NSFWare - Itch Game of the Week

A case in “coming” around on something

NSFWare is a game by Pierre Corbinais and can be found at time of writing at this page. It was created for the “Make Something Horrible 2018” game jam.

I first came across Pierre Corbinais’ warioware inspired porn game, NSFWare over at Warpdoor, where it sat on top of the page’s newsfeed for a day or so. As someone who filters through the bulk of games submitted to itch on a weekly basis I can tell you that porn games aren’t uncommon, they do turn up but they maybe aren’t as ubiquitous as one would expect with Itch’s absent curatorial style. For the most part porn games on the platform are rush jobs, little little care or craft behind them. So to find a porn game of any kind being highlighted as worthy of one’s time is something unusual.

But I have to admit that at first NSFWare put me off quite quickly. The first thing a player will notice about the game is its stark colour scheme, made up of bright fluorescent pinks, yellows and blues. There’s no shading so entire people are coloured in with uniform single flat colours, removing much of the human-esque qualities from the people found in NSFWare. Most importantly is that this removes the facial details of the characters. Sex in NSFWare is a purely physical act, without facial emoting there is little sense of individual pleasure or enjoyment. This was underlined with one of the first mini-games the game presented me, “Gag”. A mini-game in which the player controls a man sucking another man’s cock, holding it in his mouth as deeply as possible for the length of the mini-game. Failure costs one of the player’s three lives, which is accompanied by a shot of a woman falling violently to the ground in what I read as a stripper pole accident (the lack of visual details make it hard to interpret exactly). I found the game to be offputtingly violent and moved on in my search or a game of the week.

But alas I found it to be somewhat thin week on Itch, so I found myself back at NSFWare a couple days later. I had seen the game get passed around some more by people so I decided to try it again to see if I could get a better sense of it. And after playing it over several times I’ve started to see merit in the work. When simply viewed as a sex game or interactive porn toy it still fails. Too much of the humanity is stripped away by the art style to be a straightforward celebration of the joys of sex. But there is a solid endorsement of the variety in sex here in NSFWare. The game uses only the four arrow keys for its dozen plus mini-games. Corbinais finds a good variety of ways to create different tasks out of those four keys. Follow the onscreen prompts, mash as hard as you can, hold a particular button, click the right combination, or even don’t click at all. There’s a wide variety of tasks stemming from just those four buttons.

And that’s where the porn visuals work in tandem in the variety of gameplay tasks. If sex is just about getting off, we’ve sure found a plethora of ways to get there. From the conservative conventional sex to the adventurous group sex, exhibitionism or other kinks shown off in the game there’s a whole gamut of sexual acts displayed, and a wide gamut of kinds of people that preform them. And this surprising selection reflects back on the surprising amount of ways you can make a different kind of mini-game out of just the four directional buttons.

I still find the loss screen kind of needlessly violent, but overall the game is a celebration of variety of all kinds if not one of a particular focused moment.

NSFWare was the game of the week for January 15th, 2018.