Category: Adult Analysis Anthology

This is ninth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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: MorganH

It is, at this point, a cliche to introduce any topic on videogames by describing their interactivity as a unique element of the medium. Fortunately, it is not yet a cliche to describe how it is this precise quality that transforms players from fucking themselves to fucking their games.

Adult videogames and pornographic community mods have a long and under-examined history in games, and while there is little criticism on the subject, there is even less that uses adult games to investigate the complicated interface between players and games. Players have had sexual interactions with their videogames long before haptic vibrations turned controllers into makeshift sex toys, but recently, the increasing popularity of porn games and the growing presence of digital connectivity between videogames and electronic toys make this relationship even more intimate and intertwined. Examining how adult games mechanize players’ own bodies reveals a particularly potent image of how videogame play is mediated through corporeal presence.

Continue reading “Fuck this Game: Intercorporeality, Erotic Cybernetics, and Becoming the Input” →

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This is eighth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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: Mr. Hands

I had heard many good things about The Imperial Gatekeeper, a dark adult game about a fantasy country torn apart by war. You play an army bureaucrat tasked with checking people’s documentation before they’re allowed entry. But while it starts off easy, the list of rules keeps increasing in complexity as the story progresses. It sounded like the game could make for an interesting experience, although with some very dark undertones. What kind of harassment are the people at your desk willing to let you get away with if they are desperate for a stamp of approval on their paperwork? Unfortunately, I never saw these questions answered during my first playthrough. I was apparently playing the world’s most boring paperwork simulator, stamping people’s documents for no reward. That’s because the version I had bought on Steam was missing something important: a patch to add in the adult content that had been removed by the publisher.

But where did the frustrating practice of hiding adult content behind patches come from? And can we do anything about it?

Continue reading “Patching In Holes And Hogs In Adult Games” →

This is seventh of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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: Iyane Agossah

Content Warning: This is an essay about DoHna DoHna, an R18 game featuring kidnapping, sex trafficking, and assault. Moreover, please keep in mind that this is not a game review, so this is not a list of trigger warnings for DoHna DoHna itself. This essay also contains spoilers for one of the major themes of DoHna DoHna’s story, and minor spoilers regarding the game’s endings.

Continue reading “The Surprising Likeability of DoHna DoHna” →

This is sixth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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: Callisto Jupiter-Four

None of my favorite erotic games are really queer. Most of them have girls fucking each other. Some of them have trans people. But none of them actually talk about queer experiences or depict queer life. At best, they’re a sort of generic chose-your-own-gender Everyone Is Bi procgen fuckscape. Usually, they’re male-centric, male-dominant narratives where trans people don’t exist and women only fuck each other to appeal to a male audience. A lot of the games I’ve spent hours jerking off to express a worldview that is roundly misogynistic in a way I struggle to square with my enjoyment of them as a queer woman.

There’s erotic games that are explicitly queer. There’s Hardcoded. There’s a solid majority of itch.io VNs. People on Twitter keep telling me to read Coquette Dragoon. I know these games exist; I have played several of them. And yet somehow I did not like them. I don’t intend to put any of them in particular on trial, here, because I think the devs still deserve to have more money, but I have played them and they haven’t done it for me.

Continue reading “Queer Porn Games Just Don’t Do It For Me” →

This is fifth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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!

By: Bud Bear

TW: Mention of sexual assault as a game mechanic and consequence for mechanical failure, sexual horror, and transphobia and racism, untintential or otherwise. Stylized capitalization and improper punctuation for emphasis is also a thing here. I maintain a conversational, meandering tone that really is just the voice I speak with.

I’m gonna be real with these Trigger Warnings, I mean every word of them. Turn back now if you can’t handle those topics, and I do not think less of you. Sit down and help yourself to a nice cup of your favorite beverage, and just have a day for yourself. We could all use a little bit more of that. You’re one hundred and ten percent valid, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I think that Mainstream fantasy worldbuilding sucks. Full stop. It’s so… sterile. Every big author talks about removing yourself from the writing and letting the fiction speak for itself. It leads to the worlds themselves feeling very sterile and the story mostly ending up character focused. For example, The Stormlight Archive is one of my favorite series of all time.

But the world doesn’t feel alive. Sanderson removed himself from it as much as possible, by his own admission, and it feels very sterile until something pertinent comes up and there’s a lore dump. I think mainstream fantasy could take some really valuable lessons from porn games. Specifically the “Literary Porn RPG” genre. I know nothing about the people involved with Corruption of Champions 1 and 2 and Trials in Tainted Space. I am not a part of their communities and I have not spoken to their authors and writing contributors once in my life.

