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.

What If It Had Been Good: The Subverse Review

(Originally published July 12th, 2024)

My favorite piece of media criticism comes from Calgarian video essayist Dan Olson (AKA Folding Ideas on YouTube) in the form of his patient, almost fatherly evisceration of The Nostalgia Critic’s much-lambasted parody musical “review” of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Said parody musical is a sad, shrill, shallow, PAINFULLY unfunny work – yet also confusingly high-effort, the product of an obnoxious over-resourced perpetual amateur so hopped-up on unearned self-regard as to believe himself capable of outperforming artists ten times his better at their own game. Olson’s video was not the first to excoriate The Nostalgia Critic (real name Doug Walker)’s hubris, but as far as I’m concerned, his is the final word on the matter.

Olson is a clever and cutting critic, and the review is choc-a-bloc with choice quotes. Likely the most famous (certainly the most memed) comes in the form of “Cringe. There’s no other word for it. This makes me cringe. It’s embarrassing.” However, there are two others that have stuck with me, quotes that I feel sum up my approach to the following review of Studio FOW’s sci-fi themed blockbuster pornographic space shmup/tactical RPG/ visual novel Subverse.

The first quote, from 7:53:

“I’m going to have to say a bunch of unkind things, and there’s really no… way around that? Because the observable facts are just, prima facie, unkind.”

I think this is such a beautiful distillation of the critical mindset. A critic’s mission, in its most basic form, is to experience an artistic work, process it through their own understanding and experiences, and then communicate their commentary and conclusions to an audience. There are any number of ways to do this, but in all of them, the critic must strive to be both fair and accurate. And, in being as fair and accurate as one can be, sometimes the only fair and accurate thing a critic can say is that the work they are discussing is very, very bad.

The second quote, I feel, builds off this sentiment. From 16:10:

“Doug… WANTS to be a filmmaker. He WANTS to make art, but he can’t, because he’s a fundamentally incurious person who isn’t much interested in what other people think or feel, and all his ideas boil down to ‘what if Batman met Mario?’”

This is, as Olson promised in the first quote, an unkind thing to say – but also a completely fair and accurate one when considering Walker’s body of work. Olson also touches on the necessary ingredients for making art that is resonant and resilient: curiosity, empathy, passion, and originality. A creator lacking these things will invariably produce work that is aesthetically obnoxious and spiritually inert.

With all that in mind: let’s talk about Subverse.

Historical Context

Studio FOW was formed in 2014 as a small collective of creators making 3D adult animations based on popular IP. Their first project, Lara In Trouble, was an instant success garnering millions of views, and subsequent projects like Bioshag Trinity and Kunoichi: Broken Princess performed similarly well (NOTE: at the time of writing, Studio FOW’s website, which previously hosted all of their videos, is “Under Construction” with no indication when it may come back online). By 2019, Studio FOW had released 16 total high-performing, high-production-value adult animations as well as several “interactive” animations (though the interactivity on display is roughly equivalent to that of a DVD menu). It would not be an exaggeration to say that Studio FOW’s animation work, which has been viewed tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of times, represents a significant pillar within the canon of internet pornography.

The popularity of Studio FOW’s animations coupled with their frequent themes of sexual violence against women from popular video games earned them a certain amount of notoriety, most notably in the form of this 2015 exposé by Kotaku entitled “The People Who Make Brutal Video Game Porn”. It’s more than a little awkward reading this article almost 10 years later – the author, while presumably motivated by progressive values, comes across as snide and hectoring, none-too-subtly trying to whip up a sense of moral outrage among the site’s liberal-for-the-time readers. The proliferation of 3D-animated porn was still somewhat in its infancy but was experiencing a major boom following Valve’s release of its easy-to-learn Source Filmmaker animation tool, and Kotaku was making an attempt at designating Studio FOW as the poster children of the worst excesses of horny nerddom.

In June of 2018, Valve made the decision to allow adult games to be sold on the Steam storefront. Nine months later, in March of 2019, Studio FOW launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a new original game, titled “Subverse”. The campaign promised a game in the form of “a tactical RPG/SHMUP hybrid that takes place in a fully explorable galaxy where you get to be the Captain of your very own ship… which is crewed by the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.” The game was also very clearly influenced by Bioware’s Mass Effect to a point that stopped JUST short of being legally-actionable, with the player piloting a stealth-enabled spacecraft across a very distinctive galaxy map, recruiting and deepening relationships with romanceable crew members, which include a precocious ship-intelligence android, an extremely British and promiscuous experimental biologist, and a hologram-wielding hacker. The slickly-animated trailer even makes a somewhat non-sequitur joke about “colored endings” (this would be the first of Subverse’s many cheap cracks about Gamer Culture bugbears. Stay tuned for more!)

Regarding the game’s pornographic content, I’d like to highlight a paragraph from the campaign page. I’ll refer back to this later when talking about the game itself, but for now, presented without commentary:

“Instead of the usual hentai staple of offering you lewd rewards when you lose, we decided to go with the novel concept of offering you lewd rewards when you actually win! The better you perform in combat, the more you explore, and the more you talk to your waifus – the better your rewards get! Each waifu will have unlockable, fully animated, StudioFOW quality hentai scenes which you can view whenever you wish from the comfort of your own Captain’s Quarters. If you’ve played our previous flash games you’ll know exactly how these scenes function. Pick a pose, pick a speed… and away you go.”

The crowdfunding campaign was a runaway success, raising a total of close to £1.7M with a goal of £100k. Studio FOW’s notoriety may have worked out in its favor, with multiple mainstream outlets including PC Gamer, ShackNews , Polygon, and GameDaily reporting with varying degrees of scandalization at a porn game, of all things, accruing such a remarkable sum. This resulted in said outlets providing Subverse with more mainstream media coverage than any porn game before or since, effectively electing it as the face of big-budget blockbuster adult games.

