This is ninth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth 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: Eternal_Savvy

I’ve had a high libido for as long as I’ve been interested in sex, and it’s been a rough journey. Sex isn’t something people discuss in polite company, and as a teenager I often felt completely crazy because every time that I thought I had found someone who I could talk to about sex, I was met with a rejection, and always “that look.” A look that immediately made me feel a little more alone. I only ended up finding success in expressing my interests when I started to play the role of the sex-obsessed macho-man—a persona that was a poor fit for me and thankfully soon discarded. I didn’t want to just march around bragging about sexual exploits and measuring dicks. Talking about sex always somehow became a competition; proving how “manly” and “macho” you were with how many women you’d had sex with, and talking about who you had set your sights on to conquer. I never felt satisfied with the way that people expected me to treat sex because I wanted to talk more deeply about how it affected me. In the absence of conversation, I instead found that satisfaction in playing porn games. Eventually I came to realise they were capable of something that no other medium is: the ability to let us explore the deepest parts of ourselves safely, without the risk of harming others. Porn and sex have since become a passion within me that now affects almost every part of my life. I’m an artist, and a streamer, and I draw porn, and I talk pretty openly about sex and kinks on my streams. I do this because I know what it’s like to feel alone, and I want to be that voice I was so desperately looking for when I was younger. But I never really overcame that shame about my interest in porn and sex until recently.

I make a point of browsing what new adult games are available on Itch.io and Steam. I do this to find the porn with a little extra something: the sparks of conversations about game quality, potential, storytelling, or even just informed directions about what’s out there. The porn game scene is not exactly the most inspiring sight to behold at the moment. Many people don’t respect porn, and some developers will make glorified galleries locked behind shitty puzzles just to get your money. Now I’m not going to sit here and say that I don’t like capital “P” Porn, even as a means to an end I enjoy some good filthy fucking without much reason behind it. But the reason I do this is because I am looking for those people that see what I see in porn games; a medium that explores a part of being human that is not seen anywhere else, doing so by placing you in simulated situations where you can ask questions about yourself. I found that in a game I discovered in early 2025 called “Hazelnut Latte“.

Hazelnut Latte is an early-access visual novel about dating, and having sex with, a bunch of different “femboy”characters. I’m going to be focusing on two of them; Hazel and Robby. Hazel is a blond-haired, gregarious, outgoing barista. He’s the first character you meet and he’s immediately flirtatious. His roommate Robby, meanwhile, is a reserved brunette that’s wry and witty when he’s comfortable. Hazel and Robby have been close friends since they were teens, having helped one another realize they were gay, and in Robby’s case, transgender. When you are introduced to Robby at their apartment, that topic comes up, and he quite bluntly says “I wanna chop off my tits and get a dick, but surgery is expensive, so here I am.” I was a little surprised by that. It’s already a pretty sticky subject for a lot of people to discuss the idea of a trans man who still wants to dress in feminine clothes after transitioning, let alone to have them be in a game where they are one of the “femboys.” To be able to casually take that identity in stride and not denigrate it was heartening.

Hazel’s first sex scene is during the game’s intro, where you can have sex in the bathroom at the cafe he works in. He relishes in the experience, embracing the risky and exhilarating nature of doing it in the middle of a workday. In the apartment you can have your first sex scene with Robby if you escalate the cuddling into some pretty raunchy thigh sex. Robby’s approach to sex is more surreptitious. He pays attention to how you move and reacts in kind, waiting for a response, but clearly knowing where it’s going. It’s made hotter by its mundane nature: a moment of privacy in someone’s home, watching a video together. It makes it feel tangible. Following your intimate encounter with Robby is a discussion with Hazel. It turns out he was kind of hoping you’d hit it off. There’s even talk of polyamory the next morning. But there’s something extra you can unlock that I wasn’t aware of until I read some discussion later: a threesome.

That’s a word that has been historically charged with so much lust in people’s minds. It’s “SEX” in all capital letters. Why limit yourself to just one partner when you can indulge in more? So you can imagine my surprise when I read the requirements to trigger said threesome. Don’t have sex. Not ever. Not until the scene with Robby. I was so used to porn games asking for the complete opposite; be as promiscuous and sexually forward as possible. How would abstaining lead to a threesome?

Every conversation felt different when I played the new route. There was this constant air of excitement matched with the anxiety of a new relationship. It felt so much more like the dance I had experienced with past partners. And then I got to the scene with Robby again. He’s close with Hazel, and knows your weeks of dating have been chaste. Robby asks “Why haven’t you done anything with Hazel yet?” One response you can give made this game stick with me forever. You can tell Robby that you think you’re nervous to have sex with Hazel because he was born a man, and Robby is more comfortable to you because he was born a woman.

Humans are messy as often as we are elegant. Sometimes we hold back when we really don’t know why. And sometimes we are confronted with the more unpleasant parts of our actions when we’re naked, vulnerable, and sweaty. That admission could so easily risk hurting Robby by implying that you don’t respect his identity, not to mention that it could be seen as a rejection of Hazel. But Robby doesn’t react poorly. He understands, and he talks it out with you. He asks if you like Hazel and if you’d want help with making that first step. And he isn’t afraid to poke a little fun at you afterwards. Sure enough, when Hazel comes home this time, Robby spills the beans immediately. The trust he has in Robby lets the admission land softly. And with a wry smile, the two of them strip to help you have sex with Hazel for the first time, acknowledging and providing the comfort of Robby’s more-familiar body. You have a threesome that isn’t purely for the sake of fucking, but to help a relationship bloom and flourish, and to connect three people more deeply than they had been before.

