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.

Month after month, I kept intending to go back and play more. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much fun the action-platforming was, probably because surviving in Scarlet Maiden demands nothing less than your full attention. Just navigating from one room to another requires a fair bit of skill, to say nothing of when the aforementioned spikes, arrows, and enemies enter the mix, and all the while the difficulty’s steadily rising the deeper you go. Moreover, while enemies clearly telegraph their attacks, you really feel it when those attacks do connect. It’s a tough game, but it’s fair, and I loved that about it.

You may have noticed that I haven’t said a word about the porn yet. Here’s how it works: most of the sex in Scarlet Maiden comes in short scenes, scattered throughout the dungeon. The scenes are varied, and there are a lot of them, and they provide a unique, sexy way to buff Scarlet’s power. After sex, she’ll get a mechanical benefit – usually a stat increase, a new item, or extra experience points – and then she’ll get back to her adventure.

As time passed, as I kept thinking about Scarlet Maiden, I held on to a vague memory that these scenes were good, yet when I thought fondly on my time playing this game, a game I’d bought primarily for the porn, all I could remember was how much I loved the action-platforming. That exact paradox is precisely why I wanted to write about it: I wanted to figure out why I had such clear memories about playing a porn game whose porn I could barely recall.

As an undergraduate, I read an article which remains fundamental to how I think about games, an article in which the author wrote extensively about an idea they called color. The upshot is this: the mechanical foundations of a game are one thing, but the visuals, music, characters, and world laid atop those foundations – i.e. the game’s “color” – are another. Many video game genres take their names from the titles whose mechanics and design philosophies define their shared DNA. For example, consider “Metroidvanias.” In naming this genre after its progenitors, there’s a tacit acknowledgement that these games’ mechanics offer their players similar gameplay experiences. Yet when it comes to Metroidvanias, no one would say Super Metroid is the same game as Symphony of the Night, or Hollow Knight, or the distinctly-NSFW Castle in the Clouds DX, because despite fundamental similarities in the mechanics underneath, each game’s color is so distinct that they all provide the player a very different experience on the whole.

The older I get, the more a game’s color matters to me. My interest in and appreciation of a game often have quite a lot to do with how I feel about its color, and it’s clear to me in hindsight that this is absolutely why I bought Scarlet Maiden. Yet if its pornographic color is so important to the game’s identity, shouldn’t it have left a lasting impression on me?

It’s not as if the game’s adult content is bad: quite the opposite! Replaying the game for this article, I felt just as impressed now by what Otherside Games managed to do with pixel art as I’d felt when I bought it. I can’t begin to fathom how much time and attention was spent animating each and every jiggle, and that stylistic choice is one of my very favorite parts of the experience. Scarlet’s sexual escapades are great, too. Not every scene appeals to my personal tastes, but certainly none of her trysts with the dungeon’s adventurers, monsters, and bosses left me disappointed. But that still doesn’t explain why I couldn’t remember any of the high-quality sex in a game I remembered so fondly.

Here’s the rub: there’s simply no time to rub one out while you’re playing Scarlet Maiden. As mentioned above, if you’re going to make any significant amount of progress into the dungeon, much less ever finish a run, keeping Scarlet alive is going to require focus so deep that personally, I’ve almost entirely stopped paying attention to the porn when I play. Maybe it’s a skill issue, but I still find the aforementioned Triboob warriors so threatening that despite their unique design – one which does actually turn me on! – their eponymous trio of titties barely registers as sexual anymore. When I see three boobs on one body, I don’t think “awooga!” I think “time to lock in.”

That’s not to say it’s impossible to appreciate the porn in this game. There’s a gallery containing each sexual encounter Scarlet’s found herself in, and you don’t even have to return to the title screen to check it out. You can be as deep in a run as you like, and you’re always welcome to pause, traipse a couple menu tabs to the right, and reminisce on those halcyon days when Scarlet first fucked a witch as they floated midair on her broomstick. But if the game’s not paused, if I’m jumping, dodging, hacking and slashing my way through Scarlet Maiden, that gameplay is simply far too precise and challenging for me to possibly prioritize my own arousal as I go.

