With as specialized as the genre is, it’s rare to see fighting games be crossed over with other video game genres. As such, it’s refreshing to see an indie developer do just that with Honey Rose: Underdog Extraordinaire.
Just released on Steam Honey Rose: Underdog Extraordinaire combines fighting games with a life management visual novel. Players take control of Red, a university student who’s also an amateur masked fighter. Players need to balance Red’s studies on her last chance to graduate from university, with her dream of fighting in the masked fighting tournament and facing her idol, Big Blue. It’s an interesting mixing of genres that’s both fresh and somehow not unexpected, considering how many fighting games (BlazBlue, Persona 4 Arena) borrow from the visual novel genre for their story modes.
However, the hybrid genre isn’t the only innovative thing about Honey Rose: Underdog Extraordinaire. The game sports an interesting payment model that its developers are calling “Pay-What-You-Liked”. The game itself is free, to support the developers, they’ve put up 8 pieces of “DLC”. Note that we put the term in quotes because, the DLC actually has no content at all. What they are instead are 8 donation tiers that anyone who wants to support the developers can use to do so.
This “Pay-What-You-Liked” model is an interesting use of Steam’s DLC system to implement what’s basically the “Pay-What-You-Want” model seen in places like Humble Bundle. The fact that it makes the game itself free to download and play however makes it a much more interesting experiment – it allows players to actually try the game out, and then pay for it if they enjoyed it. If this new model sees some some modicum of success, it may be a way for other indie fighting game developers, to attract people to play their games and experience the genre.