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?
A Box Of Jewels, Carefully Assembled
Hardcoded is structured as a series of days. Droid main character HC starts each day in her small, stark apartment, waking from vivid dreams. After exiting the apartment, HC can either spend the day pursuing one of the many visual-novel storylines concerning one or more of her highly-fuckable friendgroup (selected from a drop-down menu) or she can explore the neon-lit, hazy streets of Pira City, where she might find any number of other grimy diversions. Then, at night, HC can continue exploring until she returns to sleep again (and, crucially, save the game).
This structure is why I think it’s a mistake to flatly classify Hardcoded as a “visual novel” and leave things there. Much of the fun of playing Hardcoded arises from unguided exploration (not to mention, there are several characters and storylines that can ONLY be accessed by first encountering them while exploring). Pira City is a lush, beautiful environment filled with little treats and surprises. Restoring power to an abandoned 3D printer yields a handful of new purchasable clothing options. Poking around ancient archives in a largely-abandoned library reveals a short account of a soft drink company recalling their new self-refilling product due to said product causing hallucinogenic “hauntings”. Various sexual appliances can be plugged into unused electrical outlets throughout the city, generating passive income as citizens step up for a turn on your LustPump Pounder. Some events are dependent on the day of the week, with the Root St. Market only available on Mondays, or the Friday Butt Slut competition. There’s a guy who sells hair on Skipnoise Ave. The overall effect is akin to poking around browser-based adventure experiences, such as the original Samorost or the Gorillaz’s Kong Studios (which is to say: delightful).
This is not to say that the visual novel segments let the side down. All are charming in their own way, each focusing on exploring a singular narrative or character arc, with ideas like “Cadence wants to try and organize a threesome with Decima” or “Olivia needs a test subject for her hacking projects” playing out over several chapters. These narrative segments are also where the vast majority of the game’s sexual content lives, coming in the form of largely-text-based erotic scenes featuring sporadic illustrations and animations. The types of sexual content range from the relatively-straightforward acts of dicksucking and buttfucking to more-exotic acts like tentacle sex and watersports, all the way to acts that I can only describe as “conceptual”, such as HC’s robot consciousness being transferred into a houseplant and forced to watch as her droid body is used as a mindless sex puppet. I might not share all the kinks on display in Hardcoded, but even so I can state that the sex is presented with passion and care (and speaking of care, almost every sex scene included some form of post-sex cooldown and aftercare, which I thought was a very nice touch).
Perhaps the coolest thing for me about playing Hardcoded was watching HC’s apartment fill up over the course of the game. Although there is purchasable furniture, decor, and lighting options, I found that the things I wound up placing on my apartment’s limited surface space were those things that I acquired organically through either the narrative segments or by exploring Pira. I pulled an old oil drum from the ocean and repurposed it into a bedside table. Atop it are the gold and silver trophies I won from the Butt Slut competition. The floor by my bed is covered in plants, including a Gunkmelon from Forcier’s garden and a succulent received as a gift from Beryl. On the wall is a drawing Beryl did of me, in front of which is a light-up plastic wand that was part of a couple’s cosplay I did with Heather. Over the the bed is a shelf covered in futuristic sex toys, including a hard-light dildo generator, a pair of dick-sized portal generators, a fuckable plant, and a rather old-fashioned set of anal beads. There isn’t anywhere near enough space to display everything I have – a testament to the density of experiences available in the game.
Not Without Flaws
Before discussing the points of friction I identified while playing Hardcoded, I want to make clear that I see all of these things as minor complaints that don’t really compromise the overall experience. Rather, I see them as being an interesting mix of design decisions and oversights, examination of which could help inform future projects from Ghost Hug.
Veterans of visual novels (particularly adult visual novels) will quickly noticethat Hardcoded is missing a number of now-standardized quality-of-life features, likely as a result of having been built entirely in the Godot game engine rather than Ren’Py (for the layperson: Ren’Py is an engine specifically built around the creation of visual novels, while Godot has much wider applications). Hardcoded does not allow players to roll back through dialog, it lacks options to skip through or auto-advance dialog, and there is no easily-viewable dialog history (errata: I was informed after initial publication that Hardcoded DOES have this feature – it’s an easy-to-miss little box in the bottom-left of the dialog screen). While whole scenes CAN be revisited, this option is accessed via the PC in HC’s room and could be missed by some players (the game also lacks a viewer for individual artworks and animations). The feature I found myself missing most was any kind of Character or Codex screen; something that could have helped me keep track of characters, concepts, and their relationships to one another would have been amazing.
