Keep an eye out for shift sticks, popsicles, and beer bottles. Instead, Yang opts for playing with phallic imagery to make his point.
Of course, if you're worried about seeing any genitalia, you won't find any here. Yang's games are explicitly about gay sex - that much is undeniably true, and makes them pretty fun on their own. I'm a big fan of Robert Yang's work, noted friend of the site (and an occasional writer). Radiator 2: Anniversary Edition from Robert Yang The soundscape can get oppressive and the landscapes claustrophobic, but the games are a certain kind of meditative. The Haunted Cities games certainly aren't calm or zen-like, but they take great care and consideration for the player (check the ReadMe for explicit content warnings!) and are rarely traditionally violent. Her games bring embodiment and emotion to the fore, and often make me question how far a game can go to guide me into a particular emotional state. Like many wholesome games, Horrorshow's Haunted Cities have no explicit goal - you're mostly meant to vibe and feel the feelings of being in a particularly evocative space.
Horrorshow is perhaps best well known for her game, ANATOMY, but she prefers to be remembered "as the shape a murder of crows takes as it twists its way over an empty field." Her Haunted Cities games were initially released as Patreon-only exclusives, but were put onto itch.io for free over the past few years. Picking just one Kitty Horrorshow game is an impossible task, because I love all of them. Personally, I think that all of those are pretty wholesome. The palette is light, the jokes are plentiful, but there's a song break about beheading capitalists and explicit magical-realist sex scenes. It's a story by and for folks of marginalised genders and sexual identities, but both made monstrous. GMKC shies away from the typically "wholesome" aesthetic, while also working within its trappings. Here in Gay Monster Kiss Club, however, there are no Frankensteins (or Frankensteiny monsters) but there is kissin'. This approach to queer identity is well-trod Susan Stryker's 1994 text, My Words to Victor Frankenstein is a well-loved early contemplation on the monstrous queer body, and one I really recommend as a complement to both games. Much like in its predecessor, one of the driving forces of Gay Monster Kiss Club is depicting queer folks as endearing (if horrific) monsters. Gay Monster Kiss Club is a visual novel/dating-sim from the same mind that brought you GENDERWRECKED. Gay Monster Kiss Club from ryan rose aceae Here are the most wholesome unwholesome games I could find.
And so, in the interest of science, I set myself a task.
As most genre-definitions go it's a pretty vague smattering of characteristics, but it's still managed to spark a lot of conversation on the ol' internet.Īs I trawled through Twitter, trying to make sense of the drive behind "wholesome games," I kept coming across one pretty compelling idea: that "wholesome games" reject the popular narrative of gritty, first-person, hyper-realistic, super-violent games in favour of soft, gentle, and otherwise kind aesthetics. They're games which forefront feelings, often come from marginalised creators, and work with limited (typically pastel) colour palettes. Here are a few components of my working definition: wholesome games are nonviolent, often star anthropomorphised animals, and are soundtracked by ukuleles or a delicate piano line. What's a "wholesome game"? I watched the Wholesome Direct a few days ago, which gave me 53 examples of wholesome games, and I'm still not quite sure I know what falls under the label.