MorganH

Addressing your asterisked point first: porn is kind of weird that way in general, particularly once you start engaging with it beyond a purely consumptive standpoint, and porn GAMES are especially bad. No matter how overwhelmingly present they might seem on your Steam storefront, porn games are a subgenre of a subgenre, made by small teams with nonexistent budgets and basically no access to traditional marketing vectors. Sure, Seeds of Chaos or Cloud Meadow might have made a lot of money via their respective Patreons and seemingly-eternal Steam Early Access presences - but only by the standards of porn games. Thomas Was Alone developer Mike Bithell's lesser-known shortform experimental follow-up Subsurface Circular has twice as many Steam reviews as Seeds of Chaos, just as a fr'instance. And who do you know who has ever heard a WHISPER of Subsurface Circular?

Anyways, to answer your actual question:

I've mentioned Hardcoded recently as a particularly formative game for me, one that really opened my eyes to how GOOD a porn game could be, without ever compromising on that sense of hedonistic indulgence. Not only was it an excellent touchstone in terms of the quality of its art, writing, and overall experience, I also found it a great comfort to see that there was someone out there who was taking this as seriously as I was.

Christine Love's Ladykiller in a Bind was another pretty formative one for me, although as much as I enjoyed and still enjoy it, I will say that its specific influence upon me was a matter of integrating both the highs of what I really liked and the lows of what I really didn't. Love's writing is as phenomenal as always, and the presentation is best-in-class, the dynamic motion of the soundtrack is wonderful, and I think Ladykiller has my favorite user interface of possibly any visual novel. However, I felt it was poorly served by its character & sex scene art (both in the technical execution and conception thereof), which served in turn to make me really prioritize having a wide variety of lush, detailed character & sex scene art in my own projects.

However, the game that's had far and away the MOST influence on my career as a porn game developer is none other than Marble Syrup's Re:Maid. I have very clear memories of being horny & nostalgic in mid-2016, firing up Newgrounds and navigating to their "Adult" section, somewhere I hadn't been in years at that point. It's there that I found & played Re:Maid, a fairly lightweight pornographic visual novel about a college student who discovers than his housemate works part-time at a maid café.

Nowadays, after a sordid history of playing much, MUCH worse pornographic visual novels (page on over to @zippity if you don't believe me), I'm inclined to be charitable towards Re:Maid. Yes, it's frequently pretty unfunny and cringey in its very-obviously-British-weeaboo-writing-a-Japanese-character foibles. The scenario is obviously about as uninspired as they come, and when the porn does arrive, it's often pretty slim pickings - just a single CG per scene most of the time, MAYBE two if you're really lucky. At the same time, however, it was a complete visual novel with a few solid hours of content, no bugs, and a functional UI built from scratch in Adobe Flash, released for free on Newgrounds by a team of amateur developers. Is it GOOD? Nah, not by any stretch of the imagination. But is it COMPETENT to a degree I've seen many other porn games fall short of since? Brother, is it ever.

Back in 2016, however, I didn't have the same breadth of vision, so all I could see were the flaws. And, seeing this slim, flawed, not-really-that-sexy VN nevertheless garnering several million views and a couple thousand a month on Patreon, I thought to myself those four little words that so often precede life-changing disaster:

"I could do better."

And, well, seven-odd years later, here we are.

EXTREMELY NOT EXHAUSTIVE. I'm not any kind of authority on Japanese eroge, so I can't really speak to any kind of lines of influence between them. I've also declined to include some more notable-but-ideologically-noxious titles like Summertime Saga and Taffy Tales. There's also going to be a limited cross-section of kinks & content types on display here that's largely dictated by my tastes - I'm a straight dude who's generally indifferent most of the "harder" kinks, which means there's more than a few blind spots based on that.

The purpose of this list is to provide a sort of tasting flight of somewhat-notable porn titles that one could play if one was looking to take a crash course in what the "canon" (such as it is) of Western porn titles has to offer.

One last note: while I'll try to give a heads-up for any really obvious content warning stuff on a case-by-case basis, if you DO decide to play any of these I'm just going to say to, like, brace yourself in general for stuff like tastelessly-deployed sexual violence, various -isms and -phobias cropping up from time to time, and occasional wild swerves between kinks.

PORN AHOY BELOW THE CUT.