Review: Super Seducer

The world’s premiere seduction “guru,” Richard La Ruina, is here to teach you the trick, to help you avoid making mistakes, so you can become what he is:  a Super Seducer (aka sleazebag).

Review

The Super Seducer press pack I received opened with a bold claim of this game being controversial, which I can see how it could be. After all, the entire title is about a self-proclaimed Seduction specialist taking you through different scenarios where your choices are all about getting women to date you. He claims it’s more than a game, as it’s also a tutorial, a teaching tool to up your game. He also claims it’s a game that’s empowering to women.

I laughed for a while after reading that one. The only way I can see this game being empowered is if women take it in the opposite way it’s intended, as a guide to red flags when meeting people, to avoid sleazebags. The only way they could’ve saved themselves was to clearly state that this game is a parody of “dating specialists,” but that’s not the case, their intention is genuine and thus very slimy.

Every episode plays a series of FMV cutscenes with several stops for choices. Keep making the right ones and the game continues, complete with extra scenes with the ‘guru’ explaining why your choice is good or bad. He does this from a bed with two scantily clad women who I think are supposed to look sensual but really just look kinda dead in the eyes, like something killed their souls. They barely blink, and are there just for eye candy, I suppose, though the real effect is that it just emphasizes just how much of a sleazebag this guy is. The only thing missing is him caressing the women like trophies or pets every so often, though I’m fairly sure it happened during the recording.

Episodes and conversations are of course planned, rehearsed and more or less “acted,” but when you break down the choices and the reasoning behind them, it’s just a guide on how to manipulate people into liking you, into taking control and coercing them, using vulnerabilities and even emotional distress to your advantage.  Hell, on the first case La Ruina clearly states that being honest is not what’s important but putting up an appearance is what’s important. He explains all of this in a soothing voice that really doesn’t help, ‘cause you know he’s attempted this sort of thing before. As a result, the man and the game are just way too sleazy. And not in the bumbling Leisure Larry kind of way, but in a really disgusting way. And this is without going into the episode where you manipulate your recently broken up friend into sleeping with you. Yeah, it’s that “classy.”

It’s the kind of stuff where you’d expect the women to leave the set and immediately tweet #MeToo, and probably accuse the guy of heinous stuff. The devs and the man himself claim they got consent from all the participants for the video game, which considering the sleaziness of the ones involved, I can only read as “we got them under legally binding documents not to say anything.”

I will give the devs technical credit for the smooth transitions between scenes and the gaming bits, which, as someone who’s played a great deal of FMV adventures, I can tell you many developers screw up.

But even if I could look past the sleaziness in the title, and the fact that there is nothing in this guy that I can respect and nothing in the scenarios and the responses from the women that I find even remotely plausible, the game itself is just thoroughly boring as hell.

I’m not a fan of choice games, and this is one that takes it to the most undesirable extreme, where you stare at live action cutscenes for minutes at a time, then make a choice and get not only the reaction to your choice but a lengthy explanatory scene with the guy and his fembots telling you why this did or didn’t work. I mean, if you wanna insert yourself in the game even further and you want to tell people how much they’re screwing up the art of being a contemptible human being, go for it, but don’t interrupt the gameplay, don’t interrupt the scenario. Let it all play out and then at the end, explain the good and bad. Hell, when you complete a scenario you already get a full summary of your choices with the accompanying videos yet again, so why in the hell, do I have to see them in the middle of the episode as well?

Conclusion

Super Seducer is a bad game, a bad choice, and if there’s only one thing good about it, is that it’s definite and total proof that Richard La Ruina is a master sleazebag slimy bastard.

It does have one honour though: being the first and only game to ever receive this score on The Mental Attic: