Friendship with Benefits

Welcome to the boring pre-amble that I’m including because porn reviews attract some serious criticism for some reason.

All reviews are subjective yadda yadda I’m male-to-female transgender so I’m coming at this from the perspective of a penised person yadda yadda the TL;DR can be found at the bottom but you’ll be missing out.

Oh, and NSFW, there are pictures in here.

With that all out the way lets get cracking on.

Friendship With Benefits is a My Little Pony visual novel where the characters have been, assumedly for legal reasons, renamed and recoloured. And like any creative endeavour, the people in charge of these decisions probably shouldn’t have been allowed to chew a pen in the first place. Some of the designs, like Moxie (The Great and Powerful Trixie) keep the professionally chosen colours of the original and the name is a good alternative but some of the others haven’t been so lucky.

Pinkie Pie is no longer pink and has been renamed Cream, which makes sense, she works in a bakery and the developer doesn’t want sued, fair.

Rainbow Dash keeps her rainbow hair but is now red, has heterochromia, and picked up that weirdly common fan-fic name Riku. Because you’ve got to appeal to the weeaboo crowd somehow.

But perhaps the worst offender is the Fluttershy stand-in — Butters.

No, not that one but really can you picture anything else?! Other than the name, she keeps the colour choices but for some reason is the only one to wear clothes. A fact the writer loves to bring up when it comes to Rarity’s struggling boutique.

But before we dive into that mess, lets take a step back and discuss the plot.

Like any good fan-fiction, you play a self-insert that you get to name. Of course, this only really works if you’re an eighteen year old male college student from America who is still a virgin and can somehow ejaculate nine times in a row.

The game starts in what quickly turns out to be the worst first impression as Moxie, an anthropomorphic unicorn, explains that you are to be her sex slave. However, after realising you’re sentient and only half balking at your furlessness she proceeds to explain that its shudder pony mating season and that all the mares in town are in heat. At this point you may want to be grateful that the characters are anthropomorphic, otherwise you could discover some of the more… interesting terms in the MLP community.

For the next hour or so, depending on how quickly you read, Friendship With Benefits is actually surprisingly enjoyable. Not sexy or erotic which is probably a mark against any porn game but while you’re with Moxie the interactions are somewhat wholesome. Your character seems to genuinely want to know about her society and culture, partially to avoid getting arrested but also out of polite interest. Oh, and in the first sex scene, your character actually gives a lick out like a true gentleman. And I mention all of this because until the game opened up and unleashed this character on the world, I was commenting on how pleasantly surprised I was at the niceness of the character and the thought the writer had put into clarifying that the random sex was all fun and games and that no pony would be coerced into doing something they didn’t want.

And then Rainbow Dash calls you daddy.

Yeah. Once you’ve been vaccinated and told to get a job, its time to meet the other ponies and get it on and hoo boy is it awkward. Lets go in the order I went.

Riku (Rainbow Dash)

The punk-rock Miss Piggy runs a bar after receiving a minor injury and deciding to give up on being an athlete. No idea why.

You spend some time working in the bar and again, the game reveals a bit of unexpected humanity as the various patrons are pleasant despite your character’s increasingly lecherous leers. Riku explains that her old gym buddy ran off with “some big titted bimbo” and that she’s pretty torn up about it. From here on the game gets pretty liberal with the word slut.

You get into a game of truth or dare which is actually quite a good little scene until it railroads you into daring her to “roleplay that I’m you’re daddy and you’re trying to seduce me”.

Never has a game needed a NOPE button more. Like by all means have your fetishes but the whole “most modern girls do” part is some top-shelf incel ranting. In hindsight I should have turned it off here but I am nothing if not a dedicated journalist and so deeper into the mire I go.

Ruby (Rarity)

With no-one apart from Butters (and Amora, Aurora, the other humans) wearing clothes, Ruby has taken to doing camgirl shows to pay rent.

Which brings an earlier point that there are only 25,000 ponies into serious question.

Who the fuck are they paying rent to? And why do I feel that laziness is to blame for the modern touches?

Mostly Ruby leaves you alone to clean the boutique while she goes upstairs for “reasons” upon which you are prompted to go up and peek. But there’s a twist!

A challenger approaches!

Melody (Sweetie Belle)

Because nothing is off limits when it comes to weird internet porn, this “oh its alright she’s actually 18 now” pony gives you a handjob while you peek on her sister and insults you the whole time.

Again, we need that NOPE button. If I hadn’t made the foolish decision to do this as a career — and trust me I’m questioning my life choices as well — I could’ve alt+f4d but sadly I had to continue. More out of morbid curiosity than anything else at this point.

Apparently they want you to join in their reindeer games and have sex on camera so Ruby can pay rent. And to be fair to the game here, there is a lot of content with each character. Some of it nice and reasonably well written. Others a full on descent into the worst of fan fictionry.

Cream (Pinkie Pie)

I… I don’t even know how to explain this whole segment. Some of the things the writer brings up during the game are surprisingly well thought out. Like getting vaccinated and making sure you don’t have any diseases on you that could transfer to your sexual partners. They even go into the philosophy of teleportation and the whole “are you the same person?” discussion.