As such, Studio FOW benefited from the following factors going into the crowdfunding campaign:

• An engaged, invested fan base built over several years of delivering high-quality pornographic 3D animations.
• The timing of Steam having opened its doors to adult games recently enough that the idea of a big-budget well-animated 3D porn game was still somewhat novel.
• A pre-existing contentious relationship with liberal game coverage outlets like Kotaku; a definite plus with a certain type of capital-G Gamer who enjoyed pornography, disliked pronouns, and was still mad about the ending of Mass Effect seven years later.
• A rubbernecking class of games media commentators possessing extremely limited familiarity with adult games as an art form but nevertheless willing to grant Subverse the implicit legitimacy of coverage.

Subverse released on Steam Early Access in March of 2021, two years after the success of its Kickstarter campaign (it would go on to also be released on GOG some time after). Since its launch it has received several major content updates, with the version 1.0 gold launch slated for Q4 2024 at the time of this writing. For this review, I played somewhere north of 30 hours of version 0.9, during which time I completed all available story content, unlocked every single looping sex scene in P.A.N.D.O.R.A., completed every single available sidequest, unlocked all Mantics, and played through all but three of the nine Devotion Quests. And now, after nearly 1,500 words of pure preamble, I’ll tell you what I thought.

Technology

The first thing most players will notice is that Subverse boasts an install size of SIXTY-TWO (62!) of God’s own gigabytes. This is the same as the install size of the PC version of Fortnite. Which, you might remember, is FORTNITE. (Subverse is not Fortnite.) This size is partly due to Subverse’s many, many cumbersome video files, but it is also a function of the game being built in Unreal Engine 4.

UE4 is a perfectly fine engine for some things, but the decision to use it as an engine for a visual novel is confusing – visual novel creation is a solved problem when using, say, Unity, because of many fantastic free plugins making the process a breeze. Conversely, as demonstrated by this dev diary post, significant programming resources must be spent wrangling UE4 into a shape where it can support basic visual novel development features like “easy text entry” and “assigning character poses/expressions”, to the point where it might have been faster to just write your own engine in the first place. The finished product functions poorly too; missing are basic quality-of-life VN features like rollback or right-clicking to access a save menu, and even advancing text is clunky, not allowing the player to advance to the next line until characters have completed their overlong animations. Load times are another persistent issue, with transitions between different areas of the Mary Celeste being separated by several seconds spent staring at poorly-cropped loading screen splash art.

In an interview with Polygon during the last hours of the Kickstarter campaign, Studio FOW founding member DarkCrow remarked that the decision to use UE4 was made because the studio had been using the engine for their animations for some time, so it seemed natural. I’ll say this: using UE4 for creating adult animations is, and I am being honest here, very intelligent! You save a good amount of time with rigging and rendering, and while you’ll never hit the same fidelity that you might achieve with a program like Blender, your finished product will still look pretty decent. Unfortunately, making a video game is not the same as making an animation. Making one does not prepare you for making the other, and this is far from the last time this kind of blundering overconfidence will manifest itself.

Writing

It would be easy to call Subverse’s writing bad, because it is easy to say things that are true. However, calling the writing merely “bad” would be to ignore the full breadth of its deficiencies. The writing is that produced by a certain type of person – the type of person overfond of compound cuss words like “cuntmuffin”, who uses the term ‘waifu’ unironically, and who one can easily imagine holding forth on the frankly epic properties of pirates, ninjas, bacon, and rap battles between Batman and Wolverine. Imagine the sort of writing this type of person might produce, and now imagine that they believe themselves far too clever to ever need an editor.

Subverse features hundreds of pages worth of writing, complete with fully voice-acted dialog. One might think that this would render it difficult to convey an accurate sense of the writing’s character, but I believe I can do so in the space of three quotes. The first is from the tutorial section on how to use P.A.N.D.O.R.A., the interface through which players purchase looping sex animations. In this tutorial, sexy British scientist character Dr. Lillian Margaliss (VA Alexia Renaldis) purrs:

“Leveling your waifus will get you PP, aka Pooter Points. The more you earn, the more you can enjoy. Use the grid to unlock the depravity you wish to taste, assemble your feast, and then devour it.”

Second up is another tutorial quote, this time coming from shipboard intelligence android character DEMI (VA Bordeaux Black):

“I will now provide a brief tutorial on how to use the navigation system of the Mary Celeste, even though it is literally point and click and there is almost no way for anyone with half a brain to fuck this up.”

These two quotes, among the first that players will encounter, paint a truly unflattering picture of the game’s writing. They betray a deep insecurity, and a need to constantly prove one’s cleverness by injecting it into every nook and cranny, while attempting to be as provocative as possible. An experienced game writer knows that nobody really likes tutorials, so the smartest thing to do is to teach the player what they need to know as quickly as possible and then get out of the way. It is the mark of the amateur – Subverse’s writing is, at all times, VERY much in the way.

If you think I am being unfair, cherry-picking quotes from the game’s earliest segments, when the developers would have had the least amount of experience, I invite you now to consider our third quote, an exchange between player character The Captain (VA Steve Hamm) and space pirate queen Va’raz Killison (VA SilkyMilk) as they discuss a fabled space pirate treasure trove Killi wants help collecting. This conversation is the precursor to Killi’s Devotion Quest, added in version 0.9 of the game which released in March of 2024:

“CAPTAIN: Another question… sorry – what’s there to stop any one of those pirate clans from goin’ in and cleanin’ the entire place out?

KILLI: It doesn’t quite work like that, Captain. You see… legend states that you can only take from the vault what you have right to claim. I have the right to only one box inside that place…

KILLI: …Which just so happens to contain the lingerie Tibold stole from me.

