Category: Adult Analysis Anthology

This is third 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: Braden Liatris

Let’s start with a question: why do we play porn games?

By syntactic necessity, it can’t be because of the game part, so it must be because of the porn part. What is it about pornography that we find so compelling? That answer may seem obvious, but it still merits consideration. Erotica and pornography don’t just seek to inform or entertain, they aim to get a rise out of their audience. They stir our blood. They excite our humors. They make us wet. Therefore, we play porn games because we want to be aroused.

So what exactly do choices have to do with any of that?

Continue reading “Do Porn Games Need Choices?” →

This is second 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: Stanley Baxton

If you’re reading this, there’s a high chance you’ve played an adult game. There’s also a high chance you’ve played an adult game where losing might be, in many ways, desirable. Consider BDSM games where losing makes your master angry and subsequently punishes you, fantasy games with bondage monsters that tie you up when you fail a quicktime event, and PvE games where arousal is a status effect building to a disabling orgasm. It’s such a common thread in adult games that it almost feels disingenuous to hone in on one to do a specific case study.

Here’s a question I’d like to raise: How many times have you seen this done in a triple-A game? Not the porn aspect necessarily, but the fact that these are games where losing, opposed to winning, is designed explicitly as a state the player might want to achieve. Adult game designers aren’t stupid; they are fully aware that people are losing their games on purpose to reach them. Why are they designing for failure? Instead of dismissing this, I’d like to ask the opposite question. Why aren’t triple-A games designing for failure?

Continue reading “What If The Player WANTS To Lose?” →

This is first 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: Kangoo

Overthinking solutions to mundane problems is one of my greatest joys in life. I love puzzles; I love untangling knots, metaphorical or otherwise; I have, on occasion, been accused of having a “Works Cited fetish”. It will come as no surprise then that, upon Morgan K’s essay on Game Overs for the first time, my brain immediately latched on to a single sentence:

“The experience of a lot of the [ryona] games I encountered didn’t really seem to work in practice. As games, they often left a lot to be desired.” (Emphasis mine)

This line felt like scratching the surface of a very interesting question, albeit one a little tangential to the main subject matter of her essay, that being: how do you make a ryona game (and I’m using that term in a very broad sense to include any adult game where defeat results in erotica) that works as a game? As in: how do you create an adult game that the player will want to fail and not have it feel like scrolling through porn gifs while having to press twice as many buttons as usual? How do you make a game that you can win, but don’t want to?

Continue reading “Either Way, What Bliss: The Problem Of Balancing A Game For Players Who Want To Fail” →

Pitches are now being accepted for essays to be included in the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, the web’s premiere destination for high-quality long-form writing about porn games and porn game culture. If you would like to jump right to pitching, you can do so via this form. If you would like to learn more about the anthology and the pitch process, read on!

Continue reading “Adult Analysis Anthology Issue 4 Submissions Now Open!” →

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This is both the tenth of ten essays contained within the second issue AND the sixth of fourteen essays contained within the third 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: You are about to read more than ten thousand words of writing about Studio FOW’s pornographic top-down space shooter/grid-based tactics game/visual novel Subverse. As part of the fundraiser to pay for AAA’s second issue, I offered a $200-dollar “Buy My Opinion” perk that promised the purchaser a minimum-1,500-word review of any adult game of their choosing, and Subverse was the game that was chosen. I did an exhaustive amount of research for my review, not only playing the full game to completion but additionally reading through several years of Kickstarter progress reports, development blog updates, forum posts, and even tracking down and reading the four Kickstarted Subverse h-manga. I wound up writing so much because this level of research brought with it an attendant feeling of obligation to prove my thoroughness, and because Subverse proved to be an extremely interesting subject. However, unlike every other AAA essay, my review did not receive a free-to-read web version. This decision came down to two factors: firstly, the version of Subverse I played was the 0.9 Early Access version, meaning that it was technically incomplete and sections of the review might be obsolete in a few month’s time. And second, I thought that keeping the review (which I was fairly proud of, and still am) within the paid version of the anthology might encourage people to purchase it. I did, at least, publish an excerpt of the review to this blog, but that was it.

