Warning: this review is about an 18+ game and will touch on topics not suited for minors, if you are one do not read and do not interact. This is also why I'm spoilering this on this page.

TW: i will be talking about pornographic content (but not to the extent where i’ll be describing anything related to them), sex, gender disphoria, family acceptance and suicidal thoughts

Disclaimer: I understand things don’t exist in a vacuum. There are people with trauma and scars I can't begin to comprehend in this world. Porn addiction is a real thing that afflicts many men, young and old and that affects primarily women in terrible ways. I also understand a lot of the anti-sex culture comes from years and years of unchecked female objectification in the media and a justified disdain for the porn industry. Nevertheless, I think this cultural push is prejudicial mainly for women and queer people, it’s part of a conservative agenda that gets pushed more and more in progressive communities due to the fact that young people, usually women, are generally shamed or encouraged to not pursue an understanding of their own sexuality. I also believe this is due to the sanitization of media, not in a censorship way, but in a safe, non-transgressive way, trying to appeal to both conservatives and the anti-sex youth and infantilizing art all around. Be aware that these are only the musings of a bissexual trans woman with a design major, i’m not an anthropologist nor do I aspire to be. It’ll also get a bit personal if the TW were not clear. Not enough to elicit unpleasant images on the minds of those who read this, but personal enough. Why i’m writing this on backloggd of all places is a true mystery, i guess i just wanted it attached to this game that made me think a whole lot. I’m gonna transpose this text into pt-br on my substack at some point, at least. whoops i already did it before posting here

Inspirations for this text were Everyone is Beautiful And No One Is Horny, The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-Mediation, Sex On Film, And The Disavowal Of Desire and this video The PC-98 Game with the Funniest Name (and Finding Meaning in Art)

In this day and age where liking something is akin to a whole moral stance, it’s no wonder that engaging with erotic media is seen as undesirable and a sign of a bad person overall. It’s too personal, too self-indulgent and a trait exhibited by incel 4chan types. Why would you want to associate with that? Though I guess the counter question would be, why are you associating someone’s media engagement with that? Are we only our tastes now? Did we lose complexity as human beings? Is this just another facet of the culture wars? I keep wondering…

If you ever read that eroges were the cornerstone of the japanese game industry you won’t be surprised to know that statement is entirely true. Many men and women got their jumpstart in this industry, for better or for worse, via eroges, and went to do bigger, more mainstream commercial things. While this makes it seem that eroges are somewhat a lesser genre that only serve as a career stepping stone, it’s also evident that many a great auteurs started experimenting with this freer, less constrained, PC-bound genre and that much of this experience would leak into their later works, even if the eroticism part was completely removed from them. Gen Urobuchi, Ryukishi07 and Itaru Hinoue come to mind.

Within the eroge community, there is a division between eroges and nukiges. Eroges, more well known, are usually regarded as story driven games that feature sex scenes in some way or another, be it by player pursuit or simply being how the story goes. Nukiges, on the other hand, are classified as satisfaction games, games where you know what you’re getting and that usually develop their sexual part much faster than eroges. Both kinds of games gave rise to the visual novel genre, which eventually also gave rise to the otome game genre, types of game that are usually inherently sexual even if not explicitly so. So even something as beautiful, complex and multilayered like The House in Fata Morgana will end up circling back its roots to eroge. And here’s where I say what I’ve been wanting to say these last two paragraphs: that’s not bad, it should not be seen as bad and absolutely not shamed into oblivion. Sexual desire is a natural part of being human (so is it’s lack i’m not throwing ace people under the bus here!) and a lack of understanding of these desires hurts us as a whole.


To the sexually adverse youth, sex scenes have no business being in any movie unless they “advance the plot” (whatever that may mean), otherwise they’re the product of porn addicts winning more space than they should. Sex is seen as repulsive, somewhat unnatural, but even worse, as male gendered. Years and years of the sexual liberation of women chewed and spit out for superficial rhetoric and moral superiority. Women don’t engage with porn, or erotica, or hentai, or even sex, no, that’s a man’s thing, women do not have agency, they do not think for themselves and they do not know what is best. It’s literal infantilization. In an age where fanfiction is more readily available than ever, where women can publish their own horny stories and these get adapted into movies, where they are reaping the seeds of what they rightly fought for, even though Twilight get treated like cultural malaise and 50 Shades of Grey like they murdered someone’s entire family. god there is so much smut for women written for women it’s not even funny, you play 1 (one) otome game and tell me how you feel. If you don’t feel intense sexual energy pouring from it i don’t know what to tell you, other than women should be able to decide what they want and do not want. And they shouldn’t be shamed for it.

When I say this hurts women and queer people I’m quite literal about it, you’d think it’d hurt men the most because that is their whole thing, being creepy porn addicts, right? But the thing is, these words do not reach them and they will never reach them, not the ones that it should reach at least. Condemning sex and eroticism to some sort of male perversion is condemning all sexually active lesbians in the world into some sort of hierarchical antiquated understanding of homossexuality where someone has to be the man and someone has to be the woman in the relationship. It’s literally regressive. And not only that, it makes people feel horrible, like, suicidal horrible, because, believe it or not, sexual content is a huge force into a lot of queer people’s discovery of their own identity. And we shame them, we shame them terribly and of course they’re gonna think something is wrong and impure with them, because they’re being shamed by their peers, which is arguably worse than being shamed by older people or by a big faceless institution like the church. It’s their own friends, some of them queer themselves even, that will shame them. I used to lurk a lot of transgender subreddits as i’m wont to do, and the number of heartbreaking posts of potentially trans men and women horrified that they may have discovered their identity through porn, through hentai or erotica or fetishes and them trying with all their might to get external validation that they’re not some creepy shitty fetichists for engaging with what is a absolutely normal part of understanding yourself is despair inducing. These are probably all good people at heart, that might be shamed into living a miserable life out of pure guilt, out of being told by proxy they’re terrible and sick in the head.

There’s this webcomic called Heartstopper (it even got a Netflix series wow!), which is an absolutely harmless (more on this later) piece of BL media that mostly features cute, fairy tale-like LGBT high school romances that do not dip into sexuality at all. I have not read it but it seems ok by how my friends talked about it when reading. Also the author famously went on record to say that they think Heartstopper is better than yaoi/BL because those genres famously fetishize queer men and her story is much much purer and realistic. I think calling out an entire genre from a foreign country fetishistic while gassing yourself up even though you are in a very similar boat is a very very shitty thing to do, but it is also symptomatic of this anti-sex movement mine and the younger generation are experiencing right now. Non-sexual is seen as realistic, pure and correct, while sexual themes are seen as depraved. The thing is, is that the bar for sexual is so so low, that a more involved kiss from two queer people might as well be exceedingly sexual. If these are not conservative talk points themselves I have no idea what else they are. It’s also very telling how a large part of Heartstoppers public are cishet people who are happy to finally see some LGBT work that is not transgressive to their sensibilities. They also harass a lot of queer artists that have more sexual tones in their work, with Heartstopper very likely being their sole contact with LGBT media, by which they then complain that they yearn for “more works like this”, which purely means sanitized LGBT works. It sucks so much in here.

I was born in a sex-positive household. Of course, my parents respected my age and I only started to have this kind of talk when I was old enough to have it, but from then on I was never shielded from this aspect of being human. I was well taught enough to understand what it meant and its repercussions. I understand this was a privilege, and one I’m well aware of why I had it. I’m so highly aware of it that it sometimes causes me horrible dysphoria because it should be like this for everyone. My saving grace was being told that there’s a time and place to talk about everything, always being taught to respect other people to a great extent and my then rapidly growing gender dysphoria. I genuinely dislike talking about this topic with kids my age, they were crass and terrible and of course mostly misogynistic. I hated it. I wanted nothing to do with it so I kept to myself, a lot. Like a whole lot. So much so that some people thought I was ace, when in reality I was just disgusted at their behavior.

