There’s a certain threshold that exists when critically considering any artistic work: namely, a certain standard of that must be achieved before the work can be expected to withstand any level of critical scrutiny. This is not merely a standard of quality, but also a standard of cohesive creative intent – is the creator of an artistic work offering some kind of identifiable vision, such that the steps they took to attempt to realize that vision can be evaluated for their effectiveness? Further, to what extent could the creator be expected to absorb, digest, and respond to critical feedback in their work? And, lastly, to what extent could critical examination be said to be of use or interest to a wider audience?

If all that sounds a bit abstract, think of it like this:  most people would consider it “fair play” to level in-depth critical analysis towards The Case Of The Golden Idol than towards a game created in the recent Ludum Dare 56 game jam. This has nothing to do with Golden Idol supposedly being objectively “better” than a game jam creation. The difference is that Golden Idol is a carefully-considered piece of art with a clear objective – namely, to offer a player the chance to solve a series of ever-more-challenging mysteries that demand they employ lateral thinking and inductive reasoning. The team that created it clearly meet a baseline level of professional competence with regards to programming, art, sound design, and game design ability, and were presumably given a sufficient amount of time to exercise their various crafts. While Golden Idol might not have the cultural footprint of a game like Overwatch, it has enjoyed commercial success beyond that of most indie games, as well as a fair amount of critical praise. Conversely, a Ludum Dare creation is made over the course of just a few days, by a team that might be making a game for the first time in their lives. While there will certainly be things about their creation that will be imperfect, what purpose is served by pointing that out? If someone were to take their Ludum Dare game and invest significant time and expertise into developing it, it might very well BECOME something that could be fairly criticized, but attempting to do so  before then (unsolicited) would be rightly seen as both useless and mean-spirited.

I think a lot of adult games fall below the threshold for criticism. This is partly for the reasons I outline above – a great many adult games are made by amateurs who do not have clear artistic visions or much in the way of budgets, and almost all adult games fall far short of any kind of public notability. Furthermore, porn games enjoy a certain level of resistance to criticism simply by virtue of being pornography. A pornographic work CAN be carried up to a certain point on the simple statement of “this is porn, it’s for cranking off to, you don’t need to think about it that hard” – a statement I think is perfectly valid! I fundamentally disagree with the notion that the things that make us cum have to be 100% internally-consistent or even especially tasteful, primarily because I think trying to seriously argue so places one on a slippery slope to full-throated Puritanism. So, for a porn game to be truly “good enough” to criticize seriously, I would argue that it not only needs to be a work of sufficient coherence, technical ability, and notability, but also that it needs to evince a creative mission BEYOND making the player cum with all possible speed.

To date, I’ve only publicly written one review of a porn game – Studio FOW’s Subverse. (An excerpt of said review can be found here, and the full review can be found in the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology.) However, this review wound up being pretty exclusively negative, and one thing I’ve brought up in my past writing on the dire state of porn game coverage is the idea that a robust body of critical writing about porn games should serve to IMPROVE porn games by making developers think more carefully about the decisions that they’re making. While a mostly-negative review can certainly contain actionable feedback, I worry about contributing to the perception that adult games exist solely for “serious” critics to laugh at, and further worry about contributing to the perception that engaging critically with an artistic work should only take the form of tearing it down.

Bringing It Around To Vaygren: Lustful Temptation

So with all of that in mind, I thought it would be a productive exercise to critically examine an adult game I played recently that I really enjoyed! Namely, Cyberframe Studios’s Vaygren: Lustful Temptation! This is a game I’d been saving for myself for quite some time, because I was pretty certain I’d enjoy it and wanted to save it for a rainy day. I finally had occasion to crack it open while recovering from a recent minor surgery, and I wasn’t disappointed! I’d been aware of Cyberframe’s pedigree for a little while – Lustful Temptation takes place in a larger fictional universe that the studio have been building out on their website for some time via illustrations, comics, and single-shot animations, and it’s always so gratifying to see a team exploring more ambitious forms of storytelling for what’s clearly a project they’re passionate about. The team even has a pretty laudable mission statement on their website’s “About Us” page: “We want to make hentai, hark back to hentai from the 80s and 90s, where the story was just as important as bumping uglies.” Hell yeah!

I don’t believe there’s any question that Lustful Temptation meets the standards for serious critical engagement as I’ve laid them out. It’s unquestionably a professionally-produced piece of art created by a team that obviously cares about doing a good job. It’s enjoyed a decent amount of commercial success since release, and was released with the support of one of the best-known publishers of adult games outside of Japan. And, although it’s a porn game that definitely, DEFINITELY wants to make the people who play it cum and cum a lot, it’s also attempting to tell a fantasy story evocative of 90s-to-00s-era adventure anime set within a coherent, considered world. Critically, that’s a lot to work with!

