There are moments when as a blogger I have to sacrifice myself for the good of the community, moments when I think that there is hard work to do and it is my duty to do it. So when Totem Entertainment, the developers of VR Paradise, the virtual strip club simulator, asked me to review their product, I understood it was one of these moments: it was my duty to do it for the good of all of you. So here you are with my review of this software… hoping that you all will appreciate the effort I did for you.
[Notice: this article is NSFW-ish, because I’m talking about an experience for adult entertainment, but I will never show you too much]
What is VR Paradise?
VR Paradise is a strip club simulator. It is intended to create the same atmosphere and the same opportunities that you can have in a real strip club. Inside it, you can interact with different women, and enjoy different dances. It is available on Steam, where it has a very positive review score.
Gameplay
As soon as you open VR Paradise, you can enjoy the tutorial, that explains briefly what you can do inside the club. Honestly, there is not much to explain, so the tutorial lasts a minute or such, but it is enough to tell you what is the main button to interact with the dancers (weirdly, it is the X button on Oculus Touch and not one of the triggers).
Once you are in the main hall, you have an exact recreation of how is a strip club: half-dressed women everywhere drinking on chairs or walking around, two girls dancing on a pole for everyone to watch, some male visitors, a barman, and some security guards. The environment has red tones because… well, you can imagine it. There is some soothing music in the background.
You can move around the club and have a look around. You can just chill there, watching the girls on the pole, or you can point your controller towards one of the girls that are in the room and press the X button to open a menu to interact with them. The interactions with the environment are pretty limited (you can grab some objects, but then you can do nothing with them, apart from drinking from the full glasses), so very soon you will open the menu to speak with a girl.
In the interaction menu, you will see the name of the girl and you will be proposed to “Call her” or “Offer her a drink”. Let me tell you my experience with these commands. Since I wanted to start things in the most educated way possible, the first time I started VR Paradise, I offered the first girl I met a drink. She said “You’re so charming” (thanks!), sat next to me, grabbed a glass, and drank whatever liquor it was. I so started staring at her waiting for a signal, for a little chat, whatever, but instead, she just started looking at the stage where the other girl was dancing and froze that way. I mean, com’on, I’ve just offered you an expensive drink! Let’s at least talk! Tell me something about your life, or let’s discuss together the Apple Glasses that are going always to release “this year” since 2017! Since LucasArts point-and-click adventures taught me not to surrender with dialogues, I pressed again the X key, but with much disappointment, I saw again the same menu… so I tried to click again the “Offer her a drink” button. She stood up, looked at me (oooh, finally, we’re going to have a chat!), said “You’re so charming” (She didn’t even try to pass The Turing test, just repeated the same sentence…), then sat down again and drank another shot of liquor, always looking somewhere else. I understood that I could have gone on all night doing the same actions, and I would just hear “You’re so charming” while letting her drink until she got cirrhosis of the liver, so I decided to change strategy.
I asked her to dance for me and I was proposed to have a topless dance there or a dance with “full nudity” in private. I said myself “if we have to do it, let’s do it well” and so I found myself teleported in a private room closed by curtains where this girl started dancing in a sexy way while removing her (already almost inexistent) clothes. There was a very long animation, and it was surely done with some motion capture suit because it was very accurate. During the animation she let me see her “full nudity” from all possible angles, invading my personal space almost every time. Not that I was disappointed by all of this, of course.
After the full nudity show ended, I went out the room and I stopped another girl. The menu was the same, and she also found me charming (Turing is crying from the other world for all of this), so I proposed her to make a dance, this time at the table. So I found myself sat down in the table of the club, she did her show showing only “half nudity” and then over.
While I was with the third girl (I had to provide a good service to you of the VR communities, so I had to sacrifice myself trying many girls), I noticed a watch on my left wrist: activating it, a menu proposed me some objects I could use. I started taking a rose, or some champagne bottles, and propose them to the girl dancing for me, but she was so focused on the fact that I was too charming that ignored them. I so threw them in her face, but the objects trespassed completely her body, like if she was a Terminator T-1000. Some other objects were more interesting: I could light up a cigarette and pretend I was smoking; I could grab a money-gun and throw 1-dollar banknotes all over the club (1 dollar because we VR developers are poor, so we don’t throw higher-value banknotes), and then there was a camera. The camera was the most interesting gadget: it was a Polaroid camera that I could use to shoot a photo of the girl, and then that photo got out of the camera and in the meantime got immediately saved in the My Images folder, ready to pop up when I’ll have to show my mother some other images from my PC. This way it is possible to save the shots of the girls that you liked the most.