I was very much fascinated by transgressive media, by media that talked about sex, that media that did would portray what was usually hidden. I’d shy away from things I felt were criminal and horrible, but it also would not stop me from reading the entire summary of Saya no Uta. I’d engage with it from a distance, one comfortable enough for me. Fast forward a lot of years later, I’m a wreck. I don’t know who I am, I feel like dying, I feel like this is my last chance on Earth. While it may sound like some horrible form of coping, eroges (very few even still) help me reclaim something, some part of me that is weirdly hidden, something I'm not understanding. I’m a bit more open when I talk about playing them, but not to an extent where I make it my whole personality. I’m very lost and I’m very afraid of dying to Covid and not being able to be happy, to truly be at peace with myself. I wonder what’s wrong.

Some months later into the next year my grandpa died of Covid. He was already very old so it doesn’t feel extremely bad, but I’m still very sad. During these past months before his death I finally understood what was gnawing on me. I had gender dysphoria. Like really bad. Like so bad I only understood how bad it was after I got out of it. I’ve been going at it for like 15 years now with it getting worse every 5 years. Life is short. I wasn’t able to tell my grandpa who I really was, but I could tell the rest of my family. I did and I’m glad to say I’m lucky enough to have spent this Christmas with them in a very pretty dress with pretty make-up that makes me happy. I also have a lovely boyfriend whom I love very very much, after spending 12 years with a person that did not really want to have a life with me even if we liked each other. I’m in a much better place all around and I get a rekindled interest in eroges. Honestly, I could just ignore what I experienced 3 years ago, I could find it repulsive even, but I don’t. Sometimes I worry I’m too much of an open book, I don’t hide these games on steam or backloggd even, but I’m not ashamed of engaging with the games I did back then, nor of talking about them, it helped me cope and hold myself together, and it probably helped me understand who I am better. While I don’t need them as coping mechanisms anymore, these types of games still fascinate me. Be it if they’re story driven games that happen to feature sex, or nukiges that are more to the point than anything, it is endlessly fascinating how everything can mean something different to different people. Even the horny weird sex game that they may play from time to time.

I’m trying to move away from judging people solely by their tastes. Sometimes it’s hard, there -is- some stuff that I find truly despicable and I don’t think I’m ready to look at it in good faith. And some people do make their tastes their whole personality, even more people that feel like they should fight against common sense perpetually as some sort of paragon of individualism. But I don’t feel like judging someone for their tastes anymore, rather than their actions. And I think we’d have a healthier online space if less people did that, you’ll be surprised by how diverse the people who enjoy eroges, hentai, erotica and things like that can be. We’d gain from that and from being less sex-negative overall. There is a reason why all of my inspirations for this text were written by women and queer people.

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Blackberry Honey is a very very cute lesbian love story set in the Victorian era that uses this backdrop to try to explore the hardships faced by the poor women in that era, mainly how they had to take in maid work to sustain their families. The story is centered around Lorina, a passionate but ultimately powerless maid that has to deal with abuse from her employers and co-workers. It’s frustrating and unfair, with her being unable to fight back due to her delicate position in the household. We as the player have no say in the matter as the game is a pure reading experience, no choices and no routes to take, you simply read the text and look at the CG. Ultimately as the game’s key art very eagerly tells you, our heroine eventually falls in love with the half-chinese parlor maid Taohua.

It’s an overall very lighthearted story that deals with topics like wealth inequality, not belonging due to one's appearance and being true to oneself. It doesn’t ever reach any conclusions in these topics but that’s mainly because it doesn’t have to, that’s just their reality being acknowledged. Also there are the sex scenes. You can play a version without them, but as I wrote that whole prose above, I feel that doing that would be a disservice to the simple fact that it exists and that the writer wrote them. I also appreciated how the game sensibly presented how important consent is, even if there is some powerplay involved in their relationship. All in all it’s a cute hopeful lighthearted game that made me cry a few times (even in the steamy scenes!) and miss my bf terribly. And it also made me put out my thoughts on how these kinds of games can be special, even with all the stigma around them.