FlipWitch: The Forbidden Sex Hex Review

Flip your sex and get jiggly!

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FlipWitch: The Forbidden Sex Hex Review
Platform: PC
Developer: Momo Games and Critical Bliss
Publisher: Critical Bliss

FlipWitch: The Forbidden Sex Hex immediately fell on my radar about two and a half years ago. A TSF themed Metroidvania with gorgeous pixel art is lowkey a dream game for me, or at the very least a merging of three of my interests all in one. I initially played the title when it launched on November 18, 2023, and while I enjoyed it, I held off on writing a review because, well, FlipWitch had some launch jank and general quality of life issues. Before I even played the game, developer/publisher Critical Bliss announced “quality of Life changes to make the game the best that it can be in the long term.” Along with “additional content and free DLC as well.”

This put me into an awkward yet familiar scenario for any modern game reviewer. Should I review this as it is now, based on my own personal experience, or should I wait until the vaguely defined updates make the game better? I decided on the latter, hoping that the game would be updated in the coming months, perhaps year, and that the developer/publisher would maintain a chain of communication.

…As of writing, it’s been over a year and a half since the last update and two years since its release, so I think I’m safe going back to this game and giving it the review I should have given it two years ago.

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Part 1: Is FlipWitch A Good TSF Game?

Let’s start with the narrative elements. The premise of FlipWitch is as follows. The vaguely defined world is currently being tormented by a Chaos Witch who has spread her influence about and sealed herself in a castle locked by six keys. The only one who can stop her is the FlipWitch, a powerful witch with the ability to flip her sex on a whim. The current FlipWitch, Beatrix, is retired, but has been training up an unnamed protégé to replace her, unlock the powers of a FlipWitch, and save the world. It’s predictable, formulaic, but it gets the job done and gives room for the narrative to focus on other things. …At least in theory.

The broader story, mythos, and history of FlipWitch‘s world is told via NPCs and side quests, of which there are dozens. You have animal people, goblins, ghosts, cultists, a robot sex worker, and regular sexy human people with well-endowed features. However, they mostly function as vehicles for small humorous vignettes that culminate in brief sex scenes. A fair enough concept bolstered by humorous dialogue— most of which I cannot show because it was not captured in my screenshots— and certainly sufficient for something meant to lean into a sex scene.

I’m not really criticizing the game for this. It’s primary goal is to be a Metroidvania filled with monster girl sex scenes, and while I think the scenes are a bit too brief to be titillating, it does its job. I cannot really ask for much more than what it does. There is enough narrative substance around these for them to suffice as rewards. However, my criticisms come back to the fact that this is a TSF, or Trans-Sexual Fantasy, or genderbending, or TG game at the end of the day. And as a long-standing outspoken TSF enthusiast, I have a bone to pick with how this game handled the subject matter.

There is no singular way one needs to tell a TSF story, but they generally need to apply a level of significance to the transformation at hand. This can be by making it an involved and visually striking process, showing an emotional reaction to the transformation, or generally have the protagonist view this change to their body with significance. The protagonist of FlipWitch is more of a vessel than a character, they don’t form any meaningful relationships with anyone other than their sensei. They don’t react to their newfound powers of gender fluidity with curiosity, enthusiasm, or much of any fanfare. They don’t react to much of anything outside of sex scenes and locked doors.

So, if the protagonist does not really react to changing sex, and the transformation is handled via the power of poof TF, then why bother making this a TSF game, rather than a more general erotic fantasy game? It’s definitely not for any clear thematic reason, as there is no clear indication of why the FlipWitch is so powerful, or why they would be opposed to the Chaos Witch. There’s nothing orderly about gender fluidity. The act of going around and having sex with everything with a libido, sapience, phallus, or a penis-accommodating orifice, is chaotic as hell.

Instead, I think the reason why this is a TSF game is more of a gimmick, a matter of convenience. It’s a justification to have a singular protagonist who can be involved in girl on girl, boy on girl, and girl on boy sexual antics— though, rarely ever boy on boy. And a means of letting the player play as a bouncy big-boobed witch or a wizard who… is just some dude in a black T-Shirt.

In case that last line was not enough of an indicator, it needs to be said that this game is very specific in how it distinguishes characters based on gender. Pretty much every female character in the game has the same basic body type. Youthful features, with massive boobs, wide hips, a big ass, and thin waistline. From bosses to NPCs to random enemies to the protagonist, to be female is to fit a standardized shape, only deviated with animalistic components and coloration.