CAPTAIN: So… all you need me to do is help you get your poon pajamas back?

KILLI: Oh for fucks sake, I knew you wouldn’t understand. Let me explain something to you, Captain – for a woman, lingerie is not just a means of covering her delightful arse. It’s a means of sexual empowerment with each piece representing a different feeling and objective.

KILLI: When a scoundrel like TIbold steals such an important keepsake and claims it for his own nefarious purposes, you cannot let such indignity against your womanhood stand!

[…]

CAPTAIN: So what you’re saying is that TIbold’s got a whole stash of your gash garments in this place?

KILLI: No… of course not! Most of my snatch suspenders were in Tibold’s possession when you destroyed his battleship. Even if they weren’t, I wouldn’t dare to touch them again after what that cretinous wanker probably did to them.

CAPTAIN: Sorry, I’m lost. If he ruined all your cunt cloaks, then why are we goin’ to the vault?”

To be clear, the issue with this passage of writing is not merely the grim attempts at mining humor from alliterative euphemisms for “panties”, though they certainly don’t help. It’s that this is a mere fragment of a VERY long conversation – one of hundreds of long, boring conversations between two or more unlikeable characters featuring forced attempts at South–Park-on-a-bad-day-level repartée in service of a generic plot and forgettable gameplay. If you play this game (which you shouldn’t), you will be subjected to line after line after line after torturous line of miserable dreck written by someone who believes with their whole heart that they are spinning flax into gold.

(I’d like to take a moment to mention that the game’s voice cast are all champs. There are no bad performances among them, and even more impressively, none of the voice actors seem to be phoning it in. They are all genuinely doing their best with absolutely atrocious material. Steve Hamm imbues The Captain with an easygoing, affable, down-under charisma. Alexia Renaldis fully commits to rendering Dr. Lillian Margaliss as a husky-voiced posh sex kitten. My personal favorite performance was that of Venus LeMay, who lends space-elf Elaisha Sorn an impeccably self-assured Valley-Girl uptalk. I could nitpick some choices – Samantha Flowers’ performance as Teelee princess Sovalin Maliana sometimes verges on being shrill, and Elizabeth Blythe VA Gina Galore might have been better-served by admitting that she doesn’t REALLY have a good Russian accent in her pocket, but overall there isn’t much to complain about on the voice acting front.)

Contempt colors every aspect of the writing in Subverse. There is constant joking-but-not-really-joking-actually contempt for players of the game, whom the writers frequently refer to as “neckbeards” and “degenerates”. Contempt is also frequently levelled at other games – both mainstream titles (with shots being lobbed at Mass Effect, FEZ, Skyrim, and others) and other porn games in general (with marketing copy on both the game’s Kickstarter and Steam store page painting a majority of adult games as “low-effort” and implying that they “only offer lewd rewards when you lose”, a claim that hasn’t ever been true of an overwhelming majority of porn games, reflecting a curious lack of familiarity with their chosen genre). Characters throughout the story are frequently contemptuous of each other and of the idea that people can be motivated by factors other than shallow self-regard and greed. All this adds up to hours and hours of nothing but sneering contempt. It’s exhausting, not to mention spiritually corrosive.

Story & Aesthetics

It’s tempting to get deep into the weeds of Subverse’s story in order to pick it apart, spending many hundreds of words talking about the galaxy of Prodigium which is ruled over by an oppressive puritanical government called The Imperium into which humans, who are called Solars, arrived blah blah blah blah blah and so on, all in an attempt at justifying the time I spent suffering through it. However, let’s save ourselves some wordcount: it’s a Mass Effect.

I am not saying the story is a one-to-one replica of Mass Effect’s, merely that it employs all the major narrative design pillars of an entry in that franchise. You are the commander of a Mass–Effect-type spaceship that drifts through a Mass–Effect-type galaxy map recruiting Mass–Effect-type crew members in service of completing a Mass–Effect-type overarching mission (in this case, overthrowing the government). Over the course of the story, you can seek out your Mass–Effect-type crew members aboard your Mass–Effect-type spaceship and they will give you their Mass–Effect-type take on the most recent plot event. After your crew members hit Devotion level 30, you can go with them on a Mass–Effect-type loyalty quest. It’s all just kind of Mass Effect, if Mass Effect wasn’t very good at doing the things Mass Effect does. On paper, it’s fine to be very clearly influenced by something — Bioware spent 20 years playing with variations on their big-budget story-driven RPG formula, and it’s fair play for other creators to employ the same tools. But imitation invites comparison, and said comparison does not come out in Subverse’s favor.

Visually, Subverse is something of a hodgepodge. Several characters – DEMI, Lily, and Huntress – may as well be pallet-swaps of EDI, Miranda, and Tali from Mass Effect. Others, like Kalli, Ela, and Sova look fresh from the character creator of a theoretical World of Warcraft that’s like, 15% more horny. The rest of the cast feel cobbled-together from a mishmash of free-floating aesthetic influences. I guess we need a catgirl? Oh, this guy’s some kind of robot angel, that’d be cool. Oh we should have Hutts from Star Wars, haha, sick.

The design of The Captain (the player character) warrants special attention. The Captain is a hard-bodied, v-shaped man with 8-pack abs and a big dick. He wears tight pants, a tight-fitting leather jacket, and never removes his flight mask, over which he has stretched a pair of striped panties. The overall effect is Deadpool-esque, but also reflects a sort of grim cowardice. Having a main character in a porn game who never removes his mask is a bafflingly limiting design choice. It means that we never see The Captain kiss any of the many women he fucks, nor do we ever really see him eating pussy (we do see pussy in the general region of his mouth, to be fair, but you know what I mean). We never see him bite a nipple, or suck on a finger. We don’t get to see sweat running down his face, or see him screw his eyes tightly shut in orgasm. We see The Captain fuck more than any other member of the cast, and the devs made the decision to wall us off from the ocean of expression that is his face in order to make him feel like more of a generalizable everyman that’s not gay to jack off to. Pathetic.

