feel that the game's concept would be behind a real documentary. Maybe that idea alone is worth giving Happiness Double Room a go to see weird minds operate from the outside. But you still feel that if you wanted an intriguing visual novel experience, you'd better stick to classics like Doki Doki Literature Club.

Round-Up - Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Long story offering players more value
• Mechanically straightforward

Cons:

• A taboo topic serves as the central theme of the game
• The storyline will make most players uncomfortable
• Explicit imagery won't be particularly appealing to most gamers