Hush Hush - Only Your Love Can Save Them Review

I’ll admit to having played a bunch of Crush Crush a few years ago, a free-to-play idle dating game from developer Sad Panda. So, when Hush Hush - Only Your Love Can Save Them was announced, it immediately grabbed my interest — a visual novel dating sim using characters that I was already familiar with? Yes, please!

Forewarning: the game gives a literal list of spoiler-filled trigger warnings at the start, so if there might be anything that will affect you, I encourage you to give it a read-through. It doesn’t say what will happen to whom, and you may not even encounter some situations in any given playthrough, but it is still spoiler-filled.

As the genderless main character, you win an all-expenses-paid trip to the town of Subrosa, but as the trip nears, you’re visited in your dreams by two beings named Qpernikiss and Thelima who task you with saving the lives of five ladies. How will you save them? By befriending them, of course! And maybe sleeping with one or two of them. Or all five of them. And their friends. Look, you’re on holiday for a month, you have to find something to do — but no, you don’t actually have to have sex at all if you don’t want to! And without the 18+ Uncensored DLC, you won’t even see it if you do.

Every day, you have to do something in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening, with dusk and dawn being used to either increase one of your stats or to do a job to earn some cash. The better your stats, the more dialogue options you open up. Similarly, having more money is always better than having less, especially if you want to experience all of the hilarious exchanges between Lotus and Dimitri at the coffee shop almost every day.

As a fully voiced (in English) visual novel, Hush Hush really shines in the writing and how it’s delivered by the cast. Every character, male and female, has a ton of personality that absolutely dazzles you as it shines through the performances. That’s why it’s so jarring and breaks the immersion when the audio mixing suddenly changes the volume of lines or when it’s super obvious that a pop filter wasn’t used. With the amount of dialogue in the game, there’s little chance that it was all recorded in one sitting for each character, which is why the mixing was so important to get perfect!

While the art is great throughout, it can be a little jarring to go from the CG scenes to the normal visual novel art. Again, it’s not like it’s bad in any way, but it looks different enough to be noticeable. Then there are the super secret special images you can find that I think are tied into the 18+ Uncensored DLC, which are a little blurry. The animated sex scenes — in the DLC — are also blurry, but in a different way because they are full-screen instead of the secret images, which are smaller. They’re not interactive, just a short animation on loop, but it just seems like the game engine struggles with making them smooth?

The main plot of Hush Hush is saving these five ladies, so it might be strange to hear that some of the fun is in failing to do that. There are ways that each character can die, and yes you’re responsible most of the time — not in that you kill them, but your actions (or lack thereof) result in something-something she ate expired pizza and died. As a general example, and not something that definitely happened and got me an achievement and game over…

See, everyone has their secrets, and if you can’t discover these special ladies’ five secrets, you might not be able to save their lives. You might go one or two days before discovering that whatever you decided actually caused a death! There are 20 save slots, and I’m not ashamed of admitting that I saved on a whole bunch of them. Do I respond to this text or not? Shall I go to the beach or home? Lean in for a kiss or more? There are lots of branches in this game, and not all of them have a black-or-white outcome!

Those stats which I mentioned earlier? Well, they fit into two categories: positive and negative. Tech Savvy and Buff are good, Manipulation and Violence are bad. But depending on the situation, it might be beneficial to have a couple of points in a negative stat. There’s no downside to having negative stats, but focusing on those will take time away from focusing on positive ones and vice versa. Every girl likes something different, so while the general advice in dating is to be yourself, not every lady will respond positively to that.

Hush Hush - Only Your Love Can Save Them is a solid game with only a couple of minor issues. The script is great, the actors are fantastic, the art is lovely, and it will take you 12-14 hours to get through. Longer if you want to achievement hunt; there are 39 of them to collect!