Cute Girlfriends Explosions

Seen through western eyes, Japan can appear an odd country. Sure, it's a place of ancient, mystical eastern promise and all that, but these days you're just as likely to reference the soiled underwear vending machines and bizarre TV shows that produced such YouTube delights as Human Tetris.

The particular Japanese predilection that we see today in Cute Girlfriends Explosions though is that penchant for oddly young-looking naked anime girls with huge doe eyes. Nothing to worry about, of course. These girls can't be that that young - their boobs are too big.

The gaming veil spread over the adult content here is so thin it's translucent, but there's no denying its quirky implementation. At the start of each level, you're shown a picture of a fully clothed woman (with pre-requisite doe eyes, of course). This picture is then chopped up into several vertical or horizontal sections and wrongly re-ordered like a jigsaw puzzle. You then have to hit the keys that correspond to each piece of the porno puzzle to get them back into order, from top to bottom.

If you manage to put the image back together correctly, a magic twinkly disrobing ray moves over the young lady, robbing her of her garments, revealing her disproportionately large anime breasts.

There's something a little eerie about this reveal mechanic, as the girl is transformed from someone just casually talking on the phone, to a girlfriend perhaps, to a flesh canvas, nipples all tangled-up in the telephone wire. Nothing in any of the final pictures is overly explicit per se, but you may find your sensibilities twanged.

In gaming terms, Cute Girlfriends Explosions shoots its load way too early. Considering the title, it's perhaps apt, but it's a misstep nevertheless. All nine images are revealed in the first series of levels. To start with, the original clothed images are split into four pieces, but after going through all the girls, callously removing their clothes, you find yourself back at the beginning, faced with the same set of pictures, just chopped into more slices.

There's only a shot-full of gameplay to the re-ordering of pieces at best, and expecting you to go through the same old pictures when you could quite easily just re-start and attain your little sordid thrills without all that increased brain-wracking is plain misguided.

However, in contrast with most adult titles out there, which have a habit of just dumping some porn pics in front of you after some form of gaming success, as if part of a Pavlovian experiment, the implementation of the adult-ness is at least marginally creative.

Cute Girlfriends Explosions will offer titillation to some. It's a titillation that's slightly worrying, a titillation that might well reflect badly on your character and cause friends to worry about your relationship with women in general, but it's there regardless.