Hot Candy Land

HotCandyLand, previously known as Sweet State, is a very large very convoluted sexual interactive experience with tons of features from various genres. Since 2012, they’ve been growing their library of activities steadily within this one singular video game title. Drawing inspiration from other porn game producers, they’ve been adding features from every single type of porn game out there, culminating in an odd, but satisfying gaming experience that somehow falls short overall. Still, the game enjoys a rather sizeable following and they’re showing no signs of downsizing. This game might be your next main squeeze, depending on what you expect to see in your porn games. It’s free to play, but features a lot less smut than most freemium games out there.

Welcome to Pornwood

The game goes out of its way to really glorify the in-game city of Pornwood, which is an obvious spin on the real world Hollywood. This is an environment in which everything is over-sexualized and as the game is aimed mostly at single males, the female NPCs are particularly horny during all times of the day. They’re also scantily clad across the board and you’re not exactly going to find many prudes in your explorations of Pornwood. This is a sex-themed city and it’s built around your satisfaction.

The story of the game, if you can call it that, is that you’re a single man trying his best to build a sex empire. The game urges you to become the greatest pimp that this city has ever seen by, well, pimping out female NPCs. You can also invest the money that you earn into other ventures like real-estate. There’s also in-game competition, against other pimps, which are the other players in the game.

Your day to day will consist of travelling across the various neighborhoods of Pornwood, getting to know the locals and engaging in sexual escapades for many reasons that make no sense if you look at the bigger picture. Say for instance that you want to become a pimp as soon as possible. Well, you’ll need to win a “cock fight” against another local pimp. Except, to do that you’ll have to grow your penis which starts out at a very meager 5cm. However, you cannot afford to purchase penis enlargement shots, which don’t actually exist in real life, but that’s not important right now. Instead, you can grow your penis out by going to the local club and having a chat with a cougar. No matter which conversation option you roll with, she will in fact, sleep with you. You can choose whether you want to wear a condom or roll the dice on your luck for a bigger payoff. Either way, your penis will have grown a full centimeter by the time you’re done.

The game is loaded with these nonsensical interactions all of which seem to serve to get your stats up in one way or another. Your penis length, your personal stat points and your bank account are all things you want to keep an eye on and hopefully improve.

Eventually, when you actually start pimping out girls, you’ll be able to work on recruiting more of them and managing them carefully in order to optimize your cash flow. Unfortunately, however, the game has an energy meter. So whether you’re up against other players or just enjoying the local scenery by yourself, you will need more energy to perform actions. This is where things get a bit shady.

The Quickest Fake Tutorial

Normally, a quick tutorial is a good thing. You don’t want to be kept away from the action for longer than necessary. Unfortunately, Hot Candy Land takes this way too far with a tutorial that practically whizzes past you in the first few minutes of the game, but manages to go through literal hundreds of features that are essential to playing the game.

And to make things worse, the game gives you a very false sense of ease, fun and general interactivity. You click through a bunch of scenes where you pick up girls, romance them into having sex with you, then get free penis enlargement rewards and even win a “cock fight” against another player, all within the first 10 minutes of the game. Playing like this, you might get the impression that Hot Candy Land is a fun game in which there’s tons of content that’s just a click away.

Now, while the game might be gigantic and contain a ton of content, it’s absolutely not a breeze. The tutorial basically lies to you, but it does so in a very strategic way. You do indeed do all the things in this game that you see in the tutorial, except, the more you play the longer it takes. Basically, you need energy for everything worthwhile that you do in this game. You also need certain currency items and stat upgrades to progress the story.

But, the longer you play and the more you do, the more these requirements skyrocket. After a few hours of playing this game you’re going to be completely locked out of any real enjoyment. That’s when the game starts shoving suggestions in your face. These suggestions are all motivation for you to pay real money for in-game currency items like energy. If you want to keep playing, you’ll have to pay. This is such a disappointing cop-out – roping you in on the promise of light and breezy smut-fun then showing you the door unless you fork over the cash. And the tricks don’t stop there.

For most of the worthwhile activities in the game, you’ll have to wait real world hours for them to resolve. There will be timers on your screen reminding you that an hour from now, something important that you really need is going to happen. You’ll have to come back then if you want to play more. This all results in a bizarre and very repetitive experience of making small changes to your gameplay before leaving the game and remembering to come back to it later. It’s habit forming and most of the incentive to play the game doesn’t come from the gameplay, but from being sent away moments after you’ve come back. It’s like the game is playing hard to get, unless you decide pay real money.

Styles and Content

The game is drawn in a very original westernized cartoonish art style that works well for what the game is trying to convey. It’s a cheap and smutty experience and the over-the-top, oversexualized females serve the game quite well. The males in the game on the other hand aren’t given a lot of attention, short of their penises which for some reason received a lot of attention for the purpose of the aforementioned “cock fights”. Beyond that, the focus is entirely on the tons of original girls, all of which feature gigantic breasts for some reason. There’s not a lot of variety in this game when it comes to the NPCs. The old, the new, the slutty and the prudes are all valley girls for some reason.

As for the city itself, you interact with it through a Sim-City style top-down view that lets you travel to any building that you have unlocked, to pursue more of the story and meet more women. This approach has been used in porn games before and it gives a great sense of an open world. Unfortunately, where other porn games actually offer an open world for you to enjoy, this one more or less keeps you locked on a rail. You have to follow through the linear requirements that are necessary for you to progress in the game. There’s no free fun to be had here. The best you can hope for is trying to improve your character so you can win fights against other players. But, even that can feel like a chore since the game fights your attempts at having fun so effectively.