Male characters, by comparison, come in all sizes short and tall. Goblin women are just green supermodels, but goblin men are giant nosed little imps with critter-like features. Or, alternatively, goblin men are bulked up hulks with giant clubs who come in both the swole and fat varieties, both sporting a nose so large it looks like a beak.

This is by no means a new phenomenon, but is well worth noting in a game about sex— in pretty much every sense of the word. However, despite supporting a good level of diversity in what male characters can be, the game is fairly chaste when it comes to depicting the male form of the protagonist. The female form is a bouncy bunny, a covergirl with breasts that double as perpetual motion machines and a wide variety of hairstyles. She is meant to be sexy, from tip to toe, and every costume she has is effectively a sexy Halloween costume. While the male form is… some skinny dude (with abs) who wears a wide variety of costumes that mostly occupy the silly little goober end of the spectrum.

The female form dresses up like a sexy shrine maiden, complete with a skirt, cat ear hair, leggings, and bells at the side of her head. It’s a deliberate design and, while a tad gauche in my book, is executed with a clear vision behind it. Around the same time this outfit is unlocked, the male form can get a farmer outfit. But rather than becoming a buff shirtless dude in overalls, with a straw hat— or whatever they put on women’s calendars these days— he’s just some guy in a yellow T-shirt, yellow wristbands, a bandana tied around his head, and green shorts.

He just looks like some dude. When wearing the goblin or pigman costume, he looks like a twink in a costume. And despite knowing that Beatrix is a FlipWitch, she never transforms herself into a man, in a move that honestly feels like a cop-out. Because we can’t put a sexy old man in our game!

This leads me to the conclusion that the developers were reluctant to let the player control a sexy man. I’d ask why, but I think the answer is, boringly, the fact that that might not agree with assumed heterosexual male audience this game was made for. A lot of hetero men are insecure with their sexuality, and while they may be fine with seeing buffed up hypermasculine guys as enemies, they don’t like the idea of switching from playing as a sexy woman to a sexy man. It’s the same logic that leads a lot of erotic content for me to focus squarely on the woman, or primarily represent the man as a penis.

On an artistic level, I think this is a bad choice that undermines what this game can do and undermines the fact that the protagonist is a woman who turns into a man. So, in theory, her male form should be modeled after female sexual fantasies. But erotic art like this needs to consider the commercial aspect, and based on projected sales figures saying the game possibly sold over 100k units on Steam alone, they did something right.

However, as a TSF enjoyer, I cannot help but find this portrayal to be underwhelming on both fronts. Female forms are portrayed with shockingly little variety, with conservative sexy as the default. And when it comes to male forms, they are either overly sexualized or barely sexualized until they get their pants off. There’s little in the way of textual substance about what it is to be someone who shifts between sexes other than… people see them differently and may be more inclined to have sex with them. It’s a disappointingly blasé approach to the subject matter.

I love looking into what a TSF work does, how it explores the genre, but here? …It’s pretty much just a nameless girl who sometimes turns into a guy running around and having sex with a bunch of monster people.

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Part 2: Is FlipWitch A Good Metroidvania?

Okay, okay, so I do not think FlipWitch is a particularly good TSF game, but is it a good game? …Yeah, I’d say so. A solid little 7/10 search action platformer that plays well, has a good number of unique locales and bosses, has plenty of upgrades to collect, and lasts 8 to 10 hours for a 100% playthrough. Which is just long enough to feel substantial without getting long in the tooth. However, there are many design considerations that I want to address as, while it’s a good game at the end of the day, it’s also a curiously balanced affair.

Now, it’s hard for me to talk about anything FlipWitch does without mentioning Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight (2016). An acclaimed pixel-based Metroidvania that came out around the beginning of the recent Metroidvania boon, and one that features a lot of overlapping elements with FlipWitch. Namely, melee combat with a single main weapon where a three-hit combo propels the protagonist forward. A chargeable projectile weapon and dodge roll that the player is expected to make liberal use of. Upgradable healing items that are replenished at any save point— just like in Dark Souls. A strong fixation on female characters and also monster girls. And several boss encounters with a giant boob lady. There are even several art style similarities one could draw.

I am not bringing this up to say that Momo Games was ripping off developer Bombservice. I’m saying that sometimes inspiration is as clear as day, and frankly I don’t blame them. Game design is a LOT easier when you have clear and direct influences you can point at, and I don’t have any problem with imitations. Hell, if anything, we need more imitations! …But when taking inspiration from other games, it is important to copy the right elements of the design, and never blindly imitate something.

