Category: Adult Analysis Anthology

This is fifteenth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Gwyndolyn Marchant

My girlfriend Juniper lives in Seattle, and I live in Toronto. Despite over three-thousand (3000) kilometers of land between us, we have a very active, healthy, and supportive relationship. We are, in the parlance of my mother, both “techie” people: we use computers and smart devices thoroughly in our lives, and are almost always online in one way or another. We are both computer scientists academically; professionally I am a pixel artist and she is a streamer. We have a weekly date, we often stream together, and we have a couple social clubs we both attend remotely. We say good morning every day with chat roleplay about physical intimacy, and we admire and tease each other for our fursonas’ – our emotive-identity avatars. We have sex once or twice every couple weeks, which is mostly metered by logistical overhead.

How exactly we “have sex” varies, but it generally involves calling over Discord and playing porn games together. This isn’t exactly a novel concept; partners have been enjoying voyeuristic sexual escapades for about as long as orgies have been a concept, which if other primates are to be believed probably predates history. [1] Watching two hot people have sex, and getting horny enough that you engage with your partner sexually as well, seems to be a normal concept among many species; even dolphins get in on the fun. [2] I can’t imagine I’d surprise anybody by describing our own behavior.

I don’t remember which of us was the first to remark upon it, but I remember a particular conversation I had between Juniper, another of her girlfriends, Zoe; and I. Our corner of our polycule has long been interested in both erotica and video games as serious art forms. We were discussing Corruption of Champions 2: a large collaborative fiction with many different authors’ writing blending together. [3][4] They observed that when making decisions, they consistently spoke in the inclusive “we” or “us”: “What should we do”, “what will happen to us next”, “isn’t it hot that this is happening to us.” I thought about it and realized quite immediately that this was how I often talked when playing games with my partners. Not just during Juniper and I’s remote play sessions, but even beyond erotica. When my wife and I play a game like Pentiment, the narrative pulls us in and we enter that same grammatical space. “We” becomes the protagonist Andreas. [5] But once we finished the game, once it was over, he became “Andreas”, and “we” became my wife and I. Something specific happens when we enter the play space. Some theorists would call this the Magic Circle.

Continue reading “The Erotic Circle” →

This is fourteenth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Croomfolk

From Sex in Video Games (2007) by Brenda Brathwaite:

At the “Sexuality in Games: What’s Appropriate?” roundtable at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, one developer noted that he had no real problem with sexual content in games provided that it wasn’t “just sex for sex’s sake.”

“What’s wrong with sex for sex’s sake?” asked another developer. “Why else have sex?” she continued. “That’s the best use of sex.”

This essay is a look at a moral panic that took place around late 1993 – a panic surrounding, among other things, the release of Night Trap, a non-adult videogame that nonetheless sparked a massive public discussion on the place of adult games within the industry that still has effects to this day, having directly led to the creation of the ESRB, the content rating association still in use by the North American video games industry. Through it, I hope to offer some insight on specific brands of puritanism and their impacts on the games industry.

Continue reading “Culture Carnage: Night Trap & Witch Hunts” →

This is thirteenth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Liz Alfos

(This article is sort of a continuation of my previous article on Meet n’ Fuck. Reading it is not required but would help you get more quickly into the topic.)

Let me introduce myself: I am Liz Alfos, and for the past six years I’ve been managing the Museum of Screens, a project dedicated to research the History of games on the Internet, adult or otherwise. In the process, I have played a lot of adult Flash games, thousands of them in fact. My bar for appreciation is pretty low, I can find value and enjoyment in many of them, but most of the time I find myself more attracted to the short games than the longer ones.

In my previous article on Meet n’ Fuck, I described the games as “bite sized visual novels”. And I’ve made a case arguing those games did more than just providing sex scenes. Rereading it now, I realize I didn’t really get into why “bite sized” was a positive description for me. Today, I want to correct that. I want to talk about those “bite sized” adult games that can be finished in minutes, sometimes seconds. I want to tell you why I love them, and what makes them valuable in my eyes. But to do that, I have to go back to the very beginning of the internet. Please, indulge me in my hyperfixations.

Continue reading “Small Touches: A Case For (Very Short) Porn Games” →

This is twelfth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Fsyco

A 2007 article about BioShock saw Clint Hocking coin the term “ludonarrative dissonance” to describe the disconnect in video games between the story being told by the gameplay elements and the story being told by the actual narrative. A commonly-cited example of this phenomenon is Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series. In the narrative, Nathan is a lovable thief with a heart of gold, but in gameplay, he guns down his fellow man without a second thought. It produces an uncanny effect where Nathan comes off like some kind of psychopath, and it feels weird to many players that these two elements never seem to address each other.