Some of Hardcoded’s features exist in direct tension with one another. For example, HC’s dialog sprite can be customized to a dizzying degree, with a huge number of options for hair/headgear, eyewear, neck accessories, shirts/ tops, and jackets/overwear. However, this means that HC is conspicuously absent in almost every background scene that features any number of other characters lounging around the environment, because accounting for all the ways in which HC can be customized would represent an impossible amount of work. It also means that HC must necessarily be depicted as fully nude whenever there is art of her during a sex scene, which is something of a missed opportunity given how fun and interesting clothing can be during sex. Then there’s the game’s focus on exploration and experiencing story moments in whatever order the player desires – this is great for allowing players to experience things at their own pace, but sacrifices maintaining a consistent tone or sense of continuity.
(One thing that isn’t quite a “flaw” so much as a “quirk I thought was funny” was the fact that almost every sexual interaction in the game is opt-out; any time something sexual is on the table, HC can either decline entirely or do something non-sexual instead (choosing to fight a tentacle monster rather than allowing it to fuck her, for example). While this is of course a great way for players to customize their experience and not have to grit their teeth through kinks they might find offputting, it did summon in my mind the image of an extreme-edge-case player who declines EVERY sexual interaction, playing their HC as the literal embodiment of the “How big that dick/small leave me alone” meme.)
Something I noticed that while the concepts and writing for sex scenes was consistently excellent, some sex scenes could be extremely short – as in, “over in fewer than ten clicks” short. The first time HC fucks a slime creature, for example, has just five clicks’ worth of actual fucking. This can also be reflected in the illustrations and animations, both in their quantity and the way in which they’re presented. For context, standard practice for most porn games, whether they use static illustrations or animations, is to visually represent each stage of sexual intercourse in a step-by-step manner. So, a typical sex scene might feature visual representations of the following steps:
- Pre-sex (a dick is shown just outside a vagina)
- Sex starting (the dick is entering the vagina)
- Sex happening (the dick is wet and thrusting partway into the vagina)
- Orgasm (the dick is again outside the vagina and is blasting cum)
Hardcoded’s sex art and animations might depict all of these steps, or only a few of them, or only one, or there might be no art at all. Whatever visual representation a sex scene might have might also only be on-screen for a few clicks’ worth of sex scene narration (in contrast to standard practice for most other porn games, which would be to have some kind of sexually-explicit visuals onscreen for the full duration of a scene).
Much of this I put down to Hardcoded’s long development life cycle, in particular the fact that (like so many porn games) said development was funded by Patreon. The trick of maintaining a successful Patreon following is providing your followers with regular, predictable updates, and for adult games this means that adding new content is prioritized over altering old content. It can be scary for anyone with a large Patreon following to break the pattern of regular content updates – taking a couple of extra months to develop a new feature or backfill content could result in a significant drop in subscribers. Games with this kind of long dev time also typically show obvious signs of improvement in their later content as the developers hone their craft and learn from past mistakes; Hardcoded is no exception here. Sex scenes later in the game are much more consistent in their visual aspects, and tend to be longer.
A Class Of Its Own
There really isn’t anything quite like Hardcoded. There are other porn games, and other cyberpunk stories, and other trans narratives, but nothing has ever wedded the three with the care and grace of Hardcoded. Despite having first come into being almost a decade ago, it’s an experience that still feels viciously innovative to this day. If you consider yourself any kind of connoisseur of adult games as an art form, Hardcoded is required reading, and in the great pantheon of visual novels I truly believe it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with giants like Umineko: When They Cry and Dangan Ronpa. In both a figurative and extremely literal sense, Hardcoded is the kind of game this publication was created to celebrate. If you love sex, if you love queerness, if you love drama, if you love furious, abiding joy hammered out of the wreckage of a dying world… you owe it to yourself to play Hardcoded.
Bigg remains the editor of the Adult Analysis Anthology as well as one half of boutique adult game studio BP Games. He has worked as a designer, writer, and programmer of video games since 2010. His games include the sex-work-focused slice-of-life Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story and the monsterfucking isekai sandbox Monstrous Liberation.
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