For example, the three-hit combo— the core that combat is built around— has a nasty habit of propelling the protagonist into enemies, where they will often damage, especially with larger bosses. I get that it looks cool, but it makes the jumping strike far more reliable whenever dealing with spikes or narrow platforms. Which there are a lot of. FlipWitch’s magical star projectiles are just as if not more powerful than the arrows in Momodora, can be charged up, but often feel a bit too powerful in how some enemy AI cannot understand what a projectile is. Because enemy AI is kind of stupid, either rushing for the player sooner than they should or staying back, letting them take potshots.

Movement in general is on the floatier end of things, likely to complement the fluid animations, and this can make certain platforming challenges tricky. Character movement is fine, but it rarely feels like I was in 100% control of the protagonist. It’s a bit hard to pinpoint a lot of consistent examples, but some clash with the game’s level design— like the slippery turning— while jumping in general doesn’t always feel consistent.

There are dozens of points in the game where I had to repeat jumps because I needed to trigger the double jump at the exact peak of the primary jump. While the unlockable jumping dash never worked consistently for me. Maybe because I was using a controller, or because I was moving in a certain way that messed with the game’s logic. And, for some reason, the game combines its jump and roll into a rolling jump when pressing both buttons. Except it combines them in slightly different ways depending on how the buttons were pressed. I don’t know why, but once I discovered this, I kept doing this compulsively. Also, when you press the jump button in cutscenes, the protagonist will start their jump animation which… how? Why?

Level designs in FlipWitch are generally pretty good. Environments are laid out to provide branching paths that lead to secrets. There are often shortcuts unlocked in conjunction with warp locations. Rooms generally don’t have too many enemies or platforming challenges making traversal or backtracking fairly seamless. And improved mobility options can trivialize what were once obstacles in earlier areas— which is a good thing.

However, enemy placement is a bit more contentious, often feeling like a rough draft, and limited by how simple their behavior is. This is something that I thought whenever I saw enemies that rush the player as they go up a ladder, not giving them any time to react or move before taking damage. When I entered a new room only to be met with two projectile enemies with different movement patterns. Or any time I ran into those flying enemies with homing attacks who loved to attack while they were off-screen.

I am tempted to say that subweapons are meant to counter these measures, but they really aren’t. Unlike the basic projectile, the subweapons use mana and are one of the main things you can buy in this game— aside from costumes. However, the way they are used makes them tactilely impractical outside of boss encounters. To use subweapons, you need to hold down the projectile button, fully charge it, then press the melee button to activate it. This… feels terrible. You are using two buttons with existing functions to perform a third different function— to use a different weapon— and need to wait several seconds before every use.

In boss battles, this means the optimal way to deal out damage is to use melee strings while holding down the projectile button so that the subweapon is used during your melee combo. And when traveling throughout most areas… you don’t want to charge your projectile, because pressing melee triggers the subweapon. I guess that’s one way to prevent players from charge carrying…

All of this could be avoided by… just giving this command a dedicated button on the controller, and there is. Instead, the developers dedicated this button to an interact function. This makes sense from a certain perspective, but I cannot get over how they could have just made up or W the interact button. It has worked for a slew of platformers in the past and is intuitive enough!

This simultaneously undermines the role subweapons play, by making them a pain in the butt to use, but subweapons in general have a bit too much variety for their own good. You really only need them as consistent damage dealers, and while the developers got creative with them, there’s a reason why my arsenal only consisted of the tutorial bombs and the horizontal laser beams. Because they deal good, consistent damage, and that is the only thing they need to do! Well, that and aid in navigation, in a one of the more confusing moves. (More on that in a bit.)

Jumping back to what I was saying about boss battles, there are generally two flavors. The major dungeon ending boss battles typically are some flavor of giantess with giant exposed boobs that need to be struck repeatedly as they dispense projectiles. Bullets, falling objects, area of effect spells, and assorted other obstacles that must be rolled through and leapt over while maintaining DPS. They are densely packed microcosms of everything the core gameplay expects of the player, with minor gimmicks for variety and large enough health pools to make them decent challenges, especially as you learn the patterns.

The other variety tends to involve mobile large enemies who pursue and attack the player throughout a room. These are effectively the minibosses of the game and while they have more variety in some respects, they also tend to be a lot simpler with their patterns and easier to dispatch, often preferring melee strikes, or feature less intuitive patterns. With the cloaked boss in the haunted castle being a particular bother. Still, they sufficiently break up the pace, are seldom challenging enough to be a wall, and are almost guarding some manner of goodie, even if sometimes it is a key. Or, worse, a key to get another key.

