HunieCam Studio is a game all about ‘cam girls,’ that is, women who entertain viewers on the internet. In this case, the shows put on by these women are all sexual. It sounds more interesting than it actually is. (NSFW warning!)
That’s because HunieCam Studio is a clicker game. 99% of what you do in the game is just...click. Over and over, the game asks you to click on icons and watch numbers go up. The faster you click, the more resources you get, the better you do. It’s ostensibly a parody of the clicker genre, which has gained some popularity in recent years with breakout hits like Cookie Clicker. The difference is, HunieCam has a saucy premise to hook you in. Whether or not it keeps your attention, however, is a whole different story.
You can watch me play through about 30 minutes of the intro below, if you’d like:
In HunieCam Studio, you play as a manager who handles a cam girl operation. From the outset, you’re asked to hire new women to start your cam girl empire. Each woman has fetish specialties, along with needs and desires.
By “needs and desires” I really mean “resources to juggle.” This is a clicker game, after all. Women can be sent off into a variety of different facilities, which will net you different resources depending on a girl’s stats. The more fans a cam girl has, for example, the more money she’ll make while at the studio. The more she works, however, the more stressed out she becomes. What a girl can do is also determined by the objects she carries: a butt plug might for example open up an entirely new type of fetish for that character to cater to. Drugs like coke, on the other hand, might make your girl perform actions at a facility faster.
You might also find that some women require a certain amount of alcohol and cigarettes to keep functioning, which is one of many mechanics that make HunieCam Studio seem pretty disrespectful toward the type of people it depicts. It comes across as yet another video game that makes sex workers into punching bags that you can exploit for personal gain. The less you pay these women for their services, the better.
Handled sensitively, HunieCam Studio could have been a fascinating exploration of a profession that many people misunderstand or outright belittle. Instead, what we get is something that feeds into those stereotypes and misunderstandings.
It’s all meant in jest is the easy deflection here. Even the player isn’t safe from jabs:
How well all of this lands depends on your sense of humor. A few screenshots, which should give you a sense of the sorts of jokes HunieCam tells:
Maybe that’s your bag, maybe it isn’t. While the game’s flavor text can certainly be entertaining at times, I found the actual experience of playing HunieCam to be extremely boring. There is no amount of sex jokes that can make clicking repeatedly (or holding down the mouse button, if you’re smart) interesting, especially not on the internet, where sex is plentiful and more importantly, free. HunieCam on the other hand costs $6.99 on Steam.
And yet, there’s something perfect about HunieCam’s marriage of mechanics and theme. After all, what could be more masturbatory than a video game that asks you to never stop clicking?