Fast-forward to the fundraiser to pay for the THIRD issue of AAA. Seeing that Subverse had made it to its full, final release, I decided to offer, as a joke, a $500-dollar “Make Me Review Subverse Again” perk, promising to do just that if someone ponied up what I felt was an absurd amount of money. Unfortunately, someone with five hundred Canadian dollars to blow decided that it would be even funnier to call my bluff, which is how I wound up playing all the way through Subverse AGAIN to see what had changed. I shouldn’t complain, as that $500 obviously went quite a long way to funding AAA3, but sometimes one must simply marvel at man’s inhumanity to man.

Now that it’s come time to publish the web version of the second review, I feel it’s both appropriate and necessary to publish both reviews in full, together. The second review makes several references to the first, and at the same time there are things I didn’t mention in the second review (or mentioned only briefly) due to having covered them in the first one, making this the most sensible way to experience them. There are a few things in the first review that ARE obsolete (for example: the first review makes reference to marketing copy on the Subverse Steam page that no longer exists), so hopefully you as a reader will be understanding of those details when you encounter them.

Without further delay, please enjoy what will hopefully be all of the writing I’ll ever have to do about Subverse.

Continue reading “The COMPLETE Subverse Review” →

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This is fourteenth of fourteen essays contained within the third 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

Here’s an important disclosure right off the top: I am not reviewing Ghost Hug Games’ adult cyberpunk visual novel Hardcoded from anything resembling a place of objectivity. I backed Ghost Hug Games’ Patreon for several years prior to the game’s release, and I was also a (mostly-lurking) member of their official Discord server. Moreover, Kenzie (one of Hardcoded’s two primary developers) is both a professional colleague and personal friend of mine; we regularly chat and share details with one another about our lives and projects. I like Kenzie and want her projects to be well-regarded and succeed financially. Had the person who purchased the fundraising perk entitling them to an adult game review of their choosing not explicitly named Hardcoded as their choice, I wouldn’t be reviewing it due to these acknowledged biases. However: they did, which is all the excuse I need! Consider yourself informed!

That being said, Hardcoded is hardly some hidden gem; it’s arguably one of the most successful and influential adult games of the past decade – indeed, I frequently cite Hardcoded as one of the strongest influences on my own games. Over its seven years of development, Hardcoded broke through the wall of silence typically leveled at adult games, receiving favorable coverage from a number of mainstream outlets including Kotaku, Fanbyte, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Wired. The Ghost Hug Games Patreon is currently bringing in over $7,800 USD/month at the time of writing, which according to Patreon-stats-tracking site Graphtreon puts it at #28 of all adult games on the platform and #328 of all Patreon creators the world over (this is not a new development – the page has NEVER dropped from the top 30 adult game pages on Patreon since first breaking through in January of 2019. Also, these numbers have presently at $7,463/month, #29 of all adult games, and #374 of campaigns worldwide). Hardcoded’s Steam page boasts an 89% favorable rating with nearly 200 ratings (229 as of this publishing) – not exactly Deltarune-level payment-processor-bricking numbers, but a solid showing. In other words, Hardcoded’s place in history is assured. Whatever small boost in acclaim and sales it receives from being reviewed favorably in this anthology will likely not even register.

One benefit of reviewing a game that’s already been so very talked-about is that I feel empowered to skim past the things that get brought up in every piece of coverage, to avoid retreading EXTREMELY flattened turf. For example, it’s a great relief that there exists so much coverage of Hardcoded pointing out that it presents an attractive, exciting, honest view of trans sexuality that never feels like it’s crossing the line into fetishism – this is absolutely true, but at this point it’s something that anyone who knows anything about the game knows already, and frankly it’s nice that as a cisgender man I don’t have to attempt to issue a ruling on a narrative’s trans authenticity.