Something that is essential to understand about why Subverse looks, feels, and plays the way that it does is that it is a game that has made “looking like it cost a lot of money” part of its core identity. This is the reason for the overbaked, too-shiny character designs that make everyone feel like Toy Story background cast. This is the reason for the many dull pre-rendered cutscenes that do little to advance the plot or reveal character. This is the reason the devs seem obsessed with having “30+ hours of gameplay”, even if half those hours are grinding out copy-and-paste space and ground combat missions. In one dev diary prior to the early access launch, one of the devs remarks that they are “basically making a 15 million dollar game with 1.5 million”, and I think it’s telling that nobody on the team seemed to stop and ask, hey, why ARE we trying to make a $15 million dollar game in the first place?

The Sex, Or Lack Thereof

If it seems odd that I’ve taken so long to start talking about the sexual content in what is ostensibly a porn game, I promise it’s not by accident. The sad fact is that this is a porn game that utterly sucks shit at delivering pornography to the player. Porn lives almost exclusively in the P.A.N.D.O.R.A. interface, accessible only from the Captain’s Cabin. In P.A.N.D.O.R.A., players spend points received by leveling up each “waifu” character’s Devotion stat in order to unlock looping animations of said “waifus”. These looping animations are typically just a few seconds in length, though some feature cumming animations that increase their length. The only time these animations aren’t unlocked with points is when they are encountered at the end of a “waifu’s” recruitment arc – one animation per “waifu”, and usually not an especially long or interesting animation either.

The only exception to this rule are the “waifu’s” Devotion quests, which do feature longer pre-rendered sex animations on completion – or, they will do in version 1.0. Said quests currently end with truncated placeholder animations. It’s also worth mentioning that they don’t become available until very late in the game’s story, and can only be accessed after getting a “waifu’s” Devotion stat up to 30. I’ll have more to say about the Devotion quests later.

This is a truly bizarre and wrongheaded method of delivering pornography in a porn game. During my time playing Subverse, I could easily go HOURS without seeing even a single sex act on screen, with that time instead being filled by boring cutscenes, excruciating character interactions, and interminable combat. Even more strangely, the looping sex scenes were the one single place where the team’s determination to cram in as much writing as possible seemed to peter out. There is no dialog in any of the P.A.N.D.O.R.A. scenes, no dirty talk, just grunting and moaning. Given what I’ve said about the overall quality of the writing I’m unsure of whether I ought to count this as a positive or negative, but its exclusion is nevertheless worth noting.

The animations, for what they are, are fine. They’re fine! They are good-looking animations of somewhat-generically-attractive women having sex with The Captain, each other, and the occasional alien or genetic mutant. This, after all, is Studio FOW’s core competency, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you that they don’t know how to animate a chesty blonde getting all holes filled. However, there is a certain lack of imagination on display here – several of the “waifus” are robots and aliens, but very seldom do the animations make much use of robotic or alien characteristics such as horns, tails, detachable body parts, or a lack of any need to breathe. An exception was the dwarf-sized alien Sova, whose animations did at least use her smaller size relative to other characters to good effect.

And this leads into the last fly in the sexual ointment: although Studio FOW’s work in the field of adult animations might have been best-in-class in the mid-2010s, they have gotten kind of insanely lapped in quality and inventiveness by the legion of incredibly talented animators whose work is EVERYWHERE in 2024. The work being produced by 3D animators like Nyl, Redmoa, wyerframeZ, rigid3d, Nagoonimation, Lvl3toaster, MagMallow, FPSBlyck, tyviania, or HydraFXX (to name just a very few) consistently embarrasses Subverse in their originality, energy, and fidelity, and you don’t even have to drop a 62GB cinderblock on your SSD just to crank off to it. Why on Earth would anyone spend $30 USD to pound their skull against thirty hours of terrible writing and monotonous combat just to access contextless fuckloops of generic babes when they could see so, SO many better animations right away for free?

Combat & Progression Design (Or Lack Thereof)

Let’s start this section by giving credit where it’s due: the top-down space shooter segments are decently fun. The ship handles well, enemies are challenging without being overwhelming, and it feels like you really do have to pay attention in order to get through these segments. Every “waifu” character adds their own unique subweapon, the addition of which forces the player to adapt their playstyle to suit it. The space combat even has an alright geometric increase in difficulty, with new enemy factions being added in each every new major area of the galaxy. As a space shooter it breaks no new ground and is fairly forgettable, but it’s at least competent.

The “tactical” grid-based ground combat, well, largely isn’t. You control a single “waifu” character as well as three “Mantics”, which are genetically-engineered aliens. There are some subtleties in each individual unit’s stats and abilities as well as positioning on the battlefield, but largely everything boils down to moving your guys next to their guys over and over until their guys die. It’s rarely challenging enough to be engaging, but the ground combat segments are at least pretty snappy – it was rare for one of them to take longer than three to five minutes.

Your rewards for victory? Experience and Devotion points for the “waifu” participating, a certain number of three currencies – Credits, Bio, and Tek – and occasionally a randomized gift item which produces a paltry amount of Devotion when given to a crew member. Here’s the problem: most of these rewards mean nothing. At no point did I feel like increasing my crew members’ experience level feel like it was making a noticeable difference in their combat performance. Credits and Tek can only be spent on a tiny number of ship upgrades – when you have maxed them out, everything your ship does will be 20% better. Yippee! Ditto for Bio, which can only be spent on unlocking new Mantics, but there are only 13 of these, and you start with 3 unlocked already. Lastly, ship and Mantic unlocks are gated by story progression, meaning that the player often spends hours with absolutely fucking nothing to spend any of their rewards on.

