I'm doing game reviews now lol
A few days ago I made the above post on twitter, which prompted everyone to yell at me and insist that their fetish game is actually kind of good. I promised that I would check them out and as a result have a backlog of like 40 video games named shit like "Tina's Stuffing Adventure" and "BBW Minecraft" to play. I've tried a few of them now and have decided to try writing my thoughts on each, which has been really fun so far. Eventually I plan to make a public blog for these, but because I love all of you more than normal people I'm subjecting you to my criticisms first. Enjoy, and please feel free to recommend other games you'd like me to try out.
Visca's Earth Conquest by Burger Kurger
One interesting quirk of the kink kitsch game is the way it's chosen proclivities tend to inform, and often constrain, gameplay mechanics. Games whose fetishes operate on a dynamic of escalating disempowerment often face the awkward challenge of balancing that desire with player agency. Conversely, power fantasies seem almost inherently suited towards adaptation.
A giantess simulator of sorts, Visca's Earth Conquest presents as a platform beat-em-up hybrid akin to the classic arcade title Rampage. Playing as Visca, a catgirl bioweapon created by a malevolent AI with big boobs, you scurry around a flash cartoon cityscape, disintegrating random garbage and nuisance animals with your fists and collecting the circles that are left behind. As you absorb matter your character model grows in size, allowing you to tackle bigger targets in a decidedly Katamariffic gameplay loop. Eventually you're crushing people and buildings indiscriminately and fighting off the growing military presence, their panicked cries for help displaying in a text box across the top third of the screen. Between each run you're able to buy various upgrades for your character, providing a cumulative sense of progression.
In terms of alignment between gameplay system and sexual obsession, giantess fetishism is perhaps as close to perfect as one could expect, a chocolate-in-my-peanut butter situation. Power-ups making your guy bigger is one of the platonic pillars of the medium. One need only look to the Mario franchise to understand the sacred link between player model size and perceived strength. This relation is so easily interfaced with that it feels redundant to describe directly, and to that end I worry that the fetishism of Visca's becomes almost invisible, dissolving into the frenetic wad of it's gameplay loop. Aside from the occasional flash of fanservice, I struggled while playing to locate the threads of intended orgone, inevitably getting distracted by the frenzy of destruction and frustrated by the increasingly smaller hit boxes of seagulls and rabid dogs. In this way the game neuters itself, its desire drive so seamlessly woven in that it loops back around towards asexuality. While I'm not into giantess, the idea of a size fan being turned on here strikes me as kind of alarming. Do they have the same reaction to any game where power-ups make your guy bigger? Do you get a boner when Mario gets the mushroom?
Presentation: 3/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Ludosexual Cohesion: 5/5
Horny: 1/5
Overstuffed Overtime by lachevite
Like a Hong Kong assembly line video you find on LiveLeak, this game begins in somewhat foreboding silence. After a brief intro cutscene in which your pigtailed avatar delivers some basic instructions and acerbic humor, you find yourself once again beholden to the machine of capital. A flash game similar to Tapper or Diner Dash, this game places you in control of a conveyer belt as it spits out various primary colored foodstuffs and asks you to spray them with a correspondingly colored chemical, while simultaneously managing the machine's heat level as represented by a steadily filling status bar. At the end of the line sits your blonde coworker who will consume whatever your labor produces indiscriminately. As she fattens up you must occasionally move away from the controls to burp her and prevent catastrophic regurgitation. In this way her character can essentially be described as another status bar. An ornate, zaftig one, but still no more complex than a black rectangle containing a row of smaller green rectangles. While I appreciate the commentary this provided on the dehumanizing mandate of industrialism (and, somewhat shockingly, the consumerist relation between the US and China,) I ultimately found this aspect of the game to be the most pathetically quotidian kind of erotic expression, the possibility of the human form flattened to a bellwether of it's own negation. I might want to die in a factory, but I don't want to fucking work in one!
