This is both the tenth of ten essays contained within the second issue AND the sixth 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
WARNING: You are about to read more than ten thousand words of writing about Studio FOW’s pornographic top-down space shooter/grid-based tactics game/visual novel Subverse. As part of the fundraiser to pay for AAA’s second issue, I offered a $200-dollar “Buy My Opinion” perk that promised the purchaser a minimum-1,500-word review of any adult game of their choosing, and Subverse was the game that was chosen. I did an exhaustive amount of research for my review, not only playing the full game to completion but additionally reading through several years of Kickstarter progress reports, development blog updates, forum posts, and even tracking down and reading the four Kickstarted Subverse h-manga. I wound up writing so much because this level of research brought with it an attendant feeling of obligation to prove my thoroughness, and because Subverse proved to be an extremely interesting subject. However, unlike every other AAA essay, my review did not receive a free-to-read web version. This decision came down to two factors: firstly, the version of Subverse I played was the 0.9 Early Access version, meaning that it was technically incomplete and sections of the review might be obsolete in a few month’s time. And second, I thought that keeping the review (which I was fairly proud of, and still am) within the paid version of the anthology might encourage people to purchase it. I did, at least, publish an excerpt of the review to this blog, but that was it.
Fast-forward to the fundraiser to pay for the THIRD issue of AAA. Seeing that Subverse had made it to its full, final release, I decided to offer, as a joke, a $500-dollar “Make Me Review Subverse Again” perk, promising to do just that if someone ponied up what I felt was an absurd amount of money. Unfortunately, someone with five hundred Canadian dollars to blow decided that it would be even funnier to call my bluff, which is how I wound up playing all the way through Subverse AGAIN to see what had changed. I shouldn’t complain, as that $500 obviously went quite a long way to funding AAA3, but sometimes one must simply marvel at man’s inhumanity to man.
Now that it’s come time to publish the web version of the second review, I feel it’s both appropriate and necessary to publish both reviews in full, together. The second review makes several references to the first, and at the same time there are things I didn’t mention in the second review (or mentioned only briefly) due to having covered them in the first one, making this the most sensible way to experience them. There are a few things in the first review that ARE obsolete (for example: the first review makes reference to marketing copy on the Subverse Steam page that no longer exists), so hopefully you as a reader will be understanding of those details when you encounter them.
Without further delay, please enjoy what will hopefully be all of the writing I’ll ever have to do about Subverse.