This leaves Devotion as the only reward with any real value, as gaining Devotion levels rewards points for unlocking the sex loops, and level 30 Devotion is required to unlock Devotion Quests. But getting to Devotion level 30 is a SLOG, requiring them to complete dozens of space and ground combat segments per “waifu”, and the supply of unlockable sex loops will run dry long before hitting 30.

Put bluntly, Subverse’s combat is fine, but is MILES away from being so fun as to reasonably expect players to do hours of combat on its own merits with zero incentives.

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.

The Devotion Quests

If the regular sidequests are the worst part of Subverse, the Devotion quests are its best. As mentioned above, Devotion quests unlock just before the start of the main story’s final act, and can only be accessed after getting a “waifu” character’s Devotion stat up to level 30. Once those conditions are met, said character will ask The Captain for his help with a task. It’s basically the Loyalty Missions from Mass Effect 2, except at the end there’s a pre-rendered animated sex scene.

On the whole, Devotion quests feature a much higher standard of presentation and gameplay than is present anywhere else in the game. The writing is stronger, with much less in the way of grating, profanity-laden rambling in favor of earnest character interactions between The Captain and whichever “waifu” whose quest it was. Every quest features a unique, fun variation on the standard-issue space and ground combat gameplay. And, crucially, they all actually ends in sex scenes – good-looking sex scenes to boot!

The main issue with the Devotion quests being good is that it makes the failings of the rest of the game that much starker. Like, you COULD have had enjoyable side content in your game, but you just… didn’t do that until the very end, I guess? It’s too little, far, FAR too late. It should also be mentioned that getting the “waifu” characters up to Devotion level 30 was a CHORE. I only had 2/9 above 30 when I hit the point in the story at which Devotion quests unlocked, and getting four more up to 30 took several hours of grinding.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that despite the Devotion quests’ higher standard of quality, the devs still couldn’t help themselves from including a few more cheap-shot, far-past-their-sell-by-date parody characters. DEMI’s Devotion quest features a boss battle with a hostile artificial intelligence calling itself “Ormero” that is guarding the source code for “Dickuntana 2” and at one point tells The Captain “Too bad I’m about to make you my bitch!” Daikatana and John Romero’s famously aggro marketing campaign therefore occurred almost TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. A QUARTER OF A CENTURY. SIX FULL PRESIDENTIAL TERMS. THE TWIN TOWERS WERE STILL STANDING WHEN IT CAME OUT. HOW ARE YOU POSSIBLY STILL MAD ABOUT IT? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

A Word Concerning Fairness

It’s not hard to envision the most likely retort from a fan of Subverse after reading the above, which is that I am being unfair by reviewing the 0.9 version instead of waiting for the 1.0 launch in Q4 of 2024. This is worth talking about! In a dev diary from March 2022, newly-instated lead game designer Bangkok reveals plans for a major overhaul of many of the systems and features that have been criticized in this review, including sidequests not ending with porn, dating mechanics feeling flat, and crew member progression not feeling meaningful. So why not hold off until 1.0?

First off, there’s a certain amount of feeling on my part that I’ll believe a lot of these changes when I see them. Bangkok’s dev diary was published over two years ago, a week before Subverse’s 0.45 update launched. The version I played was 0.9, and besides the Devotion quests, very little of what he planned made it into the version I played. Sidequests still do not end with porn. Dating still consists of giving a crew member a single gift and then leaving. Progression still feels meaningless. Most of what’s been added in updates since then has been pure content, with small aesthetic updates here and there.

So, keeping that in mind, my second point is that Studio FOW is no longer a scrappy little uwu smol bean collective of porn animators with big dreams. Since launching Subverse on Steam Early Access in March of 2021, the game has received just under 9,600 reviews. Using the usual rough estimate of 100 copies sold per review, that’s an estimated 960,000 copies sold since launch – close to a million! At a price of $30 USD/copy, that’s gross sales of $28.8M USD, from which we deduct 30% for Steam’s cut, 5% for payment processor fees, 11% for refunds, and finally 25% for the UK’s corporate income tax for earnings over 250K GBP. The remainder is $12.8M USD from Steam sales alone – and after adding in sales from GOG, I feel comfortable estimating their total actual take over the past three years to be in the range of $14-15M USD. When your in-development game has made Fifteen Million United States American Dollars, it feels appropriate to hold it to a higher standard than someone schlepping a Daz3D sisterfucker straight to F95.

After reading back through four years of dev diaries, I’m aware that the dev team has experienced struggles. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted development when it hit in early 2020, and team members have periodically been stricken by the disease since. In November 2021, the game endured a period of review-bombing following some poor communication regarding Chinese localization, which resulted in one of the lead programmers dropping down to “unpaid intern” status. In September 2022, four senior programmers abruptly left the studio at once, with no issued statement from Studio FOW giving any reason for the departures.

All that being said: this is video games. Every game development team on the planet was affected by COVID. Community management and unforeseen staff departures are part of running a studio. As the developers, you are the ones with ultimate control over what product you release.

The last thing I’ll say on this subject is that I am fully at peace with the idea that the game might become better with the 1.0 launch, rendering large portions of this review obsolete. Seriously, it wouldn’t make my life worse in the slightest if this game were good! However, I’m keenly aware of all of the areas that would NOT improve even if sidequests finally received proper rewards, if dating were to feel more dynamic, and if progression were to be retooled to require less grinding. Even if all of those things were to improve substantially, Subverse would still be a fundamentally mean-spirited slog through an uninspired, boring plot driven by unlikeable, abrasive characters telling the least funny jokes at every turn.