The other benefit of the relatively-extensive extant coverage of Hardcoded is that it helps me figure out how a late-arriving review such as mine might be useful. What I’ve noticed in reading writing produced about Hardcoded is that while it tends to be spoken of in glowing terms that laud the quality of the writing and erotica (both admittedly excellent), it tends to be spoken of less as a game and more as a kind of amorphous positive experience. This is something of a recurring trope in writing about any media that concerns marginalized groups; so much time is spent interrogating whether or not said media does right by said marginalized group that very little is left over to discuss how said media actually functions as a piece of media. Reading about Hardcoded, one would likely get a strong impression that it is a good, original cyberpunk story that happens to contain some also-quite-good trans erotica, but then be left with very little in the way of an idea of how said story and erotica are conveyed, what the loop of gameplay feels like, or indeed, any of the non-narrative features of the game whatsoever. So, that gives me a good direction, to whit: how does Hardcoded feel to play, as a porn game?

Continue reading “They Should Make ‘Em All Like This: The Hardcoded Review” →

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This is thirteenth of fourteen essays contained within the third 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: Lindsay Ishihiro

LEMON ALERT: this fic features hot! smexy! boys! kissing! don’t like, don’t read! you’ve been warned!

My eyes were tender and pure on the fateful day I first beheld a content warning on the internet. It was for a Sailor Moon fanfic, or possibly Pokemon; the actual story probably lives somewhere on the internet still, a text file in an archive that hasn’t seen the touch of its webmaster’s hand since before Y2K. Its warning stands like two trunk-like legs in the shifting sand: don’t like, don’t read.

It was a simpler time.

In games, the subject of content warnings has a tendency to spark debate. It brings to mind tedious arguments that video games cause harm (they don’t) or that they cause others to do harm (correlation is not causation), that they’re brainrot unworthy of being called art (insulting) and adult games are especially so. The thing is, I care about content warnings. From the first fanfic I read where Tuxedo Mask accidentally impregnated Zoisite with his magic rose — not a euphemism — my home has been in fandom communities where strange content is the norm and content warning is the law of the land, both as courtesy to some and an enticement to others.

Adult games have a lot in common with the playful spaces of fandom communities. They can both be places of great vulnerability, not just for the creator but for those consuming it. Both encourage the player or reader to be fully embodied in the text, to see themselves within it. This agency, and the raw desires and discomforts that arise from it, are encased in a frequently upsetting stew of sexual baggage, assumptions, intimate memories and, sometimes, trauma. Adult content can turn you inside out, and just like in real sex, that can be welcome or disgusting… or both.

Continue reading “I Am The Trigger: What Adult Games Can Learn From Fandom” →

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This is twelfth of fourteen essays contained within the third 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: Leo G.

A few years back I was in a voice chat. The subject of cuckold porn was brought up. Someone said, “It’s fucking disgusting. What kind of loser would jerk off to the idea of his wife getting fucked by another man?” I responded innocently with, “Wait, you imagine yourself as the cuck?” The room went silent, and the topic was quickly changed. I think about that conversation often, not only because it was really funny, but also because it made me realize how many facets and angles there were to NTR and cuckold porn.

NTR (an abbreviation for the Japanese term “netorare”, which translates literally “to take off” and is used to describe pornography wherein a character’s love interest is seduced and stolen by a sexually-aggressive antagonist) has a reputation. If you’ve ever clicked on an NTR doujin and scrolled down to the comment section, there’s usually someone who took the time out of their day to let everyone know that if they’re masturbating to this, they’re sick. The way they’ll talk about NTR brings to mind the type of comment you’d see on an entomologist’s cool pictures of a tarantula or millipedes. “KILL IT WITH FIRE,” someone would yell into the post tagged “#thing you don’t like.”

