Welcome to the blog post that will EVENTUALLY show you an excerpt of the final essay from the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology: an in-depth review of Studio FOW’s Subverse, written by yours truly. Before we get there, though, I’d like to spend some time talking about why it’s an excerpt and not the full thing.

Firstly, the review is a MONSTER. It is over 7,200 words long. The second issue of AAA is 70 pages long, and the review accounts for fully 20 of those pages. This not only means it’d be difficult-to-digest in web-based blog format, but it’d be a prohibitive amount of work plugging it in besides.

Second, I am pretty proud of the work I did on this review, to the point that I think it’s good enough to act as an enticement for people to purchase the full anthology! Just five dollars, or six if you’d like to get it as a bundle with the first issue! This is not something I’d feel comfortable doing with any other writer’s work, but since it’s my own I figure it’s okay.

Third, there’s the element of fairness to consider. My review is not a favorable one, and after playing over thirty hours of Subverse and reading back through four years of Kickstarter updates and developer diaries, I feel quite confident that the impression I formed of the game is as fair as I could possibly make it. However, the final release of Subverse is not out – I played the 0.9 version. In a developer diary post from 2022, then-incoming lead game designer Bangkok correctly identified a number of the same issues that I wound up having, and those changes are intended to be fixed as part of a full user-experience overhaul that will accompany the 1.0 release in Q4 of 2024. I’m no stranger to the Early Access model of game development, and I know that I would personally be pretty frustrated if some jagoff posted a long unfavorable review of one of my games before I’d had time to finish the fucking thing (and probably doubly pissed-off if I was a recent hire who’d been brought on specifically to address a game’s shortcomings). I’m not intending to play the 1.0 release (save files will be wiped, and there is simply no way that I’m playing ANOTHER thirty hours of that game), but I do stand by what I wrote about the 0.9 version. However, at the end of the day I’m simply more comfortable keeping the majority of the review confined to the PDF version of the anthology.

So, there you have it. Now, without further ado, let’s get to the excerpt!

This is an excerpt of the tenth of ten essays contained within the second 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. Full versions of all previously-published essays will be re-uploaded to this blog as I am able to do so. If you would like to read all the essays and support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

by Bigg

(Excerpted from “What If It Had Been Good: The Subverse Review“)

Sidequests & Parody Characters

All of Subverse’s sins as a media product are encapsulated in its sidequests. They are a failure across every possible vector; they fail to be fun, they fail to be interesting, they fail to be charming, they fail to present any interesting gameplay challenge, and, most egregiously, they even fail to deliver porn on completion. They represent a misunderstanding of how sidequests in a pornographic RPG should function so monumental that it verges on being impressive.

Every sidequest begins with a few lines from a character the player has never met before. The character is standing in a void, and The Captain rarely answers back. Then, the player will, in almost all cases, do either a space combat or ground combat mission identical to the dozens that have come before. After doing this, the player will be treated to a few more lines of dialog from the character they just met, unless in-fiction that character has been killed, in which case the player is simply dumped back to the map screen. Rewards always take the form of experience, Devotion, Credits, Bio, and Tek – the player never, ever, not even once receives porn as a reward for completing a sidequest in this porn game. What happened to those Kickstarter boasts about “offering you lewd rewards when you actually win”, fellas?

I really need to hammer home the “never receiving porn as a reward” thing. There are DOZENS of sidequests, and not ONCE does the player see so much as a single solitary titty on completion. The most egregious instance is a multi-quest chain about helping a character search for nude pictures of bigtitty squidgirl Empress Celestina. Classic porn game stuff! The easiest possible layup for showing a naked lady image to the player. And yet, after three quests, the big reveal that you’ve been working towards… is that the so-called nude pictures are so pixelated as to be completely illegible! Ha ha! Fuck you.

The true star of the shitshow that is the sidequests, however, are the one-off characters that serve as the narrative delivery mechanism. With very few exceptions, these characters are parodies of real people – specifically, real people who represent UNFATHOMABLY specific Gamer Culture boogeymen. There are some pulls here that are, plainly speaking, deranged for a game that is set to release in late 2024. Almost every instance of one of these parody characters left me asking “who the fuck is this game FOR?”

Some examples:

– An alien named “Fale Twish”, developer of a “3D cum swallowing game” titled “JIZ”. This, of course, is a reference to FEZ developer Phil Fish, who departed social media in 2014 and has not worked on a game since 2016.

– Another “former misogynist” alien named “Aphony Lurch”, a reference to former Gearbox writer Anthony Burch. Like Fish, Burch sometimes tweeted things that were critical of gamers in the mid-2010s, but doesn’t really tweet much these days.

– An inexplicably-dog-shaped alien called “The Lamiya” who is obsessed with his “block defense grid”, a reference to Platinum Games founder Hideki Kamiya. Kamiya is still an active Twitter user who likes blocking people who annoy him.

– A guy named “Riffy Dee”, a reference to former Epic Games game designer Cliff Bleszinski AKA CliffyB. Bleszinski, you guessed it, was also active on Twitter at one point and would sometimes criticize gamers.

This, and I cannot stress this enough, is Loser Shit. This is writing so utterly unfuckable that it makes one’s head spin. Who fires up their word processor and decides to cram the most flaccid, ephemeral culture war horseshit imaginable into the script of their porn game? Why would anyone trying to crank it want to hear a bunch of lame, failed attempts at jokes about guys who were mean to gamers on Twitter a decade ago? Who on Earth is still mad about Phil Fish in 2024?

Also, and I know I’m being mean here, but how the FUCK are you so bad at coming up with sex-based parody names? Like, “Fale Twish” for Phil Fish is nothing. Here’s a better one right off the dome: “Spill Piss”. Boom. Didn’t even try. Same for “Aphony Lurch”, that shit sucks. Here you go: “Assholey Turds”. Gottem! “Riffy Dee” for CliffyB? Try “Clitty Pee”. You’re awful at this.

Did you enjoy this excerpt? Purchase the full anthology to read the whole thing!

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