人妻姫倶楽部, pronounced "Hitozuma Hime Kurabu", and roughly translated to "Married woman princess club" is an H-game by せきらら (Sekilala) in which the main male character has sex with three "desperate housewives". The "princess" part refers to the fact that all three wives are very rich. G-Collections handled the English release of the game, titled "Hitozuma Hime Club -Secret Wives' Club-", and that's the version I actually played.

The gameplay is new to me, as far as H-games go. Between every encounter, you'll be presented with a screen showing the three girls, and their experience point in various domains, such as "Anus", "Torture" or "Sex Toy". Click on the domain/girl combination you want to level up, and the main character will go through a scene in which he meets up with the girl of your choice, and together perform an action related to the domain. Once the scene is over, the girl will have gained more XP in that particular domain. Although the screen does not make it obvious, there is some sort of hierarchal system to the domain, such that you need to, for example, fully level up "Anus" on Chisato before you can go into the "Shyness" (which I would have translated as "Exhibitionism") and "Personality" (which I would have translated as "Cosplay") domains. If you fully level up all the domains of a particular girl, you unlock two "Extreme Lesson" domains. And if you happen to get just the right distribution of experience over the three girls, you can experience threesome or foursome scenes. The game isn't as simple as tediously levelling everyone one up to max, though, as there is some sort of time limit system (I don't know if you have a fixed amount XP, or if some event triggers the end of the game) after which you will see a one of seven endings, depending on what the experience levels of all the girls are. Every scene you experience will be recorded in the ubiquitous "Memory Gallery", so that if you found one scene particularly erotic, you can just jump to it directly, as opposed to play through the game again to access it.

The game can almost entirely be played with the mouse (i.e. one handed), although there are some menus which require you to use the keyboards escape button to get out of. For the most part, all you need to do is click to move to the next dialog window, and, when the levelling screen shows, to click on the domain you want to experience. There's also the standard "Fast forward through scenes I've already seen" for when you're going through the game multiple times, trying to unlock everything in the memory gallery. The game also has an "auto-forward" mode, which will proceed to the next text of dialog after a small delay without the need for you to click when you're done reading, enabling an almost "zero-hand" game play (you still need to click on which girl/domain pair you want to level up). During the auto-forward mode, mixing waiting for the delay and clicking to when the delay is too long works as expected, and what you'll probably want to do is go ahead and enable auto-mode, and click when you're done reading narration text and/or the male character's dialog (since you'll probably read faster than the delay), and let the delay trigger the next dialog text whenever any of the girls talk. This is because the only texts that is voiced are voiced are the ones spoken by the girl, and because of the unusually long mid-sentence pauses the voice actresses tend to make, you might accidentally think they were done speaking, and click too early. A nice touch, the game engine allows you to "go back" one dialog text, if you accidentally skip something you didn't have time to read, though going back doesn't 'cause the voices to replay. Going back two or more dialog texts, however, is impossible.

The premise of why the lead male character is having sex with three hot Asian girls is as follows: While on a trip to Bali, the lead male encountered a girl named Chisato Takasugi, who asked him to rub suntan lotion on her. One thing led to another and they had sex, and then she promised him that if they ever met again, they would have sex again. Fast forward to the present: the lead male asked his dad to hook him up with a job. His dad introduced him to this rich executive who says his son needs tutoring. When the lead male shows up for the tutoring job, he finds out that the mother of the family is Chisato. Remembering their promise, Chisato agrees to have sex with him, and then later introduces him to two of her friends: Nana Kawasaki and Kagari Oishi. Chisato, being the open person that she is, tells the two about how she and the lead had sex in Bali. The two are envious that Chisato could have sex with such a virile young men, and so they decide to form a club in which the main activity is to have sex.

Having sex with married women is not a fetish I particularly enjoy, and the lead character does occasionally display a sense of guilt over the matter (though he seems to be able to dismiss this guilt much faster than I). As such, it seems like the story was written so as to give you "excuses" as to why it's okay for you to sleep with these women. I haven't fully unlocked Chisato's story, but it seems to imply that she is getting physically abused by her husband. Kagari's husband is old and impotent and uninterested in sex, while Kagari's curiosity about such activities as oral sex, anal sex and tit-fucking are just beginning to bloom. And Nana... well... it looks like with Nana, she's just cheating on the husband, plain and simple.

