Anime Girl or Bottle? (PC)

Since time immemorial, no one has ever come close to mistaking an anime girl for a bottle, and this game titled after such a nonexistent quandary does not aim to change that. Anime Girl or Bottle? is obviously a joke, the kind of game title you see and laugh because it’s hard to believe such a game exists, but there is a complete and utter lack of follow-through on the concept. The humor ends when the game begins, meaning that only enjoyment you can expect to get from this game is by looking at the Steam store page.

There are two modes of play, neither really having a lot of substance to them, but the one that is based around the title is certainly the meatier one in the same way that an animal bone that hasn’t been picked clean by the vultures yet has more meat on it. There are 20 levels, and your goal in every one of them is to click on the faces of anime girls within the time limit. The disembodied heads of these young women make no effort to look like the green bottles they share space with, and since all of them are contained within distinct pink circles, there’s never any overlap or ambiguity in where you need to click. This does mean the focus remains purely on telling the difference between them, but even with the green haired girl or the one with a thinner head, there’s no way you’ll mistake it for the light green bottle that is clearly separate in its shape. If you do click on a bottle, that will make you lose the level, although clicking on it will never be because of a mistaken identity. Over time there will be more and more bottles and anime girls in the stages, all affixed to a grid pattern so you won’t have to worry about interesting or unique variations. The free DLC stages do at least try something different, breaking away from the grid design to have bottles and girl heads where they please but still without any overlapping so the two remain hard to mistake for each other.

Perhaps so far some of the vitriol in this coverage might seem misplaced since the only real flaw thus far is a lack of imagination. The visuals are created with the least amount of effort and there’s only one song being drilled into your head the whole experience, but these elements was where Anime Girl or Bottle? really needed to succeed, because the gameplay itself is the true disaster. Had any thought gone into the extra elements it could have been more aesthetically pleasing or been a valid challenge thanks to tough arrangements, but the difficulty in this game is not tied to player skill. Rather, Anime Girl or Bottle? is best described as a hardware test. Since you need to click on the anime girls within a time limit, the developers tried to make this more than a foregone conclusion by paring down the timers to the absolute minimum amount they can be, no level ever exceeding nine seconds. There are, in fact, levels with as few as two seconds to click on every anime girl on screen, and some of these are the later levels where there are multiple faces to click. It’s not difficult to find them all and know which order to click them to fit in these time limits, but from there, the real question of the game should be How Well Does Your Mouse Work?

If your mouse is able to move across the screen quickly, Anime Girl or Bottle? might take seconds to complete even when you include the 10 less challenging but slightly more diverse DLC levels. If your mouse isn’t up the task though, you might ram yourself against the 2 second levels trying to make it register that you are moving towards the heads in time. This swing from potentially too easy to bother with to frustratingly tight means there is pretty much no level of mouse sensitivity or functionality that makes the game enjoyable. It’s not hard to see where the developers might have thought such a limited amount of time for a simple task could make this a reflex or speed challenge, but save those unfamiliar with mouse cursors, this doesn’t really stand to serve as a legitimate challenge. The timer is too tight for those who could struggle with it and not enough of a factor for those who won’t. The bottles, in essence, are mines for a mouse to accidentally click if it didn’t read your movement well, but they’re bottles for a completely arbitrary reason rather than something like an explosive or skull that would communicate their nature as ending a level if clicked accidentally.

There are a few more little problems with play that ensure things won’t go smoothly. To restart a level, either after a failure or when you need to start things again when you realize there’s no time to click all the girls, you need to press R. Despite making no use of the right click function, you will need to move a hand to the keyboard to click it, and due to tight timers, you might even want to start levels hammering R over and over until you’ve seen where everything is. Even when you do beat a level, your only reward is a mostly empty pink screen with one of the smug young anime girls with improper cropping on her image appearing beneath the words YEP! WIN! Oddly enough, the timer in the game isn’t as precise as it may seem, as there were more than a few times where I saw a failure screen and victory screen at the same time, the two glitching to appear together but thankfully still counting as a win, although the only way victories are tracked is by way of Steam achievements since you can select any level at any time. If the underwhelming YEP! WIN! hadn’t been enough on its own, having a false failure message obscure it only makes it a stranger “reward” for just barely beating these glorified mouse sensitivity tests.

The other mode in Anime Girl or Bottle? is far less aggravating, if only because it’s got too little going on in it to be upset about. The Collect Bottle mode has you move with the keyboard as you take on the form of a silver-haired anime head. Despite there being multiple types of anime girls in the other mode, only silver-hair is playable here, and her sole purpose in life is to drift into bottles to collect them. The bottles will appear on a plain pink background, your timer shown in the top left and your accumulated score in the top right. The timer here, in a strange change of pace, is far too generous. Starting at a reasonable 20 seconds, you have to try and collect as many bottles as you can despite the game not saving your high score. However, any time you pick up a bottle, you’ll be granted around 2 seconds of bonus time, and since multiple bottles can appear on screen at a time and your sluggish drift actually can get to them fairly well, if you are even just slightly trying you’ll inevitably never run out of time. The bottles also only spawn in at set locations, so even if you can’t catch one before it disappears, you can pretty comfortably guess where the next one might appear and just sit there. In fact, sitting at the right spot can make it hard to lose once you’ve built up enough time to burn on the passive strategy.

There is no endgame to Collect Bottle mode. Despite it taking quite a bit of time to even reach 100 despite your advantages, I went up to over 1000 and still never saw any change in difficulty or a way to wrap the game up, although considering the main mode also has no proper ending this isn’t much of a surprise. Really, the second mode being here at all is the bigger surprise, because despite being utterly boring, it did require the developers to do something besides just place bottles and faces on a grid.

THE VERDICT: Yes, Anime Girl or Bottle? is a joke and the mere fact it exists is the punchline. Unfortunately, there still has to be a game for there to be a joke that such a game exists, and neither the clicking of girl heads or collecting of bottles manages to make this an experience worth having. Both modes are definitely the laziest way to achieve their ideas, with a small pool of boring assets for the visuals, no animation, and the difficulty either being entirely absent or coming from an unengaging time limit. Your mouse’s sensitivity will determine if the clicking levels are the easiest thing ever or unnecessarily hard, and the bottle collecting game is functionally endless since it can only be lost once you’ve stopped trying, with neither mode having any effort put into it to be compelling as you play. Anime Girl or Bottle? is unfortunately all name and no game.

And so, I give Anime Girl or Bottle? for PC…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Anime Girl or Bottle? is a 99 cent joke, and it is a pretty decent joke when told rather than played. The absurdity of the idea is the point, but pretty much all the humor is gone once you actually boot up the game. Save the small bit of humor coming from the slapdash design and some odd choices like saying YEP! WIN! when a level is complete, everything else is basically there just so the game can classify itself comfortably as a game despite having no valuable gameplay ideas to offer. The timer has been shaved down in a weak attempt to make things difficult, but get your mouse working right and the anime girl clicking is a pushover. The bottle collecting on the other hand would be incredibly hard to fail at even with a broken keyboard, the bottle placement too predictable, time bonuses too generous, and the player basically unable to fail unless they try to.

Ghost_RUS Games’s business model seems to be making incredibly cheap games with weird titles like Fidget Spinner in Space and Putin vs ISIS, and when you’re throwing games out there to sell based only on their title, the actual substance is irrelevant. So long as it vaguely matches the promise of the name then many people will just accept that it’s a joke game rather than something to be played seriously. Still, the game that backs up this particularly strange title is undeniably awful, so once one does look at it as a game rather than a funny sequence of four words and a question mark, there’s nothing left to enjoy.