in the ways you can measure a game, btw, Fox Flux is a really good one. The level design is full of thoughtful choices, the sense of humour is completely coherent, and it's charming and sweet and very wholesome in how it tells jokes and characters work, it has excellent conveyance, and it almost perfectly balances 'you can do this if you try harder' and 'you can't do this yet but you'll work it out eventually' style level design puzzles.
Anyway, thinking about how to talk about it.
It's horny.
It's really horny.
It's entirely safe for work, you won't see nips and dongs out (at least in the demo I played so far). But if you're aware of the kink space it is in - slimes and rubber and balloons and pool toys and all the stuff you can file generally in 'squishy' - it is overwhelmingly, continuously, unrelentingly and unapologetically horny.
And this is interesting because it's entirely possible for someone to play this game and have no idea that it has any sensuality to it - not sexuality, but sensuality, a feeling of arousal at implied sensation - in the same way people might not notice the feet pics in all of Tarantino's movies, or the way that quicksand in movies was absolutely a byproduct of directors with a fetish for wet muddy women.
This is a thing that comes up from time to time like how there was this movie a few years ago about a pandemic (haha I know) where the trailer featured a really pretty actress sneezing, and the sneezing fetish community LOSING THEIR SHIT about a full, detailed, complete sneezing shot of a Celebrity, like she'd posted Tits Out Selfie on main or whatever. That split that community too because some people were afraid that the sneezing was the sign of something bad in the movie and they didn't like the idea that their kink, they were indulging, could be connected to something bad or upsetting.
This is something I think about a lot because like, if I didn't mention it, a lot of people who play this game wouldn't know, but also, the people who do know this game and would want to talk about those things would probably select away from one another. The My Little Pony kinda thing.
it's great! It's a great game!
But it feels like talking about it without talking about its eroticism, which I don't feel, is kind of insulting? Missing something? Like it's an incomplete vision of a complex and thoughtfully made work that's making an author happy in a space that normally doesn't get to be taken seriously.
I dunno, someone less of a churchboy than me should be engaging with these things.