But goddamn, when you’re writing characters based around specific fetishes it’s hard to get more honest about yourself than that. The worlds of CoC2 and TiTs especially feel incredibly gross a lot of the time, and honestly they’re probably pretty sticky, but they are fundamentally, utterly and completely their author’s work. A work of fetish is by definition going to be a peek into the author’s soul, yeah?

Continue reading “Corruption of Champions & Honesty” →

This is fourth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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!

By: Juniper Angel Theory

The modern era of media is defined by many things, but perhaps more than anything it’s defined by horrifying scale. Games are no exception to this; last year a whopping 12,529 games were released on steam. If you played one hour of each it’d take you almost a year and a half of 24/7 play to try every single one, and that’s JUST games released in 2022. With this much media coming out every day, we usually focus on the few we find value in to sift them out of the rough.

But what if we didn’t? What if instead of looking at only a few interesting games, we evaluated the whole medium to look for patterns? By observing games with similar engines, art styles, genres, or even publishers we can discover specific trends and answer some puzzling questions. It also allows us to find games we might have otherwise overlooked due to the sheer volume of media produced every day.

Continue reading “A Broad Overview Of Steam’s “Adult Only” Category (With New Editor Commentary)” →

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This is third of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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!

CONTENT WARNING: This essay contains discussions and descriptions of acts of explicit sexual violence, particularly within hentai game The Scarlet Demonslayer. Please read with discretion.

Continue reading “The Scarlet Demonslayer and the Anti-Kukkoro Kukkoro (With New Commentary)” →

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This is second of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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!

By: Yarrun

In 1982, a company named American Multiple Industries, in a bid to garner free publicity through controversy, got to work on a game designed to upset people. Custer’s Revenge, a simple, poorly-made game for the Atari 2600, focuses on the eponymous Custer’s attempts to sexually assault a bound Indigenous woman, named ‘Revenge’ in the game’s instruction manual. It was decried by feminist and Native American activist groups alike… and it quickly became AMI’s best-selling game, moving at least 75,000 copies at an inflated cost of 49 dollars a cartridge, netting a revenue of over three million dollars. The stunt worked like a charm, but the game would linger in infamy for its blatant bigotry, and for years after, it would be the most prominent example in the West of what an ‘erotic videogame’ is.

Sex sells. So goes the common adage. But when it comes to videogames, while selling normal games via scantily clad female character has consistently been a viable tactic, selling games about sex has generally been more fraught, with most companies unwilling to garner the same reputation that Custer’s Revenge earned. Admittedly, in the East, developers that started on erotic videogames could transfer over to making non-erotic videogames with relative ease. The Fate franchise, after all, went from a visual novel with sex scenes added to increase its value to one of the most profitable gacha games on the planet. But in the West, erotic games and the companies that developed them were kept in their own ghetto away from the rest of the industry, with most success being found in the computer game market with various strip poker titles.

Continue reading “On Patreon, and the Taming of Erotic Game Development (With New Editor Commentary)” →

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This is first of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but 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!

Alright, so what are we doing here? Who is this for and why does it exist in the first place? Answering that requires laying down a bit of groundwork first.

Porn games (which here I’m using to mean “pornographic games developed for English-speaking audiences outside of Japan”, since a lot of what I’m about to say doesn’t apply (or, at least, applies much less) to the Japanese porn game industry) are kind of bad.

Anyone with any familiarity with porn games who is being honest with themselves knows what I’m talking about. The vast, overwhelmingly majority of porn games are feature-poor visual novels developed with extremely inconsistent levels of competency in terms of writing, programming, and art (the ones that aren’t pure visual novels are typically extremely tiresome RPGs or extremely tiresome puzzle games). The vast, overwhelming majority of porn games languish in a state of incompleteness, and the rare few that DO get finished are very seldom finished to the level of polish one might reasonably expect from almost any other kind of game. Misogyny, both casual and extremely active, is rampant throughout many porn game narratives, as is racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. Narrative setups repeat ad nauseum – dozens upon dozens of smirking incestuous boymen porking their pliant (step)mothers and (step!)sisters, varying levels of “corruption”, and functionally-indistinguishable college fuckfests reigning supreme.

Continue reading “Porn Games And Writing About Porn Games” →

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!

Continue reading “AAA2 – What If It Had Been Good: The Subverse Review (Excerpted)” →