STORY
The story of Sassy Girl revolves around a young man who struggles with his mental health. He visits a psychologist who feeds into his subconscious desires and this sets him on a path of mental instability. Coincidentally, the loss of his father ultimately lands him into a job at a women’s magazine, the Sassy Girl. Slowly, the MC uncovers how unstable some of the women are and how much he can take advantage of them.
Storywise the game starts off really strong, but many players have noted a steep decline about halfway through the game. This game is deliberately meant to be illogical at times, and that’s something you need to know in order to appreciate it better. As you start to wonder why things don’t make sense, you’ll realize the MC isn’t making much sense and you get to decide where the path goes from there. It’s an interesting take, but feels a little under executed. That’s all I can say without giving the twist away.
Fans warned me to not spoil the inner workings of the story, but I must share that this game isn’t for the faint of heart. It tackles mental instability, power dynamics, hints at family relations and can downright lead to involuntary penetration or riding. That said, the story of Sassy Girl is an interesting one - but ultimately, falls a bit short due to its potential to give its characters more weight. It is, however, something different to be experienced.
PRESENTATION
Sassy Girl looks good, the renders are nice to look at and most of the locations are very believable. You visit a lot of special locations with the women, including mountain cabins, their houses, basements, restaurants. All women have something special to them, most of them a bit of a blank stare or a bimbo-like appearance, but the scenes do share some quite intimate and harrowing moments. Miriam, your boss at the Sassy Girl, is without a doubt the MILF quality most men are looking for while all other women at the magazine fill different trope rolls
Sex scenes are aplenty and they are quite detailed and visceral as well. Without spoiling too much, you can expect roleplay, voyeurism and pregnancy play - or go darker into submission, gaslighting or downright involuntary penetration and fluid play. For a game that might seem unhinged on the surface, there’s a lot going on and having multiple women tugging at you does make for some interesting situations and locations.
Presentation is definitely the game’s strongest suit and the graphical style helps sell the sometimes absurd things that happen within the story. Just keep playing, in the end it will all make more sense.
Since this is a choice-based VN, the only form of gameplay you have are in the choices you make - and they do matter. Your choices will decide not only how the story ends, but who will stand next to you as the story ends. Sassy Girl takes a few dark turns at times and a few choices can actually end you up not experiencing the full story, either because you’re no longer among us or you’ve chosen to leave a lot of things behind.
You rack up relationship points through dialog choices with the women and yes, they will callback to earlier choices at select times. Not engaging in certain dialog could lock you out of a story branch a while later, so make sure to choose your responses wisely.
OVERALL
During development, I lashed out at Hematite for creating an illogical game. Many fans were right to correct me that I didn’t give the game a fair chance. If you treat this game like an absurd piece of media and go in suspending a story that makes sense, you can have some great fun with this game. Even though in the end, it falls short of reaching it’s goal to tell an engaging story that lasts.
Rating: 7/10
Developer: Hematite | Adult Visual Novel | Patreon
