Mirage is a lewd, ambitious poser game featuring super-HD models.
At-a-glance
(Adult) Content?
(F) Nudity.
Censorship?
No. Woot! Woot!
Hours of Gameplay?
One or two hours.
Modding Support?
Upcoming.
Patch Available?
No, not necessary.
Foreword
I recieved a free copy of this game from the developer, and I was excited to give it a go; I would be sorely dissapointed after waiting nearly half-an-hour for painfully long load screens and lackluster, power-guzzling performance.
I truly hope I don’t have to boot this game again (for a long time).
For some inexplicable reason, I had a hard time booting Mirage. The first time I tried it crashed; on the second and third times, it appeared to “hang up” on the “Mirage is Loading” screen. I kept an eye on my Task Manager to keep an eye on the game’s resource pull; it was using a tremendous amount of resources, including one-hundred percent of my disk and memory. Granted, I’m running Windows on an HDD. . . alas, I was a fool not to upgrade to an SDD when I purchased my PC. After waiting for a good ten minutes or so, I was ready to play Mirage. Unfortunately, the game rendered at about ten frames-per-second, so I had to make some adjustments in my Nvidia Control panel and suffer another loading screen.
Now I’ll admit, my PC isn’t the bomb diggidy — but it’s better than the average bear’s.
I rock a RTX 2060 graphics card with sixteen gigabytes of RAM. I installed Mirage on my HDD (as my SDD was out of room), and I advise you not to do the same. Given the sheer amount of data Mirage processes prior to loading, you’ll need to milk your PC for every bit of read/write speed you can get. My PC was unable to render this game with acceptable performance — unless this game receives some much needed optimization or graphical settings, Mirage is only for the aristocrats of the PC Master Race.
But credit where credit’s due, this game didn’t turn my PC into a fireball!
Gameplay
You pick one of six boot options, each selecting one of three models and toggling Virtual Reality functionality (or VR). You may animate, customize, position or dick around with your choice model. There isn’t much else to do — think of Mirage (in its current state, at least) as a sort of virtual doll house. I’ll admit, I spent most of my playtime seeing what sort of silly things I could make the models do.
. . . yes, this is a game you can play one-handed.
Visuals
There is no titlescreen; the closest thing to a titlemenu are the boot options, which appear after running Mirage from your Steam Library. There are no adjustable user-preferences, not even the ability to toggle audio — this is unacceptable. A variety tools can be brought up in-game via a boxed arrow in the corner of the screen; these tools allow you to animate, customize and position characters using sliders. The sliders are not organized in any particular manner, forcing you to scroll through countless options just to the find the correct slider.
I recognized the models and sliders from a software called Daz Studio.
This isn’t bad — Daz Studio is capable of producing incredible animations and models, much like those featured in Mirage. However, Mirage doesn’t bring much that is new to the table that Daz (a free program by the way) doesn’t already do. As a matter of fact, Mirage is strikes me as a watered-down Daz. Daz can do nearly everything that Mirage does, but better. However, what Mirage has that Daz doesn’t is the ability to view and edit animations live without the time and processing power Daz would normally require. Despite this fact, given the power Mirage requires, if you can run Mirage, you’re probably better off with Daz Studio.
Honestly, after playing Mirage just made me want to play with a more robust animation software.
The Goods
Where’s the sexual content? There’s nudity, and darn fine nudity at that — but there are no sexual animations to choose from, and (at least in non-VR mode) no way to “touch” the models. Even if you could, I don’t think a mono-colored floor and endless void strike anyone as the ideal sex place.
. . . expect female nudity.
Verdict
I can’t recommend this game in its current state. Don’t get me wrong; Mirage is a super ambitious project with great potential. If the developer implemented half of the planned features Mirage could be something great. Other than the lack of accessibility and features, the biggest issue by-far is the tremendous power required to run this game. I think that it’s unreasonable to sell a game that can only be played by users with PCs that cost as much a fecking car. I look forward to the continued development of Mirage, and you can support this game by grabbing a copy. However, unless you’re vying to spend money on good faith, I would come back on a later date.