Then this. This rambling discussion about eternity, immortality and the inevitability of madness but with the spin that madness may not be a bad thing and honestly, what the fuck? I assume most people who’re playing the game are there to jack off to anthropomorphic ponies and yet the game insists on having these philosophical discussions.

Other than that, food play and food puns in a cringey but somewhat nice interaction. I don’t know anymore, I feel like I’m being broken down by this.

Amora (… I don’t know.)

There’s a church in the city! It has statues of the different allicorns throughout history but not the living ones. Which, going by the show, I’m fairly certain is all of them.

The writing has by this point genuinely devolved to “she looks like a pony cosplaying a slutty catholic nun”.

For some reason, the only character so far that you can NOPE out of. Not sure why. Maybe fear of God?

Butters (Fluttershy)

Clothes!

Butters — such an awful name — is a shy pony that doesn’t like being around other ponies and if you guessed where this is going… you’re wrong! At least for as far as I’ve played.

Butters whole schtick is that she’s an alchemist and as such needs ingredients from a slime girl and a tentacle plant. So you get to go with her on short fantasy quests and generally feel like you’re not welcome, especially when she rudely insults you and sends you away. Which, to be fair is quite accurate to the show, Fluttershy is such a dick.

Honeycrisp (Applejack)

Poor injured Honeycrisp needs help around the farm after she broke her wrist punching a tree out of anger. Why was she angry you ask? Because her father just died.

Get your dick back in your pants and hear about this poor pony’s life struggles.

Since her father died she’s had to work the farm herself and she can’t ask her little sister to help because she’s busy with college and needs to do well and escape this life! No, dick away you monster, no sex yet!

Once you’ve had this depressing conversation that kinda hints that the writer thinks Big Mac might be Applejack’s dad, you’re given a very awkward interaction with Blossom (Applebloom) who is also “eighteen we swear”. Thankfully you can talk your way out of a sex scene with her and, as far as I got, continue to avoid it.

Next up, and we’re nearly done (though there are lots of characters I have missed out)

Lily (Twilight)

Infomercial: Hey, do you struggle to talk to people? Feel let down by your inability to socialise and make connections? Well don’t worry here’s a socially anxious pony that GETS HOW YOU FEEL!

Okay, sure, Twilight is anti-social at the start. Lily on the other hand is just sad. Dick away, its time to hear about her fear of social situations and how she’s essentially a hermit. Don’t worry though, you’ll still be able to get a hand and thigh job before being made to ejaculate in a petri dish.

Then you get to talk to her inexplicable roommate Penelope who turns you into a girl. Which, as a trans-woman I’m quite fond of but, as is sadly to be expected by the rapidly declining writing quality, this is short lived and is just lickout, sixty-nine, lickout, omg girl orgasms are great aren’t they? Then back to male and “that was weird”. Blegh.

Halving the content in exchange for the option of choosing your gender would greatly improve some of these games. Girls wanna have fun too y’know!

Though fun isn’t exactly what I’d call Friendship With Benefits. One Steam review said:

You know that study where you leave someone alone in a room with only a button that hurts them and after a while they just keep pressing the button?
Yeah, thats what this game is.

And that is the most accurate description I think anyone can give.

So now for the quick fire criticisms and the final score:

• Ahegao in every single sex scene. It’s not sexy and I don’t get why the internet has become so obsessed with it.
• By all means have your kinks but don’t make me part of them. Nothing is worse than being called Daddy during sex.
• There’s a cowgirl called Anna and I feel dirty whenever she appears.
• The writing gets so disappointingly vulgar, rude, and sexist. It almost feels like a somewhat competant writer wrote the introduction then passed it to some highschool kids to finish.
• Quite a few scenes don’t line up properly. Characters you’ve met suddenly don’t know who you are, events that haven’t happened yet are referenced by both you and the other characters, and as much as I’m ashamed to admit it, this was the breaking point for me. I’ll wade through all the awful sex scenes but as soon as the immersion is broken, apparently that’s when I stop.

As a visual novel, I’d give Friendship With Benefits a reasonable 7/10.

As an erotic experience, I’d give it a 2/10. I’ve gotten more aroused by Taskmaster.

Yep, on top of the plethora of ponies you can apparently find two humans, Isabelle from Animal Crossing, a goblin, and thicc lady Spyro.

You can find Friendship With Benefits on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1299370/Friendship_with_Benefits/

Top Quotes:

• “It’d be such a shame for you to die of an illness”
• “…While I serve them both alcohols”
• “That’s easy, gimmie the tiddy”
• “It takes approximately seven seconds to get a nipple erect, and I’m sure boners can take longer than that”
• “I feel like all my faps will be empty and hollow from now on…”
• “Yeah, a shallow incel like you would say that…”

TL;DR Strong start that gives me hope porn writers are maturing quickly descends into boring and repetitive cliche sex scenes peppered with the occasional incel-ish comment.