It could be me, or my brand new computer, but the bedroom puzzle goes too fast. I literally have to click a 3-jewels-combo per second (or even faster) not to drop constantly to 0% and I rarely go over 100 points.
At this speed I can't even plan or trigger 4-jewel-combos that will get me to the finish. (I'm experimenting now with screen sizes to see if other settings will go better for me.)

Unfortunately you can't get out a date other than closing the game.

Do the personality traits have any influence on the bedroom game, or not?
The same goes for the gifts and the questions: do these have influence on the bedroom game?

You should NOT try to plan in that mode, just do matches as fast as possible to keep building up the score. Also, there's no chance of getting a broken heart (or any of the other special tokens) during the mode. Even so, getting a massive cascade like in other match-3 games is not going to happen outside pure luck.

I have seen that playing at bigger screen sizes helps a lot (in my case) actually.
So I put the game at full screen, whenever I land into the bedroom.

It's too fast. Is there a mod or a file you can edit to slow this thing down?

Solved.

1. Download Cheat Engine. Do a search. It's easy to find. (wouldn't let me post the link. Sorry)
2. Down load the manual install version into its own folder and extract it. You can run it by clicking on the executable.
3. Launch Cheat Engine
4. Launch Hunie Pop
5. Select Hunie Pop executable in the Cheat Engine Select Process (that's the first button).
6. Play until you get to the bedroom scene.
7. Go to Cheat Engine and check the enable speed hack box. A speed selector will appear that shows the speed at one. Change the speed to 0.2 or what ever you want. (Less than one slows it down and more than 1 speeds it up. Then hit the accept button.
8. Go back to the bedroom and play the game. It will be slowed down and you should have plenty of time.
9. When you are successful go back to cheat engine and reset the game speed to 1, hit accept.
10. Go back to playing the game.

There are absolutely no broken hearts ever and no limit in the number of moves, so there's no need for planning.

Also, it's easier when going into the HunieBee settings while playing a game and choosing "Easy".

In general, go for fours and Ts even if it means dragging a token from the far side of the board. I don't believe the favorite and least favorite make a difference at this point, but I don't know.

Also, look ahead in the areas that are not being affected by a chain reaction of matching occurring from new tokens dropping in from the top, then be prepared to move a token just as the chain reactions stop. Looking elsewhere on the board for the next match while dragging a token to its new location with peripheral vision is also useful.

(I've noticed a typical approach to seeing clearly is to not stare, i.e. to not hold eyes still. Instead let eyes roam freely within a general area of vision and the brain gets more information to piece together because the light will hit different parts of the retina. Generally that improves interpretation for both small areas like a paragraph of text or large areas like outside, as well as a better 3D sense or feel when looking at anything, not just game playing. For this stage in the game, I let my eyes roam freely across the whole board as much as possible without settling on anything, and at such times I spot a lot of match possibilities during chain reactions.)

Best thing to do, is not to overthink in the bedroom puzzle. You have an unlimited number of turns, and just keep making matches. Try for fours or fives, if you can, and just let the pieces fall in place, as they cascade until you reach the max.

When I first played one of those I was also thinking that it is impossible and probably a bug. The thing you need to do is thinking aboutthe next move while you just made the first and the pieces are still falling. Then you'd need a big luck for some cascades and a bit patience. Stay focused and don't try to overthink it.

The OP is right, except that the original post vastly understates the problem.

I played HuniePop for just under six hours. I was enjoying the game until I reached this game-breaking mechanic of the timed bedroom puzzles. Then I never played it again. And I can't until if/when the dev ever bothers to fix this problem.

The timed bedroom puzzles make HuniePop literally unplayable, because those puzzles are virtually impossible. Even if they weren't virtually impossible, they would still be the opposite of fun.

There needs to be an option either to disable the timer on those puzzles, and/or automatically to bypass and win those puzzles (meaning, the player should still receive all the same rewards & cutscenes etc. that they would have always received if the puzzle was completed).

The player shouldn't even have to do a new puzzle once the lady has come to their place, because they just completed a very hard puzzle in order to convince her to come. There is no good reason put a second, game-breaking, virtually impossible challenge on top of that.

If the dev does not provide any options to disable the timer on these puzzles and/or bypass them, then he will be limiting the audience for HuniePop and his future games too.

So leaving these puzzles broken hurts everyone: players can't play the game they paid for, they will tell other players not to buy Huniepop and thus the dev will earn less money, and GOG will earn less money, and Steam will earn less money, etc.

On the other hand, if he fixes the problem by providing an option to disable the timer and/or bypass the puzzle, then everyone wins.

@The comments "don't over-think it"...it's not a matter of thinking. The progress meter goes all the way down to zero before I can even see where the pieces are on the screen. I don't even have time to think. And there is certainly no way to play the game without seeing where the pieces are first.

@The comment to choose the "Easy" setting: that makes no difference whatsoever. The timed puzzles remain virtually impossible even at the easiest difficulty setting.

@The comment to use the third party hack cheat engine: when I search for that on google, the guy who describes it says to download it at your own risk because it may contain viruses/malware. Potentially receiving viruses/malware is not worth the risk just to fix HuniePop's broken mechanic. That's the dev's job to fix via a patch or mod.

And I think GOG failed in their curation by letting HuniePop onto GOG despite it being in this unplayable state.

Hard or impossible for you doesn't mean it is for everyone, and your opinion of the quality of the game doesn't mean that everyone else would regret buying it.