Ultimately, I do like the boss battles quite a bit, and even consider them something of a highlight of this game, requiring more strategizing and featuring more unique patterns. It really makes me wish that the game was updated with some flavor of boss rush mode, as these are elaborately animated set pieces that offer a decent level of challenge and strategy. So being able to immediately show them, or try battling them with new toys, would have been a great post-launch feature. Same with a hard mode in fact, as the normal difficulty may be a bit too breezy for some, especially on a second playthrough. Alas, we never got either of those things.

As a transformation game, it’s no surprised that there are supplemental transformations in FlipWitch, but their implementation is a bit… curious. The protagonist becomes a demon during their jumping dash move, and they become an angel while performing their triple jump. They are natural extensions of the characters’ movesets, and they only shift between them for a few frames. However, they also have ghost and slime forms that are activated using the subweapon system. Meaning you need to charge the projectile attack, use the melee attack button, to assume a new form. Because that makes sense!

However, the ghost form is only used to dash through dense brambles, unable to attack. While the slime form is a glorified crouch crawl, letting the protagonist sift through pipes, but is unable to even jump. …So, why are these dedicated forms, rather than something contextually activated? You don’t really need to roll in the early game, so why not change the animation and replace the roll with a ghost dash? And for the slime… double tapping down could be a decent enough trigger.

Oh, but then there’s the titular mechanic of FlipWitch, sex flipping. A concept that could lead into a sort of dual character gameplay system, but… doesn’t. Witch or wizard, the character moves, jumps, and attacks exactly the same, with no mechanical differences beyond the sex-specific obstacles, which I would compare to Outland (2011) or Ikaruga (2001), at least in concept.

Switching sex changes how blocks move, changes which blocks appear, changes which direction blocks rotate, which laser barriers you can walk through, and whether or not the player is immune to certain attacks. It is not a bad mechanic, but it often feels like the developers had a very limited number of ways to use it. You really only need to switch when the game tells you to switch, and can play 90% of the game in your preferred form. Which… sure, but doesn’t that undermine the mechanic that this game is literally named after?

Another element of ‘transformation’— if you can even call it that— are the nine additional costumes for the male and female forms. As I said previously, these range from dorky little boy outfits and sexy girl Halloween outfits, but they are essential parts of playing through the game, assuming you care about upgrades.

While mobility upgrades are static and required for progression, players can upgrade their healing peach inventory and base attack power by completing side quests. Side quests sometimes just involve deliveries or relaying information, but the most common one involves wearing the right outfit when interacting with an NPC. From a cultist with a thing for dominatrices to someone who needs a postman to deliver a letter to entering a pigmen exclusive club.

This is a fine enough progression system, but the game designers ran into a problem with how to distribute these costumes, ultimately deciding to lock the majority of them behind a shop. More specifically a specific NPC in a specific location. Meaning that if you don’t have enough money to buy a costume from an NPC, you need to backtrack to them. A task that teeters between trivial to a pain in the rear. Oh, and this same issue applies for subweapons.

I would ask why these shops need to exist and the items cannot just be scattered throughout the game world, but I think the answer comes back to an age-old game development question. How do you get the player to actually defeat enemies in their way and not just run past them? EXP and/or money drops. So, they made enemies drop money upon defeat and hid all the good stuff behind shops. Not only costumes, but features like being able to magnetically attract money drops, the ability to get more money per kill, and recovering a bit of health with each enemy kill. (All of which make for a far more enjoyable play experience.)

This system sounds sensible, but what about the minor collectibles that define most Metroidvania? Well, there are two main collectibles. 40-something silver coins that are used to get a sexy gachapon GIF at one of the few gachapon shops around the main hub area. And chests full of… money. Yep. Something you could easily just grind or farm if you are dedicated enough, and if you want to get everything, light farming is mandatory! While the chests have money, it’s not a lot of money. Like 50 or 100 gold or something, with a subweapon or costume starting at 500 gold. Why 500 gold? Because it’s a nice round number!

All of which is to say that the upgrade economy of FlipWitch is… not very good. I understand it in the broad strokes, but I think the game would be better without shops, without money, and with ultimately fewer collectibles. It would remove the grind, have players prioritize survivability over farming, and make it easier, in theory, to keep track of what they need, as the collectible count would go down to a respectable 90-ish. (Because of the silver coins.) However, the reality of game development, of asset creation, means that when you implement a feature like this, you’re kind of stuck with it.

And I think that’s much of my takeaway from FlipWitch. It is an admirable effort, does a lot right, and the core fundamentals of making a solid action platformer are all here. However, it is also the debut game from a small main development studio, co-developed by a niche erotic game publisher. The fact that these are all… C-tier nitpicky type problems and the core of the game is as good as it is damn impressive. It’s not the crème de la crème of the Metroidvania genres, but the fact that the core of the game is good is an achievement worth celebrating.

