Hentai Prison (ヘンタイ・プリズン) Review

Like most teenage boys, at the age when “sex” hits hardest, I opened the door to “sex.”

The trigger was a little ad I saw on the street, telling the story of a dick pill. It went like this: a “mistress” gets abandoned, then runs into a homeless guy on the street. He’s asleep, but still standing tall, so to speak. So the “mistress,” thirsty as hell, sits right down on him in broad daylight, and the wording that follows—I can’t decide if it’s absurd or inspired. Stuff like “jade stalk slides into jade gate,” “flower branch trembling,淫水 overflowing”—anyway, the ad ends by telling you this homeless guy is so godlike because he took their brand of dick pills.

Even as an ad it’s total nonsense and makes no sense. For one, how does a homeless guy afford a box of fake dick pills at 98 RMB? And no woman on the street is gonna get bored and sit on a beggar. Do you people not own vibrators?

Later, my more absurd education on “sex” came from a series of jokes called Professor Huang Xialiu. I found them in a pile of old newspapers—no idea which street rag printed them. A lot of the jokes were ridiculous, but sometimes they carried real satire of the era, including some absurdity from the Cultural Revolution. You can still find some traces of “Huang Xialiu” online, though supposedly anyone who’s seen this stuff is already 50.

Later, after getting broadband, I got into ED2K and the earliest BTChina.net. I remember it clearly—on BTChina’s torrent search site you could download basically any resource you wanted. The film/TV section’s “art films” were a total disaster zone of softcore porn, and I had my eyes opened wide in there. Later ED2K also introduced me to a lot of “teachers,” especially Kaede Matsushima, who in my heart was a stronger actress than Sola Aoi.

Then came college and my first job, and I watched a lot of AV and H-manga along the way. Back then there wasn’t the mature “doujin sharing” pipeline we have now—you just watched this stuff casually, tossed it after use, and as I got older, the “tool-ification” of it became more and more obvious.

By “tool-ification” I mean: when I had a physiological need, I’d go find this kind of material. Once found and used, it’d be flavorless, I’d lose interest, and throw it away.

Later someone called this “sage time,” though more accurately it’s that sense of loss after desire is satisfied in an instant. But for me it was more a kind of “guilt”—I felt I shouldn’t keep surrendering to my body’s physiological urges over and over. There were also sayings back then like “jerking off ruins your health,” and later, with the internet developing and my horizons widening, I was shocked to discover…

I wasn’t even the worst.

I learned that a lot of people are sunk in their desire for “sex” and can’t pull themselves out. Some are foot fetishists, some are black-tights fetishists, some are “everything fetishists”—not just real people, but even static 2D characters can get them hard at the drop of a hat.

Then I discovered these people’s deeper玩法. Some do窒息 play, some are bisexual, some chase thrills with exhibitionism, swapping, training, running around in the letter scene—more and more冲击 made me go from shocked to numb. I also realized there’s a word that sums these people up directly: “hentai.”

The word “hentai” strictly speaking is a biology term, referring specifically to a change in an organism’s form—the “transformation” of “state.” But in modern society we don’t mean that when we say “hentai.” I’m almost certain the word comes from Japan: the Japanese “hen” (へん) means “strange,” and “tai” (たい) means “state,” so Japanese “変態” (へんたい) means a person’s appearance is strange, abnormal…

I once thought I was a “hentai” because I couldn’t always control my desires, but later I realized I wasn’t—and I also couldn’t understand a lot of “hentai” behavior, including those people I mentioned earlier who are sunk in desire and can’t pull out.

The funny thing is, a lot of these people know full well they’re sunk in it, but don’t think there’s anything wrong with them. Some even say things like “what’s wrong with a man being a hentai?”

I always thought that line was self-deprecating joking, because “hentai” is itself a strange state—and if a person keeps thinking strange is normal, that’s pretty strange. This kind of “acceptance” of hentai is more like a rebellion against modern society’s conformity and moral constraints, which is why so many works use “hentai” as a name to describe “change”—like the January game Hentai Prison (ヘンタイ・プリズン).