My personal experience was that the timed puzzles were easy. Since they can't be failed, it's a matter of focusing on the bottom couple rows. Match anything you can until you get lucky with cascades a few times in a row.

I've won the game (100 successful alpha dates) several times over, and I am astounded by the people who say the bedroom puzzle is either too hard or not fair.

How can a puzzle that is IMPOSSIBLE TO LOSE be too hard?! :P The very concept of that boggles the mind. XD There are no broken hearts and there is no limit limit. You could literally just sit there and just stare at the screen and you won't lose it. And don't give me this "it's too fast" crap. I am a broken down old man with the reflexes of a sloth and I've never had a problem with them.

Late to the party, but just playing this one now. And while I mostly agree with what you said (being older than you and probably slower as well and I have no trouble with the final puzzles), I think some have difficulty with timed puzzles not because they can't physically do it, but they have a mental block due to it being timed. Kind of like the deer in the headlights phenomenon where they almost become paralyzed because they know they're on a timer.

With the imminent release of this game's sequel, I decided to revisit the original.

And I found my previous post in this thread still holds up 100% accurately even after all these years later --- and still zero no new patches to fix this glaring, horrible design fubar.

Guess what google auto-fills in if you type 'huniepop bedroom puzzle' into the search bar...it fills in the words "too fast"...which means many thousands of people (or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands) were searching for a solution to this same exact problem.

And that is so because it's abysmal design that the average player cannot get through. That quoted post is sheer nonsense.

It makes it sound as if anyone with reasonable gaming skills can do the puzzle, but that is not true...at all.

I am not unreasonably skilled. I play lots of fast-paced games just fine. So it's not matter of the HuniePop terrible "puzzle" being fine, but only that old fogies can't do it.

Saying the puzzle is "IMPOSSIBLE TO LOSE" is ludicrously incorrect.

You lose the puzzle anew every single time you take literally less than 5 seconds of real-time simply to look at the screen and try to see where a potential match for your gems is located.

Before you even have time to see where a match is --- much less actually to move any of your gems into a new position --- the insanely-short timer has already expired. When that happens, that's a big fat whopping Loss. All your progress in the puzzle has been instantly lost.

Then if you start again, the same same garbage happens again, because the game is operating on fundamentally broken, literally unplayable mechanics. The cycle repeats ad infinitum, because the game doesn't magically fix itself if you happen to keep struggling against it for a long time.

And if you exit out of the game, then it doesn't even save your progress and let you resume at the start of the horrible bedroom puzzle date the next time when you start the game again.

Note to be sure: an eSports-player probably could beat these bedroom "puzzles," so I'm not saying that no gamer in the universe can possibly do it. But the fact some some eSports-type players are able to do it doesn't negate one iota of the validity of any of the points I've made in this post.

By the way, even all famous eSports games don't have mechanics in them that are as anywhere close to being remotely impossible for the average player to play through, as HuniePop's bedroom "puzzle" does.

HuniePop is most probably the worst-designed video game ever made for the reasons I've just described in this post.

The bedroom puzzle is annoying/boring on this current PC, but the original PC I ran the game one had onboard video of some sort and it was terrible on that. It would run the game, and the graphics were clear, but some sort of laggy/choppy. The game took about 30 seconds to load from the .exe, but other than that, it ran just a little slow/choppy but was perfectly playable. The coin waterfall would slow down when there was lot of matches going on, and the sound would tear a bit, but it was playable because it was turn based. Until the bedroom match game. That game, will all the sound and animation would stutter it all to heck, but the "climax/excitement" timer would cool down without regard to the lagging framerate. THAT is what made it really hard, and that is what I think people have had trouble with over the years.
If the game is rendering smoothly, the bedroom puzzle is boring/stupid/easy.
If it is choppy, that same bedroom puzzle is boring/stupid/incredibly difficult to complete.

I just came here to the forum because I read the sequel is being released soon. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound promising. This is one of the few games I find myself playing once in a while, until it gets boring again. I was hoping the second one would be nearly like the first, only better and more complete.

The only things wrong with the first one was the bedroom puzzle, and the fact that the date gifts you'd give each time would not be consumed from your inventory. You can use the pink and blue shoes on every date, without buying more. And give the same shoes to the same girl on the next date, and she loved them again. And give the same shoes to Audrey that she has already seen her friend Nikki wearing, and Audrey loves them just the same, instead of a proper snarky reply.

The bedroom sex match game was just dumb. Infinite time, no skill, no way to impress or disappoint...and the halfway icky money shot scene only plays the first time, with no variation. Could have improved that a lot with a sensible timed game with various sex toy gifts to use, with bonuses in game adding towards a "stamina timer" and the total score deciding one of multiple outcomes for the bedroom pic, good/bad/indifferent. Or keep in turned based and the stamina timer remains as number of moves remaining.

Did I just reading that you need to have esports reflexes to play Huniepop? This has got to be a troll. I know plenty of people who breeze through it after the initial surprise of encountering it for the first time. Huniepop is 10/10 on Steam and I could do the bedroom puzzles with my eyes closed. With all due respect, maybe the game isn't broken or impossible and you're just not very good at puzzle games.

I've played HuniePop through to completion with no real issues. Maybe it helps that I've played a lot of other match-3 games (Bejeweled Blitz being a good example), but I didn't find the bedroom puzzles difficult at all. And I'm in my 60's, so you can't pin it on the fast reflexes of youth. :-) You just have to know how to look at the screen and spot the potential matches and keep making matches as quickly as you can. I always completed the bedroom puzzles in less than a minute or so, no problem.