Get naked with your favourite anime friends in Strip Poker Night at the Inventory
A friend of mine asked me to recommend a strip poker game earlier, and it occurred to me that what was once a mainstay of the “adult gaming” sphere — particularly back in the 16-bit home computer days and onwards into the MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 PC era — is now something we don’t see all that often. So I did a bit of cursory research and happened to stumble across Strip Poker Night at the Inventory.
I am now addicted to Strip Poker Night at the Inventory.
Strip Poker Night at the Inventory began its life as a Javascript mockup game in 2015, when it was developed as a spinoff to a work of fanfiction that involved Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, Zoey from Left 4 Dead, Lilith from Borderlands and Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite. The project fizzled out after its initial release, but was resurrected in 2016 — and since then it has grown considerably, now offering over 200 opponents (both male and female) to challenge.
Strip Poker Night at the Inventory is an open-source game, and to date about 130 different people have contributed to its development, including characters, coding, community, moderation, hosting, documentation and background art. If you have some talents of your own, you can even add your own characters to the game for everyone else to enjoy.
Being open-source, Strip Poker Night at the Inventory is completely free to play, and you can freely download and tinker with the game’s files from its GitGud repository should you know what a repository is (hint: it’s not the thing that goes up your arse) and what to do with the contents thereof. It’s also completely free of advertising, sponsors and other forms of financial support such as Patreon; this helps it steer clear of the obvious copyright issues involved with all the characters included.
As the name suggests, Strip Poker Night at the Inventory is inspired by Telltale Games’ Poker Night at the Inventory games, in which the appeal of the game is as much enjoying the interactions between characters as it is actually playing poker. In fact, the implementation of strip poker here is extremely simplistic, with no actual betting involved — this does keep the pace of the game nice and high, though, and means that the action never feels like it’s stagnating.
When you first open up Strip Poker Night at the Inventory, you’re invited to create a character. This character can be male or female and can be wearing up to eight items of clothing. There’s no on-screen representation of your character; your items of clothing effectively become your “lives” for the game.
There is also an optional “tags” feature that allows you to further define aspects of your character’s personality, appearance and sexuality, and if you fill this out the ways in which the characters interact with “you” in the game will make use of these details.
Once you’ve defined who you are (or who you want to play as — there’s no obligation to play as “yourself”) you’ll be presented with the option to add up to three opponents to your poker table. You can either do this by manually picking opponents from the database, or by making use of a huge number of themed preset tables that bring together a variety of characters that go well together for one reason or another.
After that, you’re into the game. The basic mechanics are simple: everyone is dealt a hand of five cards, and is then able to exchange any number of those cards once. Once all the exchanges have been made, everyone reveals their hands, and whoever has the worst hand has to remove an item of clothing. If someone ends up naked and loses one more time, they then have to masturbate in front of everyone else while the game continues. Once everyone except the winner has reached orgasm, the game is over.
Simple enough. But it’s the layers that Strip Poker Night at the Inventory adds atop this basic formula that make it so appealing. For starters, as in its inspiration, there is a lot of banter between the characters and you on each hand dealt.
And, more impressively, there’s a significant amount of dialogue included based on specific combinations of characters appearing at the poker table together — even combinations you might not expect. Y’shtola from Final Fantasy XIV and Nami from One Piece get along quite well, for example — and by contrast, Panty and Stocking are authentically at one another’s throats constantly.
Some characters even have “epilogues” that unlock if you fulfil specific conditions during a game. These aren’t always as straightforward as simply winning a game in which they appear, either; in the case of Nami, for example, she repeatedly attempts to seduce you in the hope of getting you to throw a hand or two, while Y’shtola’s is dependent on you specifically losing a hand after she has lost a particular item of clothing.
Being a free crowdsourced affair, you shouldn’t expect too much from the visual side of things in Strip Poker Night at the Inventory. Characters are typically built using the Japanese paper doll software Kisekae (NSFW link) so they have quite a distinct and recognisable “look” about them, but Kisekae allows for a lot of flexibility in terms of costumes and poses so there’s still plenty of variety — and the vast majority of the characters look impressively authentic to their source material.
The epilogues are particularly weak from a visual perspective; there’s a very “Flash game” feel to the animations, particularly in explicit sex sequences, which means that many of these scenes perhaps aren’t as erotic as they perhaps could have been. They’re not irredeemably bad by any means, but if you’ve been spoiled by the best Live2D hentai out there, you might find them a little underwhelming!
That said, despite the obvious erotic potential in a game like this, Strip Poker Night at the Inventory is not a game you should go into primarily as a piece of pornography. Instead, you should go into it in the hope of seeing how an incredibly varied cast of characters interact with one another in a somewhat erotically charged situation — and enjoying how the whole thing somehow manages to feel delightfully supportive and inclusive rather than sleazy, all while keeping most of the characters admirably authentic to their source material.
Now, with Panty, Stocking, Y’shtola and Nami down for the count, who out of that 200+ character roster should I challenge next…?
Strip Poker Night at the Inventory can be played online here.
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