Conclusion

The copy on Subverse’s Steam store page begins thus:

“Welcome to a new era in adult entertainment!

Tired of crappy, low effort hentai games? Then enter the Subverse – an old school PC gaming experience developed from the ground up for the discerning adult by a team of filthy apex perverts.”

Beyond just being outright myopic and cunty, the phrase “low effort” really sticks out to me here. See, I play a lot of “bad” porn games – I even maintain a side blog where I post goofy screenshots from them. One thing that I have come to understand about porn games is that making them is not easy – they require mountains of writing and visual content, your options for making money through both retail and crowdfunding are limited, and your marketing avenues are incredibly restricted. Thus, adult game development, more than any other type of game development, is the realm of passion projects. I might clown on Room For Rent or Free Pass, but it’s undeniable that they are being made by people with creative visions that they are determined to realize by any means necessary, no matter how janky the final product might wind up, or if they’ll ever be able to make back the time and money spent in development.

I don’t think this is a difficult realization to come to. At least, not unless you were a studio whose first-ever game development project managed to luck into a historically-high-performing crowdfunding campaign due to an unrepeatable confluence of factors.

I spent over 30 hours playing Subverse, and I cannot begin to tell you how much I wish those hours had been spent playing games like Room For Rent or Free Pass or any other of their cohort of free-Daz3D-asset-reliant visual novels. Those games possess an earnestness that I find impossibly charming. I have laughed and had a good time playing those games. I think the peak of my enjoyment playing Subverse was a wry half-smile that I cracked when a Todd Howard parody character named “Rodd Ploward” said “You see those titties over there? You can fuck them.”

And that’s the tragedy of Subverse, isn’t it? All that money, all that effort, all that precious media coverage, wasted on an ugly, cruel toad of a thing that buckles under any amount of sustained critical scrutiny. Subverse was better-positioned than any other adult game outside of Japan, ready to prove to the world that given the same resources it was possible to produce a porn game that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Mass Effects of the world. They failed — and worse, they made a lot of money failing, which drains me of any optimism that Studio FOW’s next project might be any better.

What if they hadn’t failed, though? What if the developers had made an effort to understand their influences beyond their surface-level aesthetics? What if they’d bothered to learn more about their adult game contemporaries, and taken lessons in design and content delivery from them? What if animation resources had been redirected from awkward interstitial cutscenes into things players might actually want to see? What if they had bothered to hire an editor who could have taken a single pass through their 400-page script and told them to try again from the beginning? What if they had channelled their incredible fortune into creating an artistic artifact of unimpeachable significance, that could be hailed as a high-water mark for video games as a medium, spoken of in the same breath as games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, Half-Life 2, and, yes, Mass Effect?

What if it had been good?

Cringe, Redux: The Subverse Re-Review

Let me start by saying: I didn’t want to do this. I put “Make Me Review Subverse Again” on the fundraiser as a joke. I thought, “Surely, nobody will ACTUALLY pay five hundred Canadian dollars just to force me to play and review a game on which I spent over 7,000 words in AAA’s last issue, ho ho.” The joke, it seems, is on me.

I won’t deny a certain curiosity on my part – I acknowledged in my previous review that since I was playing the 0.9 version, there still existed the possibility that the game could improve. What I had seen of the late-game Devotion quests and their pre-rendered sex scene rewards had been promising. While I wouldn’t say that I was terribly interested in how the main story would wrap up, after investing over 30 hours into my playthrough I did feel a certain sense of obligation to see it through. I wondered what post-game there might be, if any. The good(?) news is that if you formed an opinion based on my previous review, I can now definitively say that very little has changed from version 0.9 to version 1.1 that would give you a reason to update said opinion. I certainly didn’t!

What’s Changed

Due to large parts of Subverse’s progression systems being completely overhauled, save files from versions prior to 1.0 were rendered invalid. This means that in order to reach the late-game content I had yet to experience, I had to play through the entire game from the start, again. I’ll get more into what this experience was like below – I’m mentioning it here at the top to make clear that my opinions were formed over the course of a full playthrough.

The first thing I noticed were the aforementioned updates to Subverse’s progression systems. Each recruitable “waifu” has a slickly-presented battlepass-esque reward track for level-ups, with a wide range of unlockables including short audio logs, pinups, gallery poses, posters, and other such content, most of it viewable from a new interface in the Captain’s Quarters. The only “waifu” whose reward track differs significantly is the android DEMI’s, who levels up not via combat but through exploring the galaxy map. DEMI’s reward track also includes a number of mechanical improvements for galaxy map exploration, including increased ship speed and wider scanner range. Concept art, logo art, cutscene storyboards, and 3D character sculpts can also be purchased later for credits from an in-game shop. Finally, there’s also been the addition of a limited selection of alternate outfits for the “waifu” characters, changing how they look during on-ship conversations and during the P.A.N.D.O.R.A. sex scenes.

The addition of a regular drip-feed of rewards for progressing through the game is welcome, certainly. But one does have to laugh that Studio FOW’s big idea for making progression feel meaningful is to upend a wheelbarrow of tertiary content into yet another nested sub-menu and call it a day. Of these offerings, the audio logs are the most interesting: they range from quiet character moments to jerk-off instructions to full-length recitations of famous memes, all delivered with the familiar professionalism and full commitment of the game’s talented voice cast. I must once again commend the cast for doing their very best to breathe life into what is so often truly execrable material. The rest of it… well, it’s production materials, some bespoke posters and fictional magazine covers, and, bizarrely, a selection of h-manga pages with all their dialog scrubbed. I suppose you COULD jack off to it, but it’d be an uphill battle. Sure, it’s content, but it’s content that changes little about the core experience.