Pornographic media has its own version of this, a sort of “pornonarrative dissonance” if you will. Porn media with a plot focus often treat its writing and story as wholly separate elements. The writer comes up with things like plot, characters, and setting, and then comes up with “the sex that will happen” (assuming someone else doesn’t do that). And yet, an often overlooked element is how the narrative should inform the sex scenes, and vice versa.

When these two elements are not in agreement, the project as a whole suffers. It leads to cheesy writing and indistinct characters. It might be serviceable as porn, or the kind of “fine” you italicize or put in air quotes, but it holds the work back as a whole and prevents it from becoming truly special. To illustrate my point, I’d like to look at a few porn video games. Some of them handle this well, and others not so well. By doing so, I’d like to demonstrate how this disconnect manifests in a given work.

Continue reading “Never The Two Shall Meet: The Separation Of Story & Sex Scenes In Porn Games” →

This is eleventh of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Talon T

I picked up my first otome game at Cybird’s booth at Anime Expo 2015. Before this, I was already into anime and its horny fandoms, so I was excited for this opportunity to gameify my thirst for 2D characters. I would have been perfectly content with indulgent trashy tropes – little did I know, Ikemen Sengoku would immediately set a high standard for me for otome. Unbelievably, it reconnected me with my sexual and romantic needs, leading me to finally leave my dirtbag ex. It would reconnect me with tumblr communities, where we continued to be able to explore responsive desire and erotica in written form, even long after tumblr’s nsfw ban.

Continue reading “Responsive Desire & The Eroticism Of Tumblr Longposts About 2D Boyfriends” →

This is tenth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: A. J. Malachite

In July 2025, itch.io mass delisted hundreds of adult games and other erotic media with no warning due to pressure from payment processor Stripe. There has been widespread outrage and concern over this censorship, with many organizing community action and support for the creators affected. Most of the anti-censorship backlash has focused, deservedly so, on how proponents of censorship define queer content as inherently pornographic – making a ban on “adult content” the first stop on a slippery slope to banning visible queer existence in media. A closer look at the policies of platforms like itch.io and Patreon reveals one of the key mechanisms in the slippery slope designed to harm and isolate queer people: vagueness that allows for open interpretation.

The itch.io content crackdown was just another action in a long line of governments, corporations, and platforms enforcing increasingly severe sexual repression. Only a few weeks prior, Steam had implemented their own crackdown, also in response to pressure from payment processors. In January 2022, the platform Game Jolt banned porn games in preparation for the launch of its mobile app. And in the past few years, over a third of U.S. states have introduced privacy-violating ID verification laws and other restrictions for online adult content, resulting in sites like PornHub blocking access to users in those states and a surge in the popularity of VPNs.

Continue reading “Getting Off The Slippery Slope” →

This is ninth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Eternal_Savvy

I’ve had a high libido for as long as I’ve been interested in sex, and it’s been a rough journey. Sex isn’t something people discuss in polite company, and as a teenager I often felt completely crazy because every time that I thought I had found someone who I could talk to about sex, I was met with a rejection, and always “that look.” A look that immediately made me feel a little more alone. I only ended up finding success in expressing my interests when I started to play the role of the sex-obsessed macho-man—a persona that was a poor fit for me and thankfully soon discarded. I didn’t want to just march around bragging about sexual exploits and measuring dicks. Talking about sex always somehow became a competition; proving how “manly” and “macho” you were with how many women you’d had sex with, and talking about who you had set your sights on to conquer. I never felt satisfied with the way that people expected me to treat sex because I wanted to talk more deeply about how it affected me. In the absence of conversation, I instead found that satisfaction in playing porn games. Eventually I came to realise they were capable of something that no other medium is: the ability to let us explore the deepest parts of ourselves safely, without the risk of harming others. Porn and sex have since become a passion within me that now affects almost every part of my life. I’m an artist, and a streamer, and I draw porn, and I talk pretty openly about sex and kinks on my streams. I do this because I know what it’s like to feel alone, and I want to be that voice I was so desperately looking for when I was younger. But I never really overcame that shame about my interest in porn and sex until recently.

I make a point of browsing what new adult games are available on Itch.io and Steam. I do this to find the porn with a little extra something: the sparks of conversations about game quality, potential, storytelling, or even just informed directions about what’s out there. The porn game scene is not exactly the most inspiring sight to behold at the moment. Many people don’t respect porn, and some developers will make glorified galleries locked behind shitty puzzles just to get your money. Now I’m not going to sit here and say that I don’t like capital “P” Porn, even as a means to an end I enjoy some good filthy fucking without much reason behind it. But the reason I do this is because I am looking for those people that see what I see in porn games; a medium that explores a part of being human that is not seen anywhere else, doing so by placing you in simulated situations where you can ask questions about yourself. I found that in a game I discovered in early 2025 called “Hazelnut Latte“.

