I have to admit I didn’t think much of Hustle Town when I first started playing it. It felt very simplistic and like it would lack focus of any real plot. It managed to surprise me in some ways. The plot was actually very well thought out and had a lot of twists and turns. I would still say the game was more linear than I would have liked. It comes off at first as more complex than it is by having each girl only available at certain times of the day to talk to and having to get different items to complete certain tasks but the reality is that you have time to talk to each girl every day and that you’re given opportunity to find everything and complete everything you need to. There was no challenge or need to manage anything. I wouldn’t have minded as much except it seemed to allude to having more to offer. The humour was top shelf though and I loved the dialogue between many of the characters. There was no audio for most of the game, which I don’t always mind, but in this case having no sound at all for most of it felt strange. Usually visual novels have at least some background music. Parts of the game did but not much. One thing that did annoy me was that the developer had pretty constant pop ups interrupting the game to tell the player about certain bugs that may still be in it or to explain why they did certain things. It felt pretty unprofessional and broke what immersion I had at times. The graphics and animations are pretty good. I’ve seen better but I have seen far worse as well. Above average is nothing to sneer at.

    I played Hustle Town on Linux. It never crashed on me. There were some instances where the grammar was a bit off in that I felt was simply that the speaker wasn’t a native English speaker but in this game that actually made sense and worked for it as the main character is supposed to be in a foreign country. The game allows you to manually save whenever you want and has 54 save slots. It uses version 7.3.5.606 of the Ren’Py engine and I played the “complete” version of the game. Alt-Tab didn’t work. For all of the developer interruptions about possible bugs still in the game I didn’t encounter any.

Game Engine: Ren’Py
Save System: Manual (at any time)
Disk Space Used: 1.6 GB
VRAM Usage: 345-671 MB
CPU Usage: 1-13 %
RAM Usage: 1.5-3.3 GB

    Overall this is a solid game. The story was well done; had interesting characters; great dialogue; and humour. It could have done with a bit more choice and branching as well as having the developer leave their comments to themselves or saving it for a commentary option but the game is worth playing. I finished it in 6 hours and 44 minutes. The game is free and it is worth money in my eyes. They could have charged $10 for it and I would have gladly paid it.

My Score: 7/10

My System:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X 8GB | Mesa 20.1.7 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 20.1 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.8.6-1-MANJARO