Humble farmer Fernando happily lives with his devoted, yet hot-headed wife Mia.  But one day, demon girls decide to kidnap Fernando and try to tempt him away from Mia, but she’s not having any of that!  Mia takes up her sword and goes after those licentious demons in Wife Quest, a 2-D platformer with pixel art style graphics.  It’s available on most current consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.

Mia can run and jump in 2-D fashion across several levels with a boss at the end of each one.  She’ll explore grasslands, a forest, caves, a volcano, ice lands, and the demon castle.  You know, typical stuff.  Mia can swing her sword at enemies to dispatch them.  When she defeats a boss, she’ll learn a special skill.  She can use a shield to deflect enemy attacks, use butterfly wings to glide, a club for breaking walls, a tail for dashing, etc.  These skills use up a magic meter that you can refill with crystals you find in treasure chests around the levels.  You can also find coins in treasure chests which you can use at a shop to buy other upgrades.  These include more hearts, healing potions, backpacks to hold more stuff, as well as magic that’ll make your sword stronger and longer.

The game has a few problems that kept me from enjoying the game more than I did.  Mainly it gets way too difficult about halfway through.  The controls don’t help either.  Most of the time they’re fine, but I don’t feel like I had as much control with my jumps as I would’ve liked.  And once you learn the dash move, the game just gets nigh impossible and very frustrating.  The levels are also long, and while there are a few checkpoints that you can use to come back to later, I’d like to see them more frequently.  It’s a shame, too, because even though this game is a bit naughtier than what I usually play, I still had a lot of fun with most of it.  It kind of has a Wonder Boy feel to it.  And you have to hand it to Fernando.  Usually men in video games are depicted as being easily tempted by pretty ladies, but he never gives in to those demon girls and always runs to Mia whenever he can.  So good on you, Fernando.  He ends up being the most likable character in the game because of that.

Kid Factor:

Wife Quest is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Blood, Violence, Sexual Themes, and Language.  I didn’t really notice too much blood here, but the game is a bit more violent than usual.  You can swing your sword at monster girls and they’ll fall over when defeated.  But then you have an option to perform some kind of wrestling finishing move on each one that looks rather painful.  I guess that would be satisfying for some folks, but I thought it was a bit unnecessary.  Most of the sexual themes and language are in the text only.  Because of all of this and the difficulty, Wife Quest is best for older players.

Tags: Game Reviews