There are a number of quality-of-life improvements here and there. Load times are much improved, which was a relief. The game’s UI has received a much-needed overhaul, with everything now bearing a slick coat of new paint. Leveling up feels much less grindy, with late-game encounters blessedly providing much larger experience rewards than early-game ones (experience rewards for combat having been flat in 0.9). A new type of interaction has also been added to the galaxy map: some planets now offer “Events”, which prompt the player to select one of their “waifu” characters to engage in a three-sentence narrative based on traits like “One-Woman Army”, “Nimble”, “Analytical”, and so on. Are any of these “Events” particularly interesting? No. But they did pay out a decent amount of experience and take less time than the ground or space combat, so I treasured them whenever they cropped up.

All of the Devotion quests now come complete with the full-length versions of their pre-rendered sex-reward cutscenes. Said cutscenes are… fine, for the most part. They’re more satisfying than the bite-sized P.A.N.D.O.R.A. vignettes, certainly, but since they come so late in the game means that for the most part their impact is severely diminished. Remember, these scenes are the direct equivalent of the post-Loyalty-mission love scenes from the Mass Effect games. But what made the love scenes from Mass Effect significant was that this was almost always the very first time you were getting to see these characters in an intimate setting after a game-long courtship. It simply doesn’t (and CAN’T) hit the same in Subverse; players have already seen all of these women getting their holes plundered every which way via their P.A.N.D.O.R.A. scenes, so the payoff of these post-Devotion-quest scenes hits comes down to execution.

With that in mind, here are my thoughts on each “waifu”’s Devotion cutscene, in the order that I encountered them:

• BLYTHE: Fairly good. Does some fun stuff with power dynamics and (pretty vanilla) impact play between her and The Captain.
• KILLI: Unforgivably boring and slow. Killi is a demon pirate queen with large horns and a tail, and basically none of that comes into play during the scene at all. Instead, it’s just a bunch of meandering boy-girl fucking atop a badly-rendered pile of doubloons.
• DEMI: Pitiful. DEMI’s scene takes place in a purely-subjective virtual reality mindscape, and the developer’s big idea for taking advantage of this creative blank check is to have DEMI and The Captain fuck on a bare floor in the middle of a void and then have one single tentacle of light occasionally get involved. Disappointing stuff.
• ELAISHA: Genuinely excellent, easily the best of the bunch. Elaisha is a galactic porn star, and her scene is set up as a 300-person fuck-a-fan gangbang, and the team actually DELIVERS. The scene is an immense smorgasbord of cock types, positions, and pairings, with several of the other characters getting in on the action. Ela’s Devotion scene is actually the only one to involve more than one of the female cast, which is one of the main things that makes it stand out – for a porn game, there’s precious little long-form content of the fuckable cast members actually interacting sexually.
• HUNTRESS: Alright! This scene features a first-person underwater portion that puts Huntress’s head-tentacles to good use. Unfortunately, the other half of the scene is pretty boring boy-girl beach fucking.
• FORTUNE: Bland. Fortune is a regular human woman who has sex with The Captain in an empty holographic casino. Who cares?
• SOVA: Boring, but at least the vibes are okay. This scene takes place in The Captain’s shithole old apartment while he and Sova get shitfaced. There’s a certain relaxed charm to this scene, even if it doesn’t break any new ground with its use of its characters or setting.
• LILY: Pretty decent! Sex kitten scientist fucks her hulking mutant creation, and The Captain is there too. I enjoyed all the mutant sex parts – my only criticism of this scene is that The Captain felt like a little-needed third wheel. All I’m saying is that it’s hard to maintain the belief that a regular human man is sending a woman to new heights of pleasure when a 12-foot-tall behemoth is plunging her down a cock the size of a traffic bollard.
• TARON: This one was fine. It takes place in a museum filled with amusing sex toys, and said toys are all used to fairly good effect during the scene.

What else… oh, the plot. The plot finished. That’s about as much as I can say about it. Honestly, the plot of this game is such a bloated Nothing that even thinking about how it ends is making me kind of sleepy. There’s an attempt at giving the villain some kind of interesting motivation at the 11th hour (closer to 11:59, really), but it falls flat because this isn’t a story that has earned any amount of earnest emotional investment from its audience. Sorry, but you can’t convince me that any of these characters actually feel or believe anything after thirty hours of them acting like snide, internet-poisoned nihilists.

Finally, there’s the post-game. This mainly consists of a single quest, at the end of which the player recruits one more fuckable “waifu” character: Fow-chan, the Studio FOW succubus mascot. Fow-chan is, toe-to-tip, an embarrassment. It’s embarrassing to even think about her. Her entire schtick is that she’s an out-of-universe Kickstarter-stretch-reward character who speaks entirely in self-referential commentary. It’s unbearable. By way of illustration, allow me to present a snippet of her dialog, after The Captain asks her about the rest of his “wonderful waifus”:

“Captain, I’m a succubus. I don’t look for the best in people, I scour the depths of their souls for their weaknesses so that I may exploit them.

Let’s start with that android friend of yours. Clearly a ripoff of an A.I. from another sci-fi game that was ham-fistedly remodeled in the third chapter to become a fappable romance interest for the protagonist’s comic relief pilot…

…Who lives only to serve you without fail, which is the most basic bitch, stock waifu behavioral pattern. Oh well… at least she’s not elephant gooch grey.

Moving onto your slutty doctor… REAL ORIGINAL right there, by the way…. she was probably redesigned last minute in order to match the grid combat requirements and given a British accent by your director for diversity purposes.

Speaking of cockney accents, that second-rate scarlet succubus ripped straight from a pirate theme park ride probably wouldn’t have made it into the game if I was here in the first place.

Why WAS I not here in the first place?