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Part 3: FlipWitch is Quite Pretty

One of the things that immediately gave me confidence in FlipWitch, as a project, was its presentation, showing off some truly gorgeous sprite work in both its character animations and backgrounds.

Character animations are fluid, fit the fast-paced nature of the action combat, and do oodles to give life to each character. The three hit combo never gets old due to its deliberate animation and carefully timed impact. Enemies pop and flash upon getting smacked or struck. And every new enemy comes with a new set of animations to help them stand out, granting them far more personality even if they are effectively reskins.

Sprites are big enough to fully capture a distinct design, yet still compact enough to feature an endearing level of abstraction. They are cartoony enough to make the sexual content seem silly rather than overbearing or gauche. Which is important because otherwise all of the breast jiggle animations would be too distracting.

Environments are vividly detailed and layered in a manner that is simply impressive for a smaller-scale indie game. Every area has its own personality and sights of splendor tucked behind rocky tiles, creating the sense of space without compromising readability. Tilesets, while clearly used, are overlaid naturally and paired with enough variation to mask their usage. Well, unless it’s warranted, like in a castle or dense cavern. And there is a surprising number of bespoke assets that don’t need to be there, specifically in the hub area of Spirit City, yet do a lot to enhance the sense of place.

I also need to talk about the erotic animations. These are a reward upon completing side missions throughout the game and are exclusively sexual in nature. The protagonist fucks, gets fucked, or bears witness to a sex scene involving some guy/girl. Always paired with a good enough erotic monologue to set the scene.

Personally, I find these scenes to be a bit too light in substance and variation to be exciting. They are basically captioned sex GIFs. But I can recognize the appeal these would have to a certain audience. They are well animated, present a wide variety of sexual positions and monster girl species, and are supplemented by both a series of game over screens of the protagonist fucking or getting fucked and… just gacha sex GIFs.

I respect these as an addition, though I have to say that these animations brush upon a gripe of mine. Rather than be animated as pixel art, these animations look like they were traditionally animated and then converted into pixel art. The way outlines shift with each frame, occasionally breaking or generating artifact that really shouldn’t be there, to me, these indicate that the animations were in some way down sampled to give it a pixel art look, but the illusion isn’t quite there. It feels like it is not using the medium of pixel art as well or as fully as they should, and this approach comes off as somewhat at odds with the lavish approach taken with the characters, backgrounds, and general effects work.

It does not look bad, but I kept thinking about how I’d rather see the original animation export, before its low res conversion.

Also, they needed more backgrounds, as every erotic scene takes place in a forest, even those that take place in Heaven, Hell, and deep within the sea. They could have just had these scenes take place in a black void, but I guess that would be too easy?

Then there is the soundtrack, which is simply DOPE. The artist, under the alias of Momojams, delivered a soundtrack full of jazzy electronic bangers, track so good that a few that have been popping up in my head sporadically over the past two years, despite not having listened to the soundtrack in full until sitting down to write this review. And now that I have, I can safely say, it goes HARD! Give it a listen for yourself.

Unfortunately, the soundtrack suffers slightly from a common balancing problem, where certain themes are only used in one boss or room, and it’s easy to just not hear them in full before the game moves on. Other themes, you hear dozens and dozens of times while exploring an area.

Taken as a whole, this game’s presentation is impressive. The artists and composer put their all into this, delivered something gorgeous. While they could have cut corners, written this off as a project as something they wouldn’t get to include in a portfolio, they truly went all out and made something that still impresses me as I’m gathering screenshots for this review.

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Conclusion

So, those are my thoughts on FlipWitch. It does not use its sex flipping to great effect. It’s weirdly reserved in depicting the allure and sexual appeal of the male and female sex beyond a fairly narrow spectrum. As a Metroidavania, it works well and has mostly good fundamentals, but bears the strain of the first project of a small studio and features several questionable design decisions. Oh, and the game, as a whole, is very pretty, paired with a bumping soundtrack.

I wish that it did some things differently, or just a bit better, and I hoped that future updates would be enough to revitalize the game to better align with what I wanted from it. But that time appears to have come and gone, and what I’m left with is… still a good and thoroughly fun game, but one that does not quite capture everything it could have been. Still, I more than admire it for trying, for pursuing this vision, and hope that this will, somehow, some way, go on to inspire future creators. …Or that the developers will return with a bigger and better sequel. Who knows!