It was a moment that stuck with me because it was so beautifully human. The sex wasn’t incidental to the relationship. It was at the centre of it. That’s what porn games can do. They can show us those unique moments where we have to reckon with a part of ourselves that could risk hurting someone, or ourselves, and show us the ways in which it can be approached with compassion. And it can teach us how we might find the courage to be honest. I was blown away by that scene, and I couldn’t wait for more.

A few months later, Itch.io and a number of other platforms were targeted by puritan groups claiming they hosted harmful content. Thousands of adult games were no longer searchable on Itch.io thanks to pressure from their payment processors at the behest of Collective Shout. A few months after that the UK Online Safety Act was passed and put into effect. Suddenly I was no longer allowed to access adult content without submitting to invasive facial scans by untrustworthy third-party companies. Currently, Hazelnut Latte can’t be viewed on Steam any more without submittng credit card information, which many UK citizens do not have, and cannot obtain.

I can’t really describe exactly how I felt the day it came into effect, but my journal entry on the day does well to sum up my outlook. “What’s the fucking point?” I was devastated. I had gone from joyfully experiencing it all to being stream. That old shame was bearing down upon me with newfound sickening weight. Suddenly, those experiences from games like Hazelnut Latte were being quashed and denied to anyone else who wanted to see them.

I knew I needed help, so I called a friend. I arrived at the pub, and over the next few hours we drank, and we ate, and I talked, and he listened. The one thought that was deep in my insides, twisting them like a rusty iron spike, was “Why doesn’t anybody care?” He answered with something I knew, but needed repeating. Most people don’t see porn the way I do, they see it as a means to an end. Most people don’t play games like Hazelnut Latte, let alone pay attention to what they say. Despite the fact that sex is a fact of life for almost everyone, people don’t discuss it, even though we will all have to develop a relationship with it eventually. A new question came to me: “How do I keep going when I feel like something so core to me is being attacked?” He didn’t have an answer for me, but he did have compassion and understanding. I still remember how quickly he agreed to see me, and the hugs we shared as well. But my reaction made me realise that something needed changing. And I saw how strong of a hold that shame still had on me. I knew I needed to talk to more people.

I was fortunate that by positioning myself as someone so open and considerate of these topics in the first place, it was no shock to many of my friends when I started talking to them about them more. What surprised me was just how many people were willing to be open in return. What were previously nebulous discussions on kink became moments of trust where we more specifically mentioned what we liked and why. Hilariously, I realised at some point that a discussion of kinks started to feel like showing off a collection of trading cards, even discussing the rarity of our preferences. I began to discuss the games I had been playing, and we started to exchange recommendations. In return, I started to learn about the games that had affected them as well, learning more about them as a result.

The most significant encounter for me was when I went to dinner with a friend. We didn’t know each other especially well, which is why I surprised myself when I decided to be honest about how I had been doing lately. I plainly said that I had been upset and feeling a lot of shame because of my high libido, and it was in large part because of the recent changes in the UK. I almost didn’t know how to react when they sighed deeply, equal parts relief and frustration, and told me they knew exactly how I felt. They had struggled their whole life with high libido as well, and what followed was a whirlwind of conversation about our difficulties growing up. It was so emboldening that a week or so later, in one of my livestreams, I decided to bring up my libido during a conversation where it felt natural. Sure enough, I was surprised once more when a number of people in my chat expressed that same mix of relief and frustration. Suddenly, I was a little less alone.

My experiences with porn have connected me to myself and my friends more than most other things in my life. Sex is a part of ourselves that is far deeper and more vulnerable than we like to admit. It is capable of giving us experiences that can shake us, realise what someone means to us, and teach us about the most raw parts of our minds. Porn games are uniquely positioned to be able to allow us to explore ourselves without worry of hurting other people or being subjected to something we cannot escape from. Porn can help us find answers about ourselves, and how we interact with our partners, that can otherwise be scary or impossible to discover. To deny people the ability to look at those parts of themselves is heartbreaking, because these games and stories have the ability to connect us to one another through experience and discussion. But finding the joy to openly love porn and sex can be done by continuing to engage with these stories and talk to one another honestly and with an open heart so we can understand the passionate, inexplicable, and sometimes ugly parts of us that spawn from sex and how we like to have it. So I don’t intend to stop talking about it. In fact, I’m going to do it more than before. Hazelnut Latte recently moved to a new game engine and added a new intro, and I can’t wait to talk about it.

Eternal_Savvy is a streamer, artist, and podcaster who believes porn, and sex are beautiful, important, and fundamentally human. As someone who has loved adult games and porn since their teens, they seek to help people embrace porn and sexuality by speaking openly and genuinely about these topics during their streams, as well as in their creative works. They love clowns, apes, and gender, appearing as a genderfluid Harlequin Ape on their streams. They are currently working on a TTRPG sci-fi horror drama podcast called Heart of Hope on YouTube and RSS feeds, and they are learning game development and visual novels to create sex positive stories, and filthy but thoughtful porn. You can find them on Twitch and Patreon @Eternal_Savvy, and their porn on BlueSky @NSavvyFW.

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