Well here’s a nice surprise from itch.io, though not a surprise that I’m covering it. HoloCure is a Hololive fan game, what else, about a set of VTubers affiliated with the agency.
These multi-talented girls are usually only tasked with entertaining their fans on stream by playing games or singing or whatever, but one day a mysterious evil force makes said fans into drooling zombies who love their favorite VTubers blindly and go mad (is this some subtle commentary?) forming mobs that their favorites have to subdue. It’s a story worthy of the Beatles back when they made movies like A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, or maybe the Spice Girls’ Spice World. When was the last time you thought of that movie, if you’re even old enough to have been alive when it came out?
Which Spice Girl would Gura be, tell me in the comments after you smash like and subscribe and ring that bell
HoloCure is a takeoff of Vampire Survivors from what I hear. I haven’t played that one, so I don’t know how this game stacks up to it, but even if you’re new to this sort of game like I was, the mechanics are simple: just aim your automatic attacks at the enemies running towards you, collect the powerups and other drops they leave, and use them to upgrade existing skills and learn new ones.
Ina is somewhere in this mess. The tentacle is her main method of attack, which can be powered up as you defeat enemies/subdue fans. See also the huge miniboss at the bottom right — these guys will show up in fixed intervals to challenge you.
The current version of HoloCure has four sets of characters to play with, coming out to 20: all 11 ladies in the English-language branch (not counting the recently recruited guys in Tempus) and 9 in the Japanese branch — nowhere close to the total, so if like me you were hoping to play as Pekora, you’ll have to wait for a future potential update. But even so, there’s nice variety in the available characters’ styles, with some being slow and tanky and others being quick and agile, and still others I have no idea how to use because I’m terrible at them since their attacks require precision to pull off well.
Like Okayu, who chooses to throw rice balls at enemies that annoyingly arc in the air. The onigiri won’t help her against these shield walls of Mori fans.
I hadn’t played this game before the update just yesterday, but from the several hours I’ve played of it now (yes, this is what I’ve been doing since stopping work on Friday evening, no grass-touching for me) I could already tell a couple of things about independent developer Kay Yu, the first being that they’re clearly huge fans of Hololive and its streamers/characters/personalities, with a ton of references in the powerups and descriptions especially that all check out.
Like Plug Type Asacoco, which is exactly what it looks like. It’s not just the game being crass, this is a “real” product from a parody morning show created a year or two ago; here it’s just another weapon.
The second is that these creators care about making a quality game. The gameplay is smooth and the sprites look great (both VTuber and fan, and there are many fan/enemy types that correspond with the “fan names” and art depicting them. The music is catchy, and I’m pretty sure the few tracks in the game are based on a few of the girls’ original songs, though I couldn’t tell you which they were. (The opening/menu theme sounds a little like “Hare Hare Yukai” from Haruhi Suzumiya — hopefully a better fan can help me out here.)
All that leads me to a different question — can you enjoy HoloCure if you’re not a fan and know nothing about any of this Hololive or even VTuber bullshit? Obviously, you won’t get as much out of the game if you don’t pick up on or care about the references, and you certainly won’t get the inside jokes that come from well-known stream incidents like the Plug Type Asacoco above or Miko’s Elite Lava Bucket. HoloCure was made by fans, for fans, and also for the VTubers themselves, who have naturally been playing this on stream as well.
Kiara in the newly added Hololive HQ/office setting. This one feels a lot more challenging than the first stage’s open field since you can easily become trapped by enemies in here if you’re not careful.
Even so, I think a non-fan can still enjoy this game. It’s not just running around and killing/dodging enemies; there is a little skill involved at least mixed in with the RNG element of whether you’ll get good weapon and skill upgrades as you level up. I didn’t think I’d have that much fun with the game for its gameplay, but I have, and all the better that you can actually upgrade the characters as you progress by collecting coins and rolling to unlock new characters. In fact, the gacha element might make the game a little easier for non-fans, since they won’t be obsessively rolling to unlock best fox/cat friend Fubuki (who I still don’t have… damn. Soon, though.)
Pleading with the talent director A-chan won’t help. She won’t even look up from her screen; she’s just here to work.
So I’d say even if you know don’t or care a damn for Hololive or anything like it, you still might want to check this game out. It’s a free fan work and extremely high quality for that. And hell — I love itch.io, and I think indie gaming is the true future of the medium, but the fact is itch.io is filled with no/low-effort tossed-off crap that you have to dig through before finding the worthwhile games. The gems are there, but they can be hard to dig up, so any time I have one I’m likely to highlight it here.
And I barely even watch Hololive anymore, honestly. I am still waiting for an update that includes Pekora, but even more than that, I’d love to see a NijiCure. Maybe that’s just a dream. I certainly don’t have any of the skills necessary to putting a game like this together, but that’s a benefit to being the biggest: you generally get the most and best fan works (see also Touhou.) Though Nijisanji is huge in Japan too, and they’re catching up here as well, so maybe it’s just a matter of time.
Look out YAGOO, Anycolor is coming for Cover! Maybe this is why we keep getting denied that Pomu/Kiara collab, anyway — is HoloEN management afraid of attracting attention to the competition? The nice thing about smaller agencies is that they don’t seem to have such hangups with each other assuming that’s what’s going on here. (Edit 10/22/22: It happened! The barrier’s been broken. Took them long enough.)
A lot of the above is probably gibberish to anyone who’s not deep in the rabbit hole like me, so I’ll shut up right now and just say that I had a good time with HoloCure and that you might too, even if you’re not in that hole. Just try not to get dragged into it yourself.
6 thoughts on “Games for broke people: HoloCure”
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Everything is bad for you 
I’ve been thinking about playing this game but was worried that I’d have to be familiar with Vampire Survivors. Apparently not, so I’ll definitely check it out soon.
I’m with you. I’m definitely also waiting for some Nijisanji fangames. There’s a lot of Hololive ones out there, as well as a few more in the making that I’ve seen. But I haven’t seen any (serious) Nijisanji ones, which is sad because I’m definitely a bigger fan of them nowadays. I’ve actually thought about making one myself since I am a programmer with some some gamedev knowledge. I dunno if that’ll ever actually happen though. My track record for finishing games I’ve started making isn’t the best.
Yeah, I haven’t played that one myself so no need to be familiar with it. The bigger issue would be unfamiliarity with Hololive, but even that’s not a real problem for people who just want to enjoy a free game about fighting enemy hordes and trying to survive.
The only NijiEN fangame I know much about is this Selen Mega Man one she played on stream a while back. It looked more like a Mega Man romhack than an original game, though I know that still takes effort to get done. Searching itch.io for “Nijisanji” brings up a few different results, but nothing that interests me aside from maybe this “Pet the Pomu” game, which really just looks like an idle clicker, not my thing though the art does look nice. But if you ever do try out a fangame of your own, I’d love to try it.
Y’all can play as Kiara? Instant win.
Oh yeah, Kiara’s a lot of fun. And her game version has regeneration and some very limited immortality abilities just like you’d expect (though when you eventually do get swarmed with Kiara once her abilities are exhausted, it’s still over! Haven’t mastered the office stage yet.)
As I understand, non-EN branches of Nijisanji and Hololive collab with each other. So while my gut instinct is to agree with the “media megacorps bad” explanation, I don’t think it’s that simple.
That’s my understanding too. I don’t even want to believe there’s some competitive bitterness between the EN branches. And I should change my statement here, since I saw Selen and a couple of the HoloID girls just had a collab — hopefully it’s a sign of things to come.