Lewd Mod: Noir, by HHRichards (THON)
Last year’s THON was my introduction to the Lewd Mod extended universe – as of this writing, IFDB lists 13 different games, demos, and excerpts, the relationship and interconnections between which are obscure to unpack. They appear to all share some curious idiosyncrasies, though. The most obvious is that they’re pornographic games that present images pandering to an exceedingly specific demographic: people turned on by naked ladies drawn with MS-Paint-style graphics and no eyes. The fact that they have no eyes is never diegetically commented on, to my knowledge (in fact, Noir, which will get to in a moment, has two separate times when a character draws attention to eyes, one mentioning her “angry glare” in one picture or another drawing attention to a character’s “shifty eyes”. This feels like some kind of lampshading, but I don’t get it).
The structure is also fundamentally the same: the interface looks like a phone, you chat with a sexy lady, choosing dialogue options to move the conversation along in between the sexy pics. And they all seem to act as free teasers for full, paid games (the author’s Patreon is prominently mentioned) where, presumably, the really hot stuff lies.
Noir changes things up in adding an additional layer of gameplay. Here, you’ve been recruited by a spy agency to help them catch whoever’s surveilling their agents; you do this by reviewing a bunch of photos and flagging whichever depict one of their spies. How, you might ask, are you to identify these mistresses of the unknown? Well, these are special spies who always wear red hats. So if there’s a red hat in the picture you push the right-hand button, otherwise you push the one on the left (how finding the red-hat people, and not the people spying on the red-hat people, is supposed to help, is not explained).
While this does serve to break up the dialogue, everything about this is incredibly dumb, and as with the eyes, the game insists on drawing attention to itself – your main interlocutor this time is named Agent Scarlett, and you can ask her where these photos are coming from, and she has some hand-wave about social media feeds, hacked red-light cameras, and so on. But like, there are pictures of random ladies alone in their showers, I’m pretty sure the red-light cameras aren’t looking at that! Meanwhile, if you ask about the name of the agency you’re working for, you get this deathless prose:
It’s the hats, OK?
We wear Red Hats.
So we call ourselves the Red Hats.
Satisfied?
Anyway, it is easy to make fun of how unrealistic this is, and of course this is not exactly feminist-friendly porn that respect’s women’s bodies and identities; a major plot element is that Agent Scarlett treats you with barely-disguised contempt because her former partner was also her lover, but he slept around on her because her boobs were too small (I’m no expert on bra sizes, but from the nude pics you of course eventually get of her, Scarlett is rocking at least a C cup).
But playing two Lewd Mod games last year clued me in on the secret interpretation that makes these games a lot of fun: you just assume that these people are married thirty-somethings trying out some sexy roleplaying on the one night a month they’ve got babysitting, so while they’re extremely horny they’re also extremely bad at all this. Like, clearly they thought up this spy theme, and thought the red fedora thing seemed sexy (possibly they got spies confused with private detectives) so they Google image-searched “red hats porn” and ran with it, yes-anding the first ideas that popped into their heads and talking like hormone-poisoned teenagers whose tongues are way, way ahead of their brains (when Scarlett – not a girl’s girl – runs down her ex-partners’ paramours, she says they were “full of tits and easy with them.” Meanwhile, the less said about the PC’s dialogue choices, the better).
And so it’s no surprise how my playthrough ended: after a sexy striptease involving Scarlett pouring liquor all over her body – which would have been hotter if she, y’know, had eyes, like a significant majority of the human race – she suddenly realizes this might not have been the best idea:
Look, I gotta go.
I’m suddenly out of booze??
And kind of need a shower.
Godspeed, Agent Scarlett. Better tip the babysitter so you can try again next month.