It’s not every day you come across a game like Omega Labyrinth Life. It’s not uncommon for Japanese RPGs to contain a certain degree of ‘fan service’, which at its most tame might place characters in swimsuits or skimpy clothing. Then there is the more hardcore end of the scale, where Omega Labyrinth sits. On the fence with fan service on one side and porn on the other. Now why would someone start a review in this way? Well let me tell you about Omega Labyrinth Life.

You’re Hinata Akatsuki, the first transfer student to the illustrious all-girl school/academy Belles Fleurs. Within the first day the academy’s magical grand gardens have wilted, and the source that keeps the garden so lovely needs to be restored. With the wilted flowers coinciding with your arrival and some accusations thrown around, Hinata is on the hook to set things right. Luckily you’re quick to fix it all and go dungeon diving to help bring the gardens back to life. You don’t have to do it alone as the school has a series of students and staff that want to do their best to fix the gardens, who also become friends with Hinata along the way. As you get further into the story, the more of the other girls that will make themselves available to your quests. If you’re hoping for a story to keep you entertained, it will depend on how much you enjoy anime girl tropes. There’s no real hook to make you want to find out what happened to the garden, and most of the personalities in the game are so cliche to the point you could guess most of the dialogue.

The main gameplay is a mystery dungeon-style dungeon crawler, with some rogue elements thrown in. Each move is considered as taking a turn, and every turn that is made allies and enemies also get to move/attack. As you work your way through the procedurally-generated floors of a multi-floor dungeon, you’ll stumble into many trap tiles generously hidden through each area. Traps get annoying fast, with some rooms more traps than floor. It’s not uncommon for a bad combination of traps and enemies to turn a good run into passing out and losing everything. Scattered throughout the dungeons are weapons and shields along with various other staffs, tomes and potions. In fact there’s so many items you’ll struggle to hold them all, not that you’ll likely use all those slowing staffs. You will need food though, what keeps you from taking dungeons at a leisurely pace is hunger. In case you’ve forgotten this is an ‘adult’ game the girls can equip panties and bras as armour, while traps include having your skirt lifted or slipping over on some lube.

Omega points are the currency that goes towards increasing your bust size as you work your way through the dungeon. To save you from becoming so top heavy that you’d be unable to move, your bust level is reset after you leave the dungeon. Not all the girls share the same bust sizes so you can go in at a higher level, but lower busts level up faster. Would it surprise you that the whole ‘bust’ mechanic is the most tame part of the game when it comes to the girls chests? Should the party leader get knocked out, you’re kicked out of the dungeon and lose everything you had in your inventory including weapons and armour. There are ways to get it back if you don’t mind forking out some of your omega points or lucky enough to have a certain item. While it really sucks when you lose everything when you’re knocked out, it’s rarely worth the cost. It’s not too hard to rebuild your inventory, each dungeon has you back to your starting bust size so you’re not out of your depth. If you’d rather jump in prepared, you can buy some equipment to take with you. If you’ve got too much extra at the end of a dungeon, you can store it in the locker to use after you wipe out.

When you get back to the gardens you can also engage in some actual gardening. With seeds you’ve collected, you can plant crops of flowers and harvest them later on for more seeds and fruit. Initially the planting and harvesting is fairly tedious as you have to run around the garden to do it. Thankfully a bulletin board is introduced, allowing you to manage all the gardening from one place. If you love customising your space there plenty to muck around with, but be prepared to have plenty of omega power to spend. If you’re not interested in managing gardens it just feels like busywork. In fact the whole hub world of the academy can tend to feel like this. Between the buildings to access different crafting and upgrades and the actual quest select screen,there is very little to do. There’s rarely someone to interact with and it’s not worth the time running around the gardens and surroundings to do it.

One glance at this game and it’s very overt to its focus on breasts and fan service, even the first letter/symbol represents a pair of breasts (ω). The main mechanic of the game is of course focused on boosting the size of your characters’ breasts, as well as the touching mini games. Omega Labyrinth is definitely a game that you shouldn’t be playing on the bus/train, let alone around anyone else. I understand there is an audience for this game, or some people that just don’t care because plenty of us are grown-up enough to behave ourselves whenever there’s nipple-covered anime breasts on a screen. If you were on the fence because you want to play a mystery dungeon-style game, but don’t want to feel creepy with the gratuitous sexualisation of school girls, you’re out of luck! There is an alright mystery dungeon game here, but the creepy sexualisation of the girls is baked into nearly every mechanic.

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With every moment of dialogue and story, this game is throwing jiggly boobs in your face. At first, every exchange is punctuated by the character bouncing. Then of course you’re introduced to the size of your bust increasing as you level up in the dungeons. Next, you’re asked to place soft and squishy ambiguity crystals between your breasts to rub them to firmness as they grow and erupt magic out of the top all over the student/teacher... Then you get out of the dungeon and you’re off to the greenhouse to help your abilities ‘blossom’, a mini game involving a full body image of the girl you’ve chosen. You are responsible for touching the girls in sensitive areas until they get too excited, tapping the screen rapidly before they climax and hose down your screen in ‘nectar’ that is then collected and used to level up special abilities. If you’re worried about how it plays docked to a TV you can also use the cursor to control where you touch. It feels just as uncomfortable. It continues on like this as some kind of risque arms race to become the biggest bounciest and...juiciest(?) game out there.

Now it could be easy to say that it’s such a niche game that if you bought it, you’d know exactly what you’re getting yourself into or that it’s lighthearted. I was broadly aware of the premise of the game as being a mystery dungeon game with some focus on breasts as the measurement of levelling. While you can skip some of the more explicit (while still censored to a point) scenes and mini games, you can’t escape it all as the more questionable things - for example, implied explicit actions being done to a character when it’s clear there’s no consent. I’m not here to be the party pooper or a prude in any way either. No matter how bright, cheerful and bouncy the characters are, it’s approach to women and sexualisation of school girls is uncomfortable to say the least. If you were interested in Omega Labyrinth for the mystery dungeon gameplay but unsure about the ‘fan service’, there are much better and much cheaper options than this. Ultimately the game ups the ante so often and so quick in its minigames that not only does it metaphorically blow its load too early, but as it layers on more of them it also diminishes their impact. Sure you still feel creepy, but only an hour ago you were rubbing out a crystal between your massive bazongas so how much worse can it get? (well it does get a little bit worse).

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Questionable treatment of schoolgirls aside, the game struggles in other areas too. The frame rate struggles around the gardens, while the visuals aren’t that far removed from what you’d find on the PS Vita. Procedurally generated dungeons result in some very basic floor layouts. Not all dialogue is subtitled (the voice acting is all Japanese), although given it’s usually with the minigames maybe it’s for the best (or it’s so bad they wouldn’t even risk captioning it). With all the fan service removed, the story, characters and gameplay have little to offer unless you’re desperate to play any mystery dungeon style game.

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Omega Labyrinth Life is a tricky game to sell to people. If you’re really into softcore hentai and games with lots of touching girls all over, you’ll have plenty to enjoy here. If you’re after a mystery dungeon style game then you have to weigh up if you don’t mind a lot of awkward material paraded around you. For either group, this game does not represent value for money. You’re paying nearly $100 AUD for some pretty disappointing not-quite porn, and a very average dungeon crawler.