Shambling through the streets of lewd trying to find an apartment, I find myself stumbling upon a well kept den filled with two beauties wanting me to warm a bed for them. However the more and more I find myself trying to keep them entertained and the house well kept, the more I start to feel as though I'm the one being taken advantage of.
Welp, as you can probably tell this game is a bit of a divided experience for me, and some biases that you can probably glean from the opener is that I have played this game for a while and have some caveats that I think crop up from a perspective that stretches all the way back to when this game was first released. This game wants you to both be a people pleaser, while at the same time wanting you to be a coomer with supposedly horny roommates. However, I feel as though that balance at times gets a little whack in how the contextual scenes start to evolve, but more on that later.
Anywho, onto the review.
Confined and Horny is essentially everything that the title invites. You are a bumbling protag with some means of personality but for the most part you're a self insert MC that needs a place to stay. You find an apartment filled with your 2 love interests and within a week the tele states that unfortunately covid some virus has spread throughout the world and everyone has to stay confined. There's no real evolution on that part of the story, the most it does is confine you (hence the title) to the apartment without having to worry about an overworld beyond that.
And with everyone being confined, everyone starts to get horny. Or, well at least that's what the title promises but it's a little more nuanced than that. Like living in our default states that covid invited for most of the world, being confined and horny invites a lot of thoughts as to where you can take this premise. Will there be corruption? Will the ladies start to get more daring, frustrated and enamored with MC doing a lot of work around the house while praising them? Will this introduce a free use kind of setting the more you start to score? Again yes and no, which I think is the game's main problem.
To explain this better, the gameplay is cookie cutter stat grinding with a little bit of a twist. This is where I think the game unfortunately invites the most frustration for me, and potentially for other players depending on how you take to the grind. The majority of this game is spent on grinding conversations for your 2 LI's, for both affection and lust. These will then influence chances on sexual actions you can choose later on, an example of this can be that early on you have low affection and/or lust, the percentage on doing a successful first baser hug will only hover only around 25%. Bump up said stats then %'s start to usually hover around 80-90%, however, every girl too has phases they can level up to, once you max out both affection and lust you get a new phase that invites new lewd scenes, new lewd actions and yet your stats tank.
When your stats tank, namely due to the stats now having a new ceiling to climb to, suddenly all the previous actions you could do now are back to shittery and you can no longer hug your LI's without them telling you to stop pervin' out after they themselves started giving you handy's and the like, thus leading you back into the conversation grind. That's perhaps my biggest gripe with this game in the teeter-tot give and take it constantly asks of you, so much of this game is tied to upping the %'s so that you can start lewding out much more smoothly, yet there are so many times this game takes that away from you just when you think things are starting to thaw out lewd-wise.
I could forgive this if every new phase opened up more options in the grind, which it does, kinda, but in spite of getting to a point where you are banging, if not having said LI's invade your room to bang they are still constantly bouncing from wanting a fuckfest palace to being overtly weirded out by your lewd intents no matter what their stats say. It feels like the game is missing a more smoother progression rather than feeling as though all you're doing in the end is unlocking more scenes. As with every scene unlock, things essentially still stay the same, the LI's still want the same answers from the same conversations (which never change) and the only thing that evolves is the extension of certain scenes, and/or introducing new ones while still maintaining that status quo of how responsive these LI's are going to be with RNG stat choices.
This can be further found out between two other stats you have to unfortunately wade through, being dirty (you need a shower every other day) and your boner meter. Yeah, MC is perpetually stiff, and if your half-chub goes to full mast unfortunately the LI's are creeped out on you sailing it openly, in spite of whether you already are banging out in the open in the household. With these two you have to balance them out or again you tank the stats of one of the LI's.
Which...I just don't get it. This is the point the game has broke me in this incessant grind you have to constantly wade through. The shower part I get if you want something to have the player keep an eye on, sure, but so many times this game breaks its own context on the latter. Girls are still creeped out by you choosing a lewd comment but they can barge in on you jackin' off and tease you as your choking the chicken. Or one of them can ambush you in the night to give you a random BJ yet still be taken aback at you gawking at her when she does dishes in her underwear, and Jesus Christ, you can have the stiffest boner in the world after giving oral to one of them in the living room and suddenly they say you're the biggest pervo loser for swinging that monster around thus pissing them off.
And that's basically Confined and Horny. I wanted at first to give it four stars with the feeling I got after sticking with it for so long but this game's constantly trying to both invite and prevent it's own concept from happening. It does have great scenes, a nice scenario and both LI's have well-written (porn-wise) personalities when you do go through their more intimately written scenes. Aside from that though the actual skeleton of this game that you interact with most of the time can start to really show you the cracks after even a single playthrough.
Overall 3/5, if the grind can be reworked then I think it'd be more than ample at sitting at a five but after a couple runthroughs this game does start to feel like a three star triumph trying it's best.