But it goes deeper than not liking a genre. As we’ve seen online, people will get very possessive and disturbed when it comes to the concept of a woman they desire having a relationship with another man. And to a degree, why wouldn’t they be? A lot of the gacha and anime industry is predicated on creating a parasocial environment, where the idea is that these women exist just for you. They’ll never have a man in their life canonically, and might as well be wearing purity rings. What I find fascinating about this phenomenon is that cheating in erotica is a tale as old as time. The housewife that has sex with the milkman, the married duchess who hates her boring marriage, the examples are endless. Romance and pornography would have a much slimmer catalog if we removed all instances of extramarital sex.

For the vitriolic commenters that love their waifus, NTR is all about the nasty feelings associated with being the victim of cheating. But these days, NTR can mean anything from “two adults who consensually swing,” to “man sobbing in a closet while his wife pays off his debts with her pussy.” A content warning that’s too generic can lead to unwanted surprises, and for that reason I understand being uncomfortable with it. But then, why is it so popular?

Continue reading “She’s Nobody’s Woman, Literally: A Deep-Dive Into The NTR Genre & Why It’s Everywhere” →

This is eleventh of fourteen essays contained within the third 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:Morgan K

I have a vivid memory from my childhood. I’m sitting in my parents’ living room playing 1995’s Toy Story for the SNES. I would have been around 7 years old, too young to experience it as anything more than stimulus, impulse, input, response, but old enough to know I loved the feeling of the cycle. I was pretty good at video games for my age, at least by my older brother’s assessment, so up ’til then I’d never really confronted a game that seemed an insurmountable wall until I encountered “A Buzz Clip”. Piloting an RC car, you must attack Buzz Lightyear before your battery runs out, collecting powerups along the way to extend its rapidly diminishing energy. A simple driving segment, must have played plenty like it before, but try after try, I just could not finish. Then, after one particularly well-executed run where I timed out mere pixels away from the next time extension, I flipped out.

The room spun as my vision became blurry. I wanted to scream, I probably did, but sound had ceased to reach me as an alien impulse took over my body, compelling me to thrash and strike the floor as the tension that had been building in me with each failure snapped, flooding me with an emotion more intense than any I had experienced before. I woke up later in bed to my mother scolding me, but I didn’t care. I’d breached a new horizon of emotional experience, my first full blown tilt. How did a video game do that to me?

As someone whose life very much centers around games, I’ve thought back to that experience a lot over the years. It’s given me a deep appreciation for the art of the “Game Over”, an element with vastly more opportunities to inform the moment-to-moment experience of a game than its prestigious “A Winner Is You” counterpart. They both represent a release from the tension of gameplay, briefly ushering you out of the simulation and back into reality, or at least the abstract mid-point of the title screen. However, while a well-executed ending can make or break a game, potentially redeeming an otherwise lackluster journey, the way a game frames your failures acts as an invitation, an opportunity to convince you to stay immersed, to remind you that you’re having fun, or at least something like it. It’s bargaining, it’s persuasion, at times it is even seduction, and it’s this form which I am most intrigued by.

Continue reading “Bad End: The Seduction Of “Game Over”” →

This is tenth of fourteen essays contained within the third 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:MxMorganic

Steam tells me I bought Scarlet Maiden on March 16, 2023. I remember being intrigued by the gameplay, but more than anything I was sold by the visuals: the pixel art and animations were crisp, it was a treat for the eyes, and it was incredibly sexy. It looked hot, it looked loaded with adult content, and between those specifics and my omnipresent interest in new, high-quality porn games, buying was a no-brainer.

When I pitched this article, I knew I wanted to talk about Scarlet Maiden, because despite never finishing it, I thought about it often. I remember appreciating how it didn’t waste my time before letting me actually play it. I woke up as Scarlet, the game’s protagonist, got enough plot to justify sending me into the game’s randomly-generating dungeon, and within minutes was hacking and slashing my way through monsters, avoiding spikes and traps, and repeatedly dying to the Triboob warriors because they hit like a truck and I hadn’t mastered the dodging yet.

Continue reading “Sex And Color In Scarlet Maiden” →