ExpandedPC (Microsoft Windows)Nintendo Switch2018

Hakoniwa Explorer Plus

Get ready for a voxel art action game featuring an unprecedented level of freedom! A whole range of cute girl monsters are waiting to punch, kick, wrap you up, suck your blood, and eat you right up.

Community

Storyline

They challenge various dungeons based on the information they gather in town.

Trailers

Screenshots

Very Positive

1 Steam reviews

Review History

Reviews

1 total

≥h

Steam User 9130STEAMNot recommended

Found this game from a youtube short. I was attracted to the game by the cute style and the boss fights being cute girls. Unfortunately, I didn't last long enough to see any of the cute girl boss fights. This game drove me crazy. It's light on game mechanics, so it needs the few that it has to be very good. I don't think any of them are executed well. I am actually impressed that the developer, who obviously cared enough about the project to complete an entire game never questioned their own design choices.

The game's input system is inconsistent. You progress conversations through the enter key, but you can't skip dialogue with enter. You can skip with the attack button, and you can pick dialogue options with the attack button, but only certain dialogue options, so you can't rely on just attack or just enter. Escape pauses the game, but it isn't an escape for any inventory/dialogue/menus, instead you have to hit the jump key (or the inventory key for the inventory).

Saving the game is not called save, it's called Record, and it isn't in the pause screen, it's in the inventory; which resulted in me believing there was no way to save for my first play session and so I went to bed in the starting town hoping that's how my progress would be saved. Nope.

The game relies heavily on item usage, weapon/armor swapping, and loot management. The rewards for everything is xp to increase your damage/health (no stat allocating, it's just linear growth), items, or money to buy items in the store. So with all this emphasis on items, management needed to be slick and easy. It isn't. You have extremely limited inventory for how many items the game dumps on you. There are a lot of consumables in the game, but you can only have one equipped at a time, so to use any others, you have to go into your inventory mid combat and use them.

Weapons and armor have durability, and when they break, they get weaker and you drop them, requiring you to pick them up-- oh, oops, you picked up some random consumable dropped by an enemy instead. Gotta discard that first. NOW reequip it or, actually may you can find something else with better stats. What's that? you can only see stats by selecting each item, navigating to details, and examining them? golly, maybe I'll just use my fists. the most common enemy in the game breaks equipped items anyways.

You navigate from room to room through quick loading instances that reset everything. However, you switch rooms by walking into an invisible threshold that is closer to you than you expect, so occasionally you will leave scenes when you don't mean to, erasing loot and resetting enemy health (but not yours of course). I did that a few times during boss fights when I was about to win and had to restart them from the beginning.

There's a lack of polish with the fighting mechanics. Health bars don't visually completely empty when an enemy is killed, so it's hard to tell when you're fighting 13 enemies that are mogging you if the one you're swinging at is doing its death animation and you can safely walk through or if it has 2 hit points left and is about to hit you and trap you in the crowd. There are flashy heavy attacks, but every time you start one, you also do a light attack, so you can launch enemies that you wanted to hit with the heavy out of range, and it looks less cool when you try to set up a heavy attack to just swing at air right before you start the charge up.

There's no dodges, nothing like that. For all the weapons I got to try in my limited playtime, it was walk in and hit the enemy and walk out. Most enemies have some kind of range projectile that they can launch at you just as you're going in for an attack. That can be dealt with against 1 or 2, but many encounters are just swarms of enemies that spawn all around you. Also, many projectiles also stun you, and there is no stunlock protection, so you can mess up once and then be stunned endlessly until death.

There is a story, so i've read online, but the game definitely doesn't care about it. it is a vehicle to get the player to go through dungeons. The writing is trying to be humorous. It was, unfortunately, ineffective.

I am disappointed. I am so because I think the artstyle of the game is very nice, and I like the saucy but not explicit artwork. The one overworld travel song that looped was nice, too. I think with some playtest and 20-30 more dev hours put into improving the usability of the game, this could have been a favorite game of mine. Something I'd avidly share with friends. Instead, I will be refunding this game with prejudice. Straight to prison with this dev. Bone cancer upon them. I wish that the only comfort he has is knowing that, crappy though his game is, his next could be better if he actually tried. Because here, he clearly didn't.

Mar 11, 2026·1h·Verified