Erase Her: Puzzle Story is a puzzle play story game suggested by publisher Gamejam to suit everyone who likes testing their IQ with brain teasers that have a love theme. There are several stories in the game, each of them has a scenario where our main hero, a red-headed girl, has to come up with some solutions to save herself: either literally from death, or metaphorically, from awkward situations, love triangles, controversy, and more!. Solutions are made with an eraser - the only instrument that exists in this game, so it’s kind of a magic wand that can do a lot of things, you just need to turn on your creativity.

Take a look at the first screenshot: your main hero is in bed with a man when his wife knocks on the door. By pressing an eraser instrument somewhere on the picture you can solve the problem. First, you hide behind the curtain, then you erase the lamp and run away while your partner’s wife is angry and tries to find her husband’s lover. Oh, if only it was that easy in life!

Ethics and Morality 101 this is not

If we were some moral-ethic commission we might have a few issues with this game and what it is teaching to children. After your female character runs away from sleeping with a married man, she gets hungry, orders a pizza, and tries to seduce the delivery girl. Where have I seen that scenario play out before….and seduction is also done by eraser - you need to erase the pizza box so that pizza falls out and makes the delivery girl’s clothes dirty. What a cheap old-fashioned trick! But okay, okay, who are we to judge?

Sometimes your choice is very obvious. Say you’re meeting a guy of your dreams but you’ve got acne on your face. What do you do with your eraser? Right, apply it to your face to get rid of them. Again, how wonderful would it be if it was the same in real life!

But sometimes the choice isn’t as easy. For example, it’s hot and you see the sun. Erasing it at all? Then it can become freezing cold and you’ll die. The correct answer here will be to erase your clothes - that’s how you don’t boil in scorching weather. Well, in this game you frequently take off the clothes of your female character (which makes me think it’s a game for or by teenage boys).

The Pizza Delivery scenario.... of course

At every point of the game, if you’re not sure about a solution you can press anywhere on the screen and hope something will work out. If not - there’s always an option to get a hint if you watch a rewarded ad.

After each successful completion of an episode you can get a new outfit and earn coins (that you can later spend on a new outfit and some other stuff - here it may appear to be a more typical “girly” game). You can either get a small number of coins or more if you watch a rewarded ad.

Sometimes a choice of options is too overwhelming and there’s a life-threatening situation - this is where hints come especially handy.

There are some very short dialogues in the game that make it look a bit more interactive and ff course, some of the dialogues can have a hint of a “love theme or a ‘nudge nudge, wink wink ‘vibe’”. “Oops, it was just a typo” - your hero says. Some players might knowingly smirk at the dialogue & some might refer to Google to understand the joke - it’s suitable for children, right?

Monetization model

The game has in-app purchases, rewarded ads, and playable ads but its a hypercasual title so expect ads throughout. Also. Gamejam is actively cross-promoting their other games throughout the game.

Rewarded ads are well related to what the player is playing at the moment. Many of the promoted games in the performance marketing are also “love-themed” so it might be interesting for current players, and therefore, the ad won’t be as annoying as a toothpaste ad for instance so their ad tech stack is working well.

As for the in-app purchases, there are plenty of options to buy coins that are used in the game and probably the most popular option - to get rid of the ads for approximately 2 USD but this is a hypecasual game so it’s mostly about the ads.

Of course, you can get some free coins if you watch one more ad, and then some extra outfit if you watch another ad, and then a hint in a game for another one… Well, if a player doesn’t watch to spend any money they’ll need to watch a bunch of ads all the time. Pretty classical monetization model for these kinds of games.

To wrap it up

Erase her is a teen loved-themed brain puzzle with spicy jokes and a lot of de-dressing scenes in a cartoon style. It is already at hit with certain age groups, and can surely develop even more cross-over popularity with some new catchy scenarios.

By Iryna Shapoval for Gamesforum