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» “Yohjo Simulator” lets you wreak havoc as a little girl with a penchant for headbutting【Video】

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“Yohjo Simulator” lets you wreak havoc as a little girl with a penchant for headbutting【Video】

Mike Oct 20, 2015
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Thanks to the runaway popularity of **wacky physics games with the word “simulator” in the title (yes, I’m looking at you, Surgeon, Goat and **Tabletop Simulator****s), it was only a matter of time before a Japanese developer decided to out-weird their Western counterparts with a distinctly Japanese “simulator” game.

That game is Yohjo Simulator, and of course it’s bizarre and unsettling.

In Yohjo Simulator, players control an unassuming little Japanese girl, wearing an adolescent school intramural sports uniform. What appear to be underwear are actually a type of very short athletic shorts common in Japan. The adorable little pigtailed protagonist is unleashed into an open world full of nondescript buildings, non-player characters—all of whom appear to be male—and more or less random items like tables, chairs and boulders, with no real goals or win conditions. Said world is powered by a ludicrous physics system that sends everything not bolted to the floor flying off into the distance at the slightest touch.

As with Goat Simulator, arguably the game that started this whole “simulator” YouTube fodder gaming craze, your little girl avatar is capable of delivering a walloping to NPCs via superpowered headbutt. She can also perform what appears to be a jump kick and can somersault into things to send them careering off into the moon or something.

Like Goat Simulator, the game is intentionally nonsensical. There’s no story or endgame, no cinematics or level progression. You’re just a little girl headbutting things, all while you, we presume the developers hope, broadcast via Twitch or record for your YouTube channel. Even so, Western gamers—who more or less welcomed the “lol random” weirdness of *Goat Simulator—*seem noticeably taken aback by Yohjo Simulator’s content.

Part of this probably has to do with the little girl protagonist—who appears to be blatantly under-dressed to Western eyes—and the fact that she interacts with mostly naked old men at points in the game. But, I also have a hunch the lukewarm reception in the west also has a bit to do with the game’s less-than-stellar production values; NPCs mostly don’t actually move or interact with you at all until you headbutt them into the sun; most of the buildings are the same nondescript, vaguely industrial blocks that would feel at home in a PlayStation 2 game, etc. It kind of reeks of a cash-in riding on Goat Simulator‘s coattails, in other words.

But if you’re one of the tens of people who have been waiting with bated breath for the wacky little girl physics game you’ve always wanted, we have some sad news for you: the game seems to still be in limbo on Steam’s “Greenlight” service—a system that lets users vote on in-development games to see a full release—so you can’t purchase and play it quite yet. If you really want to show your support for Yohjo Simulator, however, you can vote here. Happy headbutting.

Source: Hachima Kikou
Images: Steam Greenlight page