In the club, there are some other people (e.g. the barman), but the interactions with them are non-existent or limited to a single line of text. So the only things you can do is wandering around, watch the girls, interact with the girls, and pretend you are drinking or smoking. This is what annoyed me the most: while the game conveys a good atmosphere of a strip club, after 15 minutes it becomes always the same. You call a girl, you ask her to “dance”, rinse and repeat. No dialogues with the girls to create a connection, no interaction of the girl with the objects you can use with her (like the money gun), no interactions with other men in the club, and especially no sense of constrained resources and progression. You start that can already see all girls naked, and asking them to show their body doesn’t cost you anything, so you can keep asking all girls in succession until you have seen them all. And while the first one may be interesting, at the 7th one in 20 consecutive minutes, everything starts becoming a bit boring (Imagine the sacrifice I made to see all these digital women naked for you!). There should be more sense of challenge and should be more a way to create a connection with the dancers, otherwise, the game has little replayability.
The initial menu of the game also gives you the opportunity of customizing the number and the type of girls that there are in the club, so that you can basically shape the strip club of your dreams. Some experts in the comments of Steam highlight how they wanted a finer detail of customization, especially of the body of the dancers: I trust the opinion of these fine experts on the matter, and so I also invite the developer to add more customization options.
Graphics
The visual elements of VR Paradise are really well made: the environment, the girls, the liquor bottles… all the assets are high-quality ones. The girls are stunning to be seen and while they look digital (so the body seems made of marble), they are beautiful. I also appreciated a lot the animations of the dances: I think the developers have recorded with a suit some professional dancers, because there are many different sexy dance animations and they are all quite convoluted. Especially the girls dancing on the poles are able to make a great show by moving their body around the pole, turning the head upside-down, and doing other crazy tricks. It seems to be in a real club.
The only thing that has not been re-created well, and that is a bit an immersion-breaking, is the eyes of the dancers. The eyes are very creepy: they look in a direction towards the void and make the girls appear like robo-killers. As soon as you don’t look them in the eyes, everything is great, but when you see their faces, everything becomes disturbing (but here the experts above would remind me that eyes are not the intended place to look in such an experience). The uncanny valley hurts also the VR adult entertainment industry.
Immersion
I think that VR Paradise does a lot to foster the immersion of the user: according to the experts, the experience re-creates the exact same experience of a real strip club if we exclude the smell. And even if I’m not an expert in the field like them, I can recognize that thanks to the soothing music, the red colors, the comfy sofas, the girls spread everywhere, etc… that environment feels really erotic. The girls have believable bodies. When the girls dance in the private dances, they often come towards you and dance with their body close to yours and this enhances the sense of immersion, because it feels like they were doing that thing with you. There are moments when your mind can get really lost and believe you are there in a real strippers club.
But all of this magic is broken as soon as you try to interact with something: the terrible dialogues, the uselessness of the objects in your inventory immediately unveil that you are just in a VR game. The girls don’t interact with you or the objects you have and this is a pity. And then there are the girls’ eyes, the damn eyes…
Comfort
The game is to be played seated, and you move mostly through teleportation, so it is comfortable for everyone to be played. It offers many customization options, so you can change the visuals and the input as you prefer.
Performances
One of the biggest drawback of this game to me has been the performances. I played it with my RTX2060-powered laptop, and I had to reduce the visual quality of the graphical settings and especially remove the screen mirroring otherwise it would become super choppy. Even this way, after some minutes of usage, it started leaking some memory and the framerate dropped a lot. I guess there are things to optimize because the performances on my PC are just terrible.
What about the women?
VR Paradise is meant to be played by men, so there is not the possibility of seeing handsome men doing naked shows. Someone should make a DLC targeted at women, I think.
Price and availability
You can find VR Paradise on Steam for 20€. It is a NSFW content, so you must be 18 years or older to buy it.
Final opinion
I see VR Paradise as a great VR strip-club sandbox. It is visually stunning, the girls are beautiful and it can convey the real sensation of being in an adult club. Also the game is expanding and it is already available a DLC, plus some themed events, like one they did for Halloween with special costumers and such.
But to become a real strip-club simulator and not just a sandbox, it has to work more on the interactions, in letting you interact with the girls and develop a relationship with them, maybe also adding a progression system with some challenges that increment the replayability of the game. Since many people made the same complaints, I hope that the developer is already working on this.
(Header image by Totem Entertainment)