Given the presence of domestic violence in the story, the female characters do show some depth to them, but ultimately, they are still the three basic stereotypical personae injected into every H-game. Chisato is the aggressive, straightforward, demand-sex-from-you type girl. Nana is the young, flat-chest-Lolita, you-have-to-rape-her-and-she'll-like-it type girl. Kagari is the motherly takes-care-of-everything, has-largest-breasts type girl. Their Love Hina parallels are Naru/Kitsune, Shinobu and Kitsune/Mutsumi respectively.

Before you'll make your levelling up choice, you'll often have a short scene in which you might encounter one of the girls while she's shopping, and she'll often make a comment like "You should come over tonight" or "I can't talk now, I'm with my husband". Whether these are purely random, or some sort "hint system" as to who to pick next, I have no idea, but they do occasionally help build the characters. In one of these pre-choice scenes, we see that Kagari loves children, and the fact that she will never become pregnant from her husband is putting a lot of strain on the relationship, though she puts on a smile and tries to downplay her feelings.

You never actually meet the husbands, and in fact, the only characters who have sprites in this game are the three wives. The sprites are drawn well, although there is a lot of obvious recycling. For example, after Chisato says "Hang on I'm going to change sweaters... Okay, I'm ready!" they'll be using the same sprite (with the same sweater) before and after that dialog text. The engine seems to limit the sprites to being displayed in one of three positions: left, center and right, and the game actually uses this pretty well. Obviously, when all three girls are present, all three slots get filled up. In one scene, when Chisato gets drunk, her sprite sort of stumbles around randomly between the three slots to very nice effect. The transitions between the scenes, are also very beautiful. If this means anything to you, one of the transitions looks like an alpha-mask with a fractal painted on it is slowly cycled through. Unfortunately, when you have sex with one of the girls, they use full screen art rather than sprites, and the quality of the full screen art is significantly less (different artists perhaps?) Most of the art will avoid drawing your penis, and so you'll occasionally see, for example, the girl's vagina mysteriously getting stretched out, as if she were having sex with the invisible man. There were some inconsistencies here too: When I tried levelling "anus" with one of the girl, and she was still very inexperience, we ended up deciding not to go through with the act, and I said "I'll do your ass next time", but the art clearly showed her anus getting stretched by some invisible penis.

Speaking of inconsistencies, there were occasional plot inconsistencies as well. For example, the first time I played through, I tried levelling only Chisato, never interacting with Nana, but in one of the pre-choice scenes, the girls have gathered for some gossip, and Nana claims I had slept with her. I guess the designers expected most players to have tried at least every girl once by that point. There were also a few mistranslation/typos as well, including "The crouch part of her costume" and "roll play". While strange sounding (but grammatically correct) Engrish is common in translated H-games, many are fully able to avoid typographical errors like these. The fact that I only unlocked about half of the scenes and spotted (without actively looking for them) 2 typos does no reflect well on G-Collection.

The music in the game isn't noticeable. However, I have never heard "good" music in an H-game, and I've definitely heard a lot of bad music, so being non-noticeable is above par for these games. The voice acting, which is in Japanese even in the English version of the game, is pleasant. While I can't judge whether the deliveries are "convincing" as my Japanese isn't quite that good, the voice actresses chosen are appropriate for the personalities played. Nana really does sound like she's 12 years old, and Kagari really does sound like Mutsumi from Love Hina.

Overall, the game was decent, with an interesting play system, but the mediocre sex-art makes it a hard H-game to recommend. I didn't like how they surprised me with "Okay, time's up, game over". I had fully expected to be able to just level everyone up, and get to see everything easily. I wish they had provided a warning or something at the beginning that there would be a time limit. However, the voices are sweet, and every now and then a "commercial break" style interlude occurs in which the 人妻姫倶楽部 logo appears, and one of the three girls says "人妻姫倶楽部". Even though I've heard them utter that phrase well into 50 times, I surprisingly never get tired of hearing it. Their voices are that attractive. I give it a 6/10.