Oh, and what about your vapid, self-centered elf? Only a million other fictional universes have used that archetype before. The whole literal fashion nazi angle was a futile, overplayed attempt at originality.

And a catgirl? Enough said! Nice blatant pandering to the furry community when you checked that box off, you hacks.

Oh, and don’t let me forget the drunken foul-mouthed dwarf… The staple of any shit joke-writer’s arsenal of narrative crutches!

Bit risky to put all your Mary Sue eggs into one intellectual pixe basket as well. For Fortune, I would’ve gone with a blonde, big-tittied, big-bootied, preposterously proportioned, supremely fuckable airhead with no gag-reflex or shame.

Buuut at least you shoehorned the “Big Tiddy Goth GF” in… too bad you had to ruin it by making her unfuckable for most of the game. I bet the censors will be pleased with her blatant xenophobic overtones.

And the squidgirl? What drunken, coked up, bird embryo-sucking art director came up with that design?”

Sorry for subjecting you to all of that. I KNOW it sucked. Imagine how I felt having to listen to it. But it is a deeply revealing passage. A favorite defense of unfunny hacks everywhere is to jokingly acknowledge their own unoriginality, but this is somehow even worse than that – the “jokes” simply don’t make any sense. Who would give a character a British accent for “diversity purposes”? Why would Taron (who is a ‘catgirl’ in the strictly-anime sense, a human-appearing woman with cat ears and a tail) be considered any kind of furry pandering? Why are you acting as though there’s anything remarkable about having a squid-girl character? Splatoon just turned ten years old, for Heaven’s sake. Have you SEEN how much Splatoon porn is out there? And what “censors” are you even TALKING about: this is a fully-uncensored porn game that has been available for purchase on Steam since 2021. Why are these people so, so, SO bad at writing and being funny?

What Hasn’t Changed

For all that Subverse’s progression might now feel more aesthetically meaningful, I failed to notice much difference between a level 1 “waifu” and a level 40 “waifu” in either the ground or space combat sections. Every “waifu” can be equipped with items that change her stats or abilities somewhat, but there never seemed to be any reason to do so. Outside of a couple of boringly-unfair scripted fights, the random ground combat segments never came close to being hard at any point, and space combat remains largely unchanged throughout as well.

The non-Devotion side quests are still obnoxious, unfunny, pointless, and thoroughly out of place in what is supposedly a porn game. I was honestly somewhat taken aback that literally no effort whatsoever was spared to improve what is inarguably the worst part of a pretty bad game. No rewrite passes, no attempts at giving the parody characters different, funnier names (“Sandy Glitchford”? Really? When “Candy Bitchford” trips so readily off the tongue? It takes a true talentless hack to fail even at being a talentless hack.) No extra experience or credits. And, most damningly, no porn rewards at the end of any of them!. It boggles my mind that nobody on the design team thought “oh, we should make a handful of the P.A.N.D.O.R.A. scenes only unlock on completion of certain sidequests”. It’s an obvious fix! You had all the tools! That’s half a day of work, at most!

The most consistent aspect of Subverse is that it is an overstuffed slog that is deathly allergic to real joy. I am quite confident in saying that it has one of the worst stories I’ve ever experienced, delivered via a cast of the least-likable characters I have ever met. The porn, examined on those rare occasions when I would take a break from making boring enemies explode and die, is pedestrian to the point of sterility. Its price tag of 40 American dollars would be far better-spent on two or three other, better porn games selected completely at random. If you’d like some recommendations, here are a few off the top of my head: RegulusNSFW’s SpunkStock, Delusria’s Salvor Deep, Classy_Lemon’s Projekt: Passion, and Mirthal’s Aurelia.

Well, What Now?

When I re-read my initial review of Subverse, I was surprised by how much of it I still agreed with. The fact that for that review I had to force myself to play through as much of a game I wasn’t enjoying as I possibly could within a very limited timeframe very definitely made me feel even MORE down on it than I might’ve been otherwise. Unlike a great many of the people who leave reviews on Steam, my reaction to playing something that isn’t to my taste is typically to stop playing it and go do something I enjoy instead with the limited number of hours I have upon this Earth. However, I was determined to give as thorough a review as I possibly could, and that meant choking down as much of it as I could. I was definitely sensitive to the fact that the way in which I’d played the game might have colored my review somewhat, causing me to stray into more negative rhetoric than might’ve been warranted. But no; the only things in that review that I no longer stand by are the things that have been rendered out-of-date by updates, such as the progression and UI changes. The rest stands.

(I’ll also say that my experience of this second playthrough was much improved by the realization that since nothing had changed about the pre-1.0 content, there was nothing to stop me from simply muting the game’s audio and catching up on podcasts until I finally reached the fresh stuff. Allow me to take this opportunity to shout out Say It In Red’s mammoth five-hour episode discussing Xeecee’s Misericorde, as well as the Sad Boyz episode with Ify Nwadiwe discussing the insane Morning Routine Guy. Subverse, it turns out, is far more tolerable when you’re skipping all the dialog and cutscenes and barely paying attention to it while listening to much funnier, more interesting people with actual insights talk and goof and have a good time.)

As ever, the most galling thing about Subverse isn’t that it’s a bad game. Lots of games are bad! Most of them, even! It’s that it’s a bad game that has been uncritically appointed as the official representation of The Best A Big-Budget Porn Game Can Be. If someone without a lot of familiarity with porn games were to think of a porn game in 2025, Subverse would likely be among the first that would come to mind. Many people’s first-ever impression of what porn games are has likely been formed by playing Subverse. That sucks! My mission as a writer – the mission of this entire publication – is to try to convince people that porn games are worth taking seriously, a goal made that much more difficult with Subverse squatting atop the zeitgeist. We can do so much better than Subverse. You and I deserve better than Subverse.

We could hardly do worse.

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