Depending on your performance there are several different ending cutscenes you can receive, each depicting your status bar coworker reaching a different of immobility. Unfortunately my reflexes weren't good enough to reach any but the most basic. After a dozen attempts I begrudgingly reset and activated freeplay mode. Here, the conveyer belt is permanently paused and you are free to spawn whichever food item you want to feed your coworker, making seeing all the endings trivial. Many kink kitsch games feature some kind of option like this, for when the player stops wanting to play with both hands. I personally consider this a major disrespect to the medium as a whole. It betrays a mistrust of the guided experience, a misunderstanding of videogames as a conveyer belt of "content" in bite sized chunks, rather than the weird, continuous occupation of body and soul that they are meant to be. Why would you let your player clock out early when you're paying for them to be there? Maybe the gamer in me longs for the factory after all. Strap me to the machine. Slide my fleshy body past the plastic flap and into the gnashing gears. Pull the lever. Snap it off.
Presentation: 2/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Ludosexual Cohesion: 3/5
Horny: 2/5
Moo Moo Manor (alpha demo) by sometimescozy
While Moo Moo Manor is ostensibly another game about managing status bars, the cute cowgirl characters on display here play a notably more robust mechanical purpose, serving as multi-functional tools through which the player interfaces with the games systems. Playing the role of disembodied dairy farmer, you are tasked with the daily operations of an anthropomorphic cattle ranch. Each of your holstaurs needs to be fed, burped, and milked, and they can't do it themselves... Obsessively tactile and unabashed about it's philias, the game unfolds into a set of rhythmic minigames in which you intimately meet the needs of each cow one on one, like a Tamagotchi but sweatier. Once you've relieved your herd your able to sell the milk, using the profits to buy various furniture pieces with which to decorate your ranch. I've always found the prevalence of weight gain fetish games with the food production market as a central theme to be simultaneously cloying and endearing. I'll call it part of the genre's camp appeal. This one presents an almost libertarian romanticism, fully entitling you to both the sweat of your brow and the cream of your labor. The cowgirls are not chattel, they play their role and blush and coo in recognition of your manifest freedom.
The game lacks much mechanical depth once you've gotten used to it's lactation oriented minigames. The cowgirls gain certain stats (and weight) as you play, but there doesn't seem to be any penalty or failure state for ignoring their status bars. The house decoration mechanic is similarly vestigial. While a silhouette of mechanical interplay is at first implied, it never materializes, and I found the resulting experience surprisingly zen-like. Without the fuss of an active goal-reward circuit, the player is free to sink into the plush texture of the farm and become lulled. This is further aided by the gentle backing track and soft pastel aesthetic, submerging you deeper into erotic reverie, towards that Lordeian pearl of margerine. It's not about the cows, it's about you. This quality paradoxically makes Moo Moo Manor a boring videogame but an excellent erotic experience, and perhaps makes it a good benchmark for other projects like it. Games generally aim to seize the players nervous system and align it towards the enaction of some experiential ideal, but perhaps the erotic game shouldn't aim for that. Maybe it's meant to be a vessel, like an empty milk jug. Something you pour yourself into gradually, meditatively, until overflowing.
To this extent I actually found myself playing long past the games soft end, when the developer announces that there's nothing left to unlock and plugs her Patreon, quietly sustaining the rhythm of feeding, burping and milking the cowgirls as my thoughts pulsed with my breath. I lapsed into a memory of an early childhood field trip to a dairy farm. A dim barn with a lone Holstein standing beneath a hanging lamp. The inviting, alien warmth of the teat. The way a distant church bell rang as I backed away after a single tug. When I eventually resurfaced, I found that one of the cowgirls, Abigail, had grown big enough that her character model was glitching, her distended abdomen clipping through the mesh of her chest and arms. She gazed at me through the screen with an awkward but infinitely accepting blush. I quietly apologized before closing the program.
Presentation: 4/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Ludosexual Cohesion: 4/5
Horny: 4/5