Let’s start with the positives, however – and they’re plentiful! I feel the need to stress this: although I’m about to write critically about it, my experience with Vaygren: Lustful Temptation was, on balance, a positive one, and I encourage anyone seeking a high-quality adult game to buy it and take it for a spin. Lustful Temptation is beautifully illustrated and lushly animated, yes, but even more impressive is how pitch-perfect the art and animation is in its homage to turn-of-the-Millennium big-budget hentai. It speaks to the team being real students of their influences as well as being careful practitioners of their craft. The story is also a promising one – a young, ambitious sergeant in the army of a crazed monarch is given her first major solo command of a squad of untested recruits and sent out into the world to stamp out the flames of rebellion! Classic stuff! Lots of places that could go, can’t wait! The game is also fully voice-acted, and features an original theme song composed by Souichi Sakagami! It’s also VERY attractively-priced at a mere $8 USD – honestly I think the team could have charged twice that and I’d still have felt like I was getting my money’s worth for how slick everything is. Given that the final version of Lustful Temptation is meant to be five times as long as what’s currently available, I think there’s a strong case for getting in on the ground floor while it’s in Early Access. Finally, there was one quality-of-life feature I quite enjoyed: Nyx, the player character, can choose to focus her libidinous attentions on one of the five members of her squad alone in a given playthrough. However, this is a porn game, and players are going to want to see all available content and thus play through all five routes. Thoughtfully, save files on Lustful Temptation‘s save screen feature a small chibi icon of the character whose route the player is on in said file, removing the guesswork if you (like me) aren’t the greatest about remembering to give your saves informative names.

Having laid out the positives, let’s move on to some questions that occurred to me during my time playing Lustful Temptation. I’m posing them as questions rather than out-and-out criticisms because I recognize that what I’ve played so far is the first of five planned episodes, and as such there remains plenty of time for areas of friction to be smoothed out.

• Racialization of several of the game’s primary cast plays a large role in Lustful Temptation‘s narrative. Player character Nyx is a nekomata beastkin (in other words, a catgirl), and reflects several times on how her racialized status meant that she faced significant challenges and discrimination while moving up the army’s ranks. The same is true of her lizardkin subordinate, Ra’ga. Two of Nyx’s other subordinates are the dark elves Cassidy and Yvain, both of whom are remarked upon by Nyx and others repeatedly as being sexually-desireable due to being exotic and uncommon. The intersection of racial dynamics and sex is common in porn, though rarely in what anyone would consider a “tasteful” manner when looking at fetishizing genre designations such as “BBC”, “blacked”, “petite Asian”, and so on. Fantasy media also has a similarly checkered past with the issue of race, often flattening entire races down to a handful of broad traits, and reproducing real-world racial injustices unthinkingly in immature attempts at creating the illusion of depth within a setting. While it’s too early in the story to make a definitive ruling, what steps (if any) will Lustful Temptation take to avoid or subvert the looming problem of racial fetishization?
• Society within the world of Vaygren: Lustful Temptation appears, so far, to be mono-gendered. There are no male characters present in the game, the trailer, or any cutscenes. Player character Nyx has a vagina but she can (and does, on several occasions) magically summon a functional penis. There are several other penis-having women in the game, though it’s unclear whether they have theirs all the time or summon and dismiss theirs at will like Nyx. While I hold that this is a perfectly valid creative choice with a lot of interesting narrative potential, I’m somewhat skeptical of it being examined in any serious way. I’m reminded of Lynn Robinson’s essay “Femboys, Futanari, And Finding Myself In The Space Between Their Bodies” in the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, wherein she writes “Importantly, the futanari rarely has a history. If you ask her how she got her penis, the answer may be ‘magic’ or it may be ‘I don’t know, I’ve always had it.’ The question you never ask a futanari, though, is ‘how did you become a girl?’ That would be missing the point.” It’s very easy for women with penises to be reduced to sexual props within pornographic narratives. Will Lustful Temptation be one such narrative, or does it have plans for a more robust commentary on gender?
• Another interesting facet of society within Vaygren: Lustful Temptation is how sexually-permissive it is. When we first meet Nyx, she’s in the middle of being fucked by her commanding officer. The Queen fucks her adjutant while addressing her troops. The troops all fuck each other in their bunks, the training yard, and various nooks and crannies throughout the castle. While this is a great fit for a pornographic story, it does make certain other story beats difficult to parse. In the story path concerning Ra’ga, Nyx’s lizardkin subordinate, conflict is set up by having Ra’ga clearly attempting to find a mentor in Nyx, someone who shares her experience of racialization within the queendom’s military – only to have her illusions shattered when Nyx demands Ra’ga fuck her, something Nyx sees as her right as Ra’ga’s superior officer. Ra’ga is reluctant, but ultimately complies, leaving Nyx’s bedchambers clearly upset afterwards (something Nyx is mystified by). In another genre of story, this would be a pretty cut-and-dry abuse of power by Nyx, as well as a form of sexual assault, and would serve to inform future conflict between the two characters. However, the pornographic setting throws something of a spanner in the works of that reading. As far as a player can tell, sex between everyone regardless of class or relative power appears to be extremely commonplace, to the point of being mundane. Loud, athletic, high-cum-volume sex appears to be as common within Lustful Temptation as sharing a meal or having a conversation. Are we meant to sympathize with Nyx and agree that it was unreasonable for Ra’ga to assume Nyx wouldn’t want to have sex with her? Furthermore, how intentional is the decision to provoke discomfort within the player by making them implicitly cosign Nyx’s decision to take advantage of her subordinate? Will the boundaries of sexual propriety within Lustful Temptation’s setting be more clearly delineated in future episodes?

As I said, overall I very much enjoyed Vaygren: Lustful Temptation and am looking forward to the release of its second episode on October 29th! Are there any other adult games you’d like me to take a deeper look at (or any you’d just like to outright recommend)? Sound off in the comments! That’s it from me for now!

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