The game is set in a semi-alternate society where anyone with a “sex-related” crime is judged “unreformable” and sent to this “Hentai Prison,” a sunless place on an island somewhere unknown.

Our protagonist is an exhibitionist who thinks running naked in public is “art,” refuses to confess after arrest, and is thus also judged “unreformable” and sent to this prison.

Since it’s a “Hentai Prison,” it’s naturally full of all kinds of monsters. After entering, the protagonist just lives quietly, but still gets bullied by the prison’s little cliques. Eventually he manages through various struggles to find a foothold and starts exploring ways to get out…

Honestly, I didn’t finish this game. I originally planned to put it down for a while and come back, since the reviews are so high it’d be a shame not to finish—but from the limited routes I played, I really can’t see what’s so special about it.

Because from the common route onward, the game uses various “Soviet jokes” to hint at its theme:

Through totalitarian control of “hentai crimes,” it reflects society’s control over people’s thoughts and behavior.

By this point I already knew what the ending would be like. First, the protagonist would start a revolution in prison or incite a breakout, then negotiate with the prison authorities. The negotiations would be the usual verbal sparring—stuff like “sexual needs can’t be erased,” “hentai can’t be eliminated,” “so-called hentai behavior isn’t a crime as long as it doesn’t affect others.”

Then I skimmed some spoilers and found my guess was scarily accurate. The game’s progression has no surprises—it’s exactly what I imagined.

Even so, I still couldn’t keep playing, mainly for two reasons. The first is that the game is way too long.

How long? The pacing is so slow it genuinely makes you feel like you’re serving time. I don’t know if that’s meant to create realism or if the writer just had that much to write, but I really wouldn’t recommend anyone spend dozens of hours watching this prison nonsense—especially since the prison content isn’t that realistic either. The labor reform just happens to be at a shipyard, which just happens to let you break out, and there just happens to be a guard who’s related to some prisoner—the setups are way too convenient. And the escape descriptions aren’t anything special either. I remember a bad movie called Escape Plan (not 2 or 3), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stallone—its prison depiction and escape were way more entertaining and exciting than this game. I really don’t understand what positive feedback the player gets from such long, repetitive dialogue with so many reused scenes.

On the contrary, once the game actually starts the escape, the presentation is pretty weak—the pace suddenly speeds up, feeling underbuilt.

I actually think the game’s subject matter isn’t anything new. I could see what the ending wanted to say from the start, and in this kind of near-“assigned essay” plot, the game should make the narrative as tight as possible instead of boringly stretching it out. Besides, you didn’t have the budget for more CGs—a few background images keep swapping back and forth, creating a genuinely oppressive feeling like being in prison. Can’t tell if that’s intentional or not.

The other thing I can’t accept is how directly the game portrays “hentai” and “fetishes.”

As I said at the start, I once thought I was a “hentai”—until I met real “hentai.” The various plays mixed into the Soviet jokes made my jaw drop. Inspecting dicks in a “menstrual police” style really opened my eyes, and there’s constant Fuck-related exposition—say anything and a guard will associate it with some obscure sex-related taboo word I can’t even understand. Plus the protagonist frequently has serious conversations with his own dick, along with the “slimy sound effects” that pop up constantly—it gave me extreme discomfort.

The only thought in my head was: this is too much, isn’t it? Do you really need to go this far?

I understand art needs exaggeration and reprocessing, but this feels close to toilet humor. I don’t know what the point of that processing is.

Maybe this game really isn’t for me. Story-wise, I think it’s nothing new—even templated. Joke-wise, I think it goes “too far.” And presentation-wise, I think it’s way too hardcore, to the point of making me want to vomit.

Maybe this game is “a world only hentai can understand.” Maybe, in the end, I just never became a hentai.