Continue reading “Sanctuary In Vulnerabilty: Hazelnut Latte & Creeping Censorship” →

This is eighth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Bigg

WARNING: This review contains discussions of eroticized sexual violence, bestiality, and sexualized characters with childlike appearances. Please read at your own discretion.

What if there was an all-babes Suikoden where everyone kept falling ass-over-teakettle into extremely sexual tentacles? The answer to this question is provided by Tsukinomizu Project in the form of their 2023 RPG, Eclipse Knight Saga ~Captive Princess Knight Mary~. This reveals to us the dangers of asking hypothetical questions willy-nilly. In all honesty, Eclipse Knight Saga is not, for the most part, a bad game. In the roughly 20 hours I played, which I’m told only brings me about a third of the way through this game’s total average playtime, I encountered some things I was modestly impressed by and more than a few things I disliked, but most of the time what I encountered was slumped-over, jaw-resting-against-my-fist, capital-B Boredom.

Everything about Eclipse Knight Saga is perfectly competent and serviceable. Its combat functions, and even possesses an identifiable difficulty curve that does demands a certain level of attention and mastery (though only up to a point – more on this later). There exists a mostly-cogent narrative (I say “mostly” because the English translation often leaves something to be desired) and the cast does include a very large number of characters (this is frequently not as much of an asset as the game seems to think it is – more on this later). If you’re in the market for a certain strain of tentacle porn, this game does contain a generous helping thereof. On the other hand, if you find tentacle porn crass and weightless as I do, that huge helping quickly starts to look less like a treat and more like a chore. Yes, you guessed it: more on this later.

All the pieces are there, everything works, and even I’m not so curmudgeonly as to deny the game its flowers for the little flourishes it adds, such as its charming combat sprites and upgradeable home base. By the standards of pornographic video games, this places it in rarefied company. And yet, as you might have gleaned from my many caveats, I would struggle to recommend it to any save a very specific few.

Continue reading “An Unenthusiastic Eclipse Knight Saga Review” →

This is seventh of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Darling Demon Eclipse

In my experience playing erotic play-by-post chatroom tabletop roleplaying games, a particular text was passed around a lot, but never really used – the Book of Erotic Fantasy for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e was an artifact of fascination, occasionally a focus for the masturbation of TTRPG-playing perverts, but never really something we wound up playing. In a number of these play-by-post games, we’d grab bits and pieces and apply them to Dungeons & Dragons 5e, but we never fully used the Book of Erotic Fantasy. We all had the sense that it was too intricate and intrusive in its portrayal of sex and sexuality, that its many stat rolls and pregnancy tables were ultimately going to get in the way of the fantasy-fucking stories we were telling.

We were right that Erotic Fantasy was overelaborate, but for me this concession meant, from about 2017 to 2021, resigning myself to the idea that there are no erotic adventure TTRPGs to be played – I had heard of Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe by Riverhouse Games and other great, erotic games that could be played as oneshots, but I wanted more and longer-lasting erotic games. After studying a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse games, I started working on my erotic communist fantasy heartbreaker Sapphicworld (which is still in development as of writing). The process of developing that game ultimately inflicted me with the curse that this essay is about.

Continue reading “I Only Want To Fuck The Dice” →

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This is sixth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Kastel

I believe Amelie Doree has written some of the finest criticisms on adult visual novels. In accessible English, she integrates her queer experiences and scholarly research to discuss why erotic fiction is an authentic vehicle for artistic expression. You can see it for yourself on her YouTube channel – my personal favorite is her video on Suisenka.

But before she became a pioneering figure of our times, she was an ordinary trans woman who followed my ramblings on visual novels. While reading older visual novels and thinking about the historical conditions of their narratives, I joked on Twitter that I wouldn’t mind helping a video essayist discuss visual novels. Expecting nothing, I was surprised to see her reply on the next day, asking if I could help provide background information and translations on a then recently translated game, Dōkyūsei: Bangin’ Summer, a remake of a historically influential visual novel from the 90s. The ensuing video helped establish a long-lasting collaboration that persists to this day.

As a fellow critic, I am always curious about the way others formulate their thoughts and put them into words, especially under restrictive settings. Her answers below are a window to a mind who cares deeply about the meaning and place of adult visual novels. I hope you find them as insightful as I have.

Continue reading “An Interview With Amelie Doree” →