Space Paws

Even though Taifun Riders has been hard at work mastering the art of smut game production for years, his biggest claim to fame is his now legendary title, Space Paws. Since its announcement in 2015, Space Paws has been taking the porn game world by storm, and it’s done a lot for the furry community, specifically. It’s also extremely commendable that Taifun Riders, hereafter Taifun, managed to get into a sponsoring partnership with the legendary WetPussyGames website.

The Gameplay

Right off the bat with some meager, cookie cutter experiences, Taifun didn’t stretch too far when it came to the base game concept. The game is a visual novel, plain and simple, but unlike those infamous Nutaku titles, you don’t swap between mini-games and get exposition in the novels. You’re stuck in visual novel mode and you certainly don’t have reason to complain.

All of the art in this game is perfect for the source material and the story it’s trying to convey. You’re on a space adventure through the stars, except there’s furries – tons of furries. For those of you in the audience who’ve managed to go a lifetime without hearing that term, allow this review to cut your teeth on the magnificent world of anthropomorphized animals. No, it’s not bestiality, they have breasts and genitals like the rest of you – they’re just very furry. One could posit that this genre was born out of people’s morbid fascination with sexualizing Sonic the Hedgehog characters, but one way or another, it’s become more of a genre than a fetish. It’s broken into the mainstream in a big way and Taifun is riding the edge of that storm and making waves with Space Paws.

You get to interact with tons of characters, all of which are one form of furry animal or another and your playable character is the most popular dude in the universe. Oddly enough, you play as a human, but we’re not here to throw stones. It’s great that furries out there have this game as a healthy break from everyday life.

The Story

The story of Space Paws isn’t exactly breaking conventions or carving new paths, but for the purpose of a smut game, it’s deeper than you’d expect. It’s also got a ton of really believable interactions that make sense. Your character is not a Mary Sue that hops straight through any and all conflict. You feel like you earn your place in the galaxy – bit by bit.

The game starts you off on a spaceship, with a slow start, in what feels like an amnesiac nightmare. You’re marooned in space and completely alone, on a ship you do not recognize. You can poke around, but nothing really happens until you decide to open up another pod, like the one you just awoke from and meet Allison, your comrade in arms for this mission. What mission you ask?

Well, Allison explains that you’re both part of a humanity-saving project that was launched into space after scientists discovered that Earth will be rendered uninhabitable due to pollution. Pairs of breed-ready couples were launched in pods to awaken at a later time and explore space, whilst populating the universe with new human beings.

The plan sort of went awry as you and Allison seem to be the only two who have made it out alive and she isn’t exactly down with the whole “repopulating the galaxy” plan you two have laid out in front of you. She’s not at odds with you, she’s just a bit of a recluse, especially before you get to know her properly. Luckily, there’s a lot to be done in this galaxy you’ve awoken within. You can visit different locations, across different planets and interact with the local folk.

The story unravels slowly, and as the player character you sort of push your character forward with the unspoken promise of alien intercourse. This is where the furry passion really factors in. All the alien species have their own planet and they’re all pretty amicable. Still, don’t expect to be the life of the party right off the bat. And sure, some cat people do hypothesize that perhaps you might be a god, because you resemble them, but you do not have fur. Or maybe they’re following a prophecy, who knows.

Either way, you’re free to explore and talk to the locals, get to know them, learn about the universe and most importantly increase your various skills that make navigating this newly found part of the universe an easier task.

The Challenge

In any given day in Space Paws, you start off with exactly 100 points of energy and these are your most important and most expendable currency. Every significant action you perform costs you energy points. Since you start out as a bit of a lethargic, lame brained and malnourished space farer whose specialty for the past few years has been hibernation, you tire out very easily. You have to level up your skills by performing certain actions. Some levelling is simple – you read a book, you get savvy. Others you will have to explore and learn about on your own.

Either way, all of this expertise will either help you fight baddies or engage in coitus with hot, furry alien babes. And since this is a smut game, the combat too helps you get to the smut faster, as it’s more of a hindrance than part of the actual experience.

The combat is lackluster – plain and simple. This might be considered a serious downside, but you can also look at it this way: It’s simple enough to be quick and out of the way. It would be a lot worse if you had to level up a band of characters in increasingly meaningless mini-games that you had to stare at for hours on end, only to end up having to spend real money to speed up the process. This game is completely free and made by people that truly cared about the outer space furry experience. None of the game elements are symbolic or made to drain your time. It’s supposed to be a satisfying story telling experience throughout.

Unfortunately, in their passion for trying to produce a deep story, Taifun made the game a bit too linear. Now, this isn’t a bad thing, most RPGs these days are completely linear save for a few decisions you can make along the way deciding the fate of the universe. The problem is not in the linear story, rather, in the linear gameplay. Specifically, the conversation branches in this game, which are the core of the gameplay, force you down a narrow path. Sure, they’re expository and serve to teach you more about the universe, but they go way out of their way to lock you into the pattern that the writer had in mind in advance. This means that if you’re trying to get past a gate and you have to talk to a guard, you either say the right thing and get through, or you say the wrong thing, get stuck in a loop and have to try again saying the things you didn’t choose to say before.

That’s not fun gameplay and it certainly isn’t how you do branching conversations. Still, you have to roll with the punches when you’re playing a free game that’s built around smut flavored storytelling. You can’t have everything. Plus, you have to keep in mind that other games that do branching conversations better usually don’t invest this much of their budget on the art. So for the price of missing out on some more dynamic conversations, you get tons of furry art as the payoff. And speaking of the payoff.

The Payoff

Leaving the best for last in what is an amazing game across the board; the smut in this game is top notch. The visual style retains the same extremely high levels of quality between the smut and the rest of the game, so you get to experience proper full screen penetration on-screen every chance your character gets. Sure, you have to earn it, but it’s extremely satisfying when you do. It’s also related to the story, rather than being some sort of post-quest reward.

You don’t get ripped out of the experience by these smut scenes and given that you get to know the characters before you romance them, there’s also the feeling of developing relationships. In the furry community, the personalities of the characters seem to be as important as their visual appearance, which makes for a very nice and well-rounded approach to smut romance.

Finally, it’s worth noting that even though this is a pornographic game, none of it really comes across as cheap. The sex is very attainable, but it’s not up for grabs. The story also progresses very gradually and the rewards that you do get are very sensible. There’s also none of the symbolic teasing you might have gotten used to seeing in freemium online games. This is a proper furry porn game, plain and simple.