Sapphire Safari Preview

Let’s not beat around the bush (that comes later), when it comes to Sapphire Safari it’s clear that the developer had a vision. What if Pokémon Snap was an open world with monster girls? Well, it’s been in development for a while, so I was curious how things looked on Version 0.21.

Right off the bat, I’ll confirm that you cannot yet have sex with the monster girls. You can choose between playing as Oscar or Jamie, but currently that choice makes no difference. There is a wardrobe in the first camp you find, but it’s non-functional at the moment so you don’t even get to dress up.

Once you’ve activated the first broadcast tower, the only thing left for you to do is take photos of the various monster girls that inhabit the island and activate more towers. If you’re not in range of a tower and you fill up your camera’s 10 spaces, then you cannot take any more photos. Clearly, you left your memory card in your other swimsuit. Your job is to get photos of each inhabitant doing multiple things, such as thinking, playing, sleeping, etc, etc… then upload them to a tower.

You can crouch to sneak around (so that you don’t alert the creatures and make them run), as well as throw pheromone grenades to make them start getting intimate. Quite what that means differs depending on how many monster girls are in range, and whether any are futanari (AKA they have a penis). If they’re alone, they will have some solo fun, but they can also have twosomes, threesomes, or get watched by several others. If they’re not doing what you want them to, you can also chuck a rock to get them to stop, though if you leave them for about 30 seconds they stop by themselves.

At least in this build, the placement of creatures is random, with all of them just in every part of the island. So, it’s pretty easy to fill up your camera without going too far out of your way. I found some caves that seemed to be designed for bee-like monster girls, but in my time with the game I didn’t actually spot any of those. There were also different caves with patches of goo or sludge, but again there were no slime monsters. It’s fairly clear that the developer has some ideas coming, slowly but surely.

Also proving how early in development Sapphire Safari is, optimisation could certainly use some work (my RTX 4070 was running hot on ultra settings), and hardly any of the text actually fits into the text boxes. Sometimes, when bringing the camera up to take a photo, the graphics would be blurry and take at least several seconds to clear up. Oh, and none of the sexual act animations line up.

While the graphics aren’t going to knock your socks off, I have no complaints. The styles all fit together at least, so they’re doing better than some games with a much higher budget. Each monster girl looks unique, and there are multiple types of each one so you’re not looking at the same handful of designs all of the time. I’d also like to congratulate the developer on the fact that the futanari monster girls are realistically proportioned, which is certainly not always the case.

The main letdown is how the Sapphire Safari store pages state that there is full voice acting. The only sounds are some gasps from the monster girls if they spot you, and the music. Voice acting is something that will be in the game, but the developer is advertising it as something that’s already available.

I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on Sapphire Safari as it develops further. It’s showing some promise and is a unique idea in 18+ circles, which automatically perks, err, piques my interest.