There’s another thing I find perplexing: I love Scarlet Maiden’s porn, and I love romping through its dungeon, but I don’t always love it when the porn shows up mid-romp. On the one hand, as noted above, almost every explicit scene in this game is in service of its mechanics, and I think that’s tremendous! What could possibly be a more fully realized example of sex as color? It’s a fascinating choice, it’s excellent game design, and I’d love to say I’ve got no notes.

But then there’s the other hand: maybe 10% of the button inputs required of a player relate to the porn, and since the other 90% all relate to its excellent action-platforming, I sometimes feel a little reluctant to temporarily turn my attention to the porn when I feel so deeply immersed in the rest of it. The requirement to have sex before gaining its various rewards, rewards that are pretty important if you’re ever going to beat the final boss, can feel like it’s keeping me from getting back to the action, the part of the game I like the most.

To get extra experience from defeated enemies, you’re asked to play a timing-based minigame, which isn’t especially difficult, and once I got the hang of the pattern, I actually started to find it pretty boring. Moreover, I mentioned before that you can easily access previously experienced sex scenes by heading to the gallery, but in order to actually unlock many of them, you have to successfully clear the same minigame you’ve already played before, just with a new monster. Upon a boss’ defeat, Scarlet begins a more difficult sequence in which she pleasures her vanquished foe by inputting various directions on the D-pad for twenty seconds. Depending on how well you do, you’ll earn up to three minor buffs for the rest of the run. Most of the time, I just shrugged and pushed the buttons.

One time though, I realized I really didn’t want to be doing it. I still put in the effort to earn those buffs, because I felt I needed them, but all twenty seconds felt like a drag, like they were keeping me from progressing deeper into the dungeon, from reaching the next boss, from getting back to “the game”: as if I didn’t just spend twenty seconds playing the game! What was I to make of that? Don’t I love how seamlessly porn melds with mechanics in this game? Again, I had to ask: what could possibly be a more fully-realized example of sex as color?

Playing through the game these last few weeks, I found myself thinking “damn that’s cool” way more than “damn that’s hot,” and honestly? The part of Scarlet Maiden’s color which strikes me most might be its incredibly unique weapons and spells. Between my first playthroughs and my recent return to the game, I never stopped thinking about the Obsidian Warhammer, whose description reads “the weight and heat of this weapon will melt the thickest of skulls.” When I came across the spell Ice Chain, it was felt as awesome to cast as I’d hoped it would, and when I first cast the spell Arcane Hammer, I found myself saying “holy shit, that’s so sick” without even intending to.

Another important note about Scarlet Maiden’s color is that its omnipresent sexuality doesn’t just stir the loins, it also lends a delightfully goofy element to the experience. The ice level is full of snowmen with racks and dongs, there’s a mimic that thoroughly tongues your anal cavity before it relinquishes its treasure, and there’s a journal entry that mentions a woman following her hardening nipples the same way you’d follow the needle on a compass. When Scarlet approaches the head nun of her holy order to confess her sins (i.e. to level up), the nun asks “have you come to repent?” Scarlet’s response is a chipper “sure!” One comically light spanking later, Scarlet’s converting her sins into levels.

Moments like these are why I love Scarlet Maiden. Its color is truly unlike any other game I’ve played, a brilliant blend of familiar fantasy monsters and tropes, tight, badass action-platforming, and a panoply of sex that’s lewd and silly in equal measure. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, but it is absolutely tremendous, and I’m glad to live in the world where Otherside Games painted this game with colors as excellent as these.

MxMorganic has been playing games for over twenty years now, and playing adult games for the last seven or eight. MxMorganic also has the sort of brain that refuses to ever shut off, and so they’ve done quite a lot of serious, analytical thinking about games, adult or otherwise. They consider themselves a storyteller first and foremost, and writing about how and why their favorite stories are brilliant is a primary focus of their writing – for instance, their MA thesis examined the ways that Supergiant Games’ Hades re-imagined and enriched the Greek mythic storyworld by creating one of its own. MxMorganic’s online presence is still growing, but you can find their fictional writing on An Archive of Our Own (username MxMorganic), you can find them casually streaming their favorite games on Twitch (username also MxMorganic), and you can find updates about both of these endeavours, as well as any other upcoming projects, on Bluesky (@mxmorganic.bsky.social).

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