I’m ashamed to admit I’m something of a connoisseur of clicker games. I’ve played tons of them on both PC and mobile platforms, and I’ve seen just about everything the genre has to offer. They’re generally good for about as long as it takes for the progression to disappear into a haze of ever-increasing numbers that are so large they become small, where only suffixes tell you the difference between trillions and quadrillions (be it cookies, damage, eggs, money, whatever), but the actual clicks and effort required to get from one milestone to the next remains the same, or (more usually) increases.

HunieCam Studio turns all that on its head, and provides probably the best clicker game experience I’ve ever encountered. It does this by imposing a time limit on play, and making the game about repeated playthroughs to beat your high score, with a lot of flexibility in how you attempt to do so. This immediately raises HCS head and shoulders above its competition, by removing the progression problems fundamental to the genre. It does give you the option to keep playing your save should you so choose, but at 21 days, it cuts you off and gives you a score and some tokens you can use to unlock more outfits and hairstyles for the girls you’ve recruited.

As a woman, I was worried that I might have issues with the treatment of women in this game. A part of me finds the mechanics of the game pretty repugnant, but at the same time, I’m somehow okay with it due to the tone. The game is clearly aiming for maximum silliness (as much as possible, given the subject matter), and similar to HuniePop, I find it easier to swallow as a result. It’s not even as if the game skirts around the issues. Rather, the very mechanics of the game encourage dividing up women like cattle into different earning categories, using them and discarding them according to the cold needs of your business.

For instance, I recruited a 5 talent / 5 skill girl (btw this is a mistake, do not do this, they are WAY too costly). I thought I might use her maxed out talent and existing fan base as a springboard, but it ended up not being profitable to have her do camming at all. The only way her massive earnings weren’t immediately eaten up by her hourly wage was to send her out for escort work (which is 12x faster). At first, I gave her a condom, which got used up quickly. I didn’t have any spare girls to go rifling through the shop looking for more condoms, and it chafed me having her sitting there drinking and smoking through my stockpiles earning nothing, so I sent her back for more escort work, and within 2 or 3 clients, she caught full-blown AIDS. Since it’s incurable, my choice was clear: I removed her from my stable. So sorry, thems the breaks, we have to let you go. Now there’s a used-up lady with AIDS sitting out there somewhere, probably working fast food, her looks now wasted in the industry best suited for them.

If you stop and think about how this is an actual thing that happens to women in the sex industry every day, it’s incredibly depressing. I don’t really have a great defense of this kind of content, other than to say the game clearly knows exactly what it is, and is aiming to simply be silly fun, and you probably shouldn’t think about it too much. Not every game gets a pass based on this kind of “it’s just a game” hand-waving, but somehow, HCS nails exactly the right atmosphere and tone to get away with it. I’m glad that it does, because as I said before, this is probably the best clicker game you’ll ever play.

So, let’s talk about the girls and the mechanics. Your goal in HCS is to run a stable of sex workers with the aim of achieving the highest possible number of fans for your company. In order to do this, you click and drag the various girls in your group to the buildings found in town, each of which consumes a certain amount of the girl’s time and returns some result, be it money, fans, style, talent, an item, booze, cigarettes, or a new recruit. Performing these activities raises the girl’s stress level, and when it’s maxed, they can’t do anything until they relax, which is done by dropping them off at the spa. Completing a task at a building that gives resources will queue those resources up on the building itself.

Clicking and holding on a building first collects any resources queued for pickup, and if there are none, advances time for all the girls at that building, shortening the amount of time they spend on the task. This doesn’t impact the reward, which stays the same. One of the first upgrades you can buy (all of which are the usual clicker staples like making clicks more impactful or other passive bonuses of some kind) will automate picking up resources on a timer, which helps speed things along.

Since your goal is to amass as many fans as possible, you would think that dropping girls off at the photo studio (which gives fans) would be the best route to take. However, the girls must be paid for their time, and photo shoots don’t generate income, so you’ll need to have them do cam shows or work as escorts in order to generate revenue for the business. This is why I call the girls “sex workers” instead of “cam girls”, because they work as strippers, escorts, and sexy photo models in addition to the cam shows.

Each girl has several stats that determine her characteristics, mechanically. Girls will have 2 fetishes they cater to by default. For example, Nikki (a character from HuniePop) has Glasses and Huge Tits. Additional fetishes can be added by giving the girls certain accessories, like cat ears (for the furries) or a cake (to fart on, of course, what else?). Fans the girls bring to your organization will be distributed according to the fetishes they cater to, though I’ve yet to grasp the subtleties of how to use this system to its full potential.

Girls also have Style and Talent. Style determines how many fans they gain by doing photo shoots, whereas Talent determines the income they get per fan, from doing cam shows. These can be raised by shopping for clothes, and working as a stripper, respectively. Higher levels are better, but come with dramatically increased hourly wages, especially if both Style and Talent are raised. This makes it much better to maintain cam show earners with high Talent, separately from your photo shoot fan recruiters with high Style. It’s also beneficial to have at least one girl with 1 of each stat, to run errands cheaply. It’s a waste to pay a strong earner like a hundred bucks to run to the store for more smokes, after all.

Many of the girls depend heavily on alcohol and tobacco to get through their working days, consuming your stocks at different rates from not at all to nearly constantly based on their level of addiction. There are accessories that can curb their needs, but of course the tradeoff is that supplying an alcoholic with a never ending barrel of wine means you can’t give her that extra fan/fetish boost from farting on cakes or what have you.

STDs are a huge risk and problem. They can only be contracted by working as an escort (no getting herpes from an unsterilized stripper pole in this game), and they impact a girl’s working ability in various ways. Some are incurable, but even curable STDs require Antibiotics, an item gained sometimes from rummaging randomly through the adult store where you get your other accessories, and take 3 precious days to cure the infection. They’re the largest limiting factor on your use of the sleazy motel where your ladies take their escorting clients, which otherwise would be a really overpowered way to gain a ton of money very quickly.

HCS maintains a nice balance, forcing you to juggle your clicks and manage a lot of variables at once, giving you a lot of freedom to play how you want within its bounds. Combined with the fun, lighthearted take on some very dark subject matter, it’s the most enjoyable clicker game I’ve ever seen, hands down.