Content Notice: NSFW discussion, mild feminist observations, Market analysis
Musical Accompaniment (looped)
It's a jigsaw slide game where you click on two squares of a larger image and swap them to complete the image. In this case, its naked anime women, often of a folk mideval or halloween variety. All white skinned cis women with these absolutely placid stares. No girl in here does the classic anime aheago, in part because 4 out of the 20 'levels' is just a slightly changed version of the same girl wearing a big hat.
I'm not somebody of a firm moralist streak. For instance there's a fairly easy slam dunk critique here that the slaughterhouse B roll 'chopping' of womens bodies and mixing them around that makes this jumble of flesh and genitals you have to properly taxidermy whole again is as objectifying as it gets. However, to the extent this is a fair criticism, it matters a lot less to me than real life issues like wage gaps or structural transphobia. In fact I've argued before that obsessing over obviously sexual content as if its a plight against women is missing the point because sexual pleasure comes out of a connection between objects where they objectify each other. I wont relitigate it here. You can read that point here if you're interested. It's just so much to say it would be contradictory rhetoric for me to take a stab here.
If we just think about the pure mechanics, in spite of it being obvious shovelware. I can't truly posture that I learned nothing from playing. It did give me a sense of spacial awareness of the body and spacial reasoning in general, and due to the fact the difficulty does not actually increase I did eventually get pretty good at doing the image puzzles quickly. However the sexual component of this text is actually at odds with itself do to how all of it is just them posing with no penetration or anything, and there's a looping dentist type lounge music song adorning it all. It gives an eerie quality that makes me think less of any arousal and more of a serial killer butchering a corpse to classical music.
One of the reasons I felt 'something' is that I was playing fast with the intentions of getting my 30 cents back within the 2 hour refund window just to see if I could. I saw there was 20 levels and I thought 'I wonder if I can beat it in time'. I got to the end in 70 minutes. However this very cynical speedrun motive on my part reveals a whole underbelly of the Steam Platform as a marketplace. Were this to be free or non refundable I would have had a remarkably more disturbed experience but that sensation got rerouted. I had in effect created an absurd goal that prevents any feeling of forlorn wistfulness in the moment on shovelware, in my mind there was no time for that. This commodification goes one foot deeper. The reason why anime porn shovelware is so popular on steam is that it by design fills the niche its going after pretty well. Steam as a platform asks for an upfront platforming cost of 100 dollars. In order to make your money back on a 1 dollar game you need 100 people to buy it and not refund it. Since its with your labor the best way to profit is to put as little labor as possible into the work. The trick of making it porn related is the important part because if you can get people to feel gratified they wont refund it but also by making it porn you guarantee that anybody that wouldn't like it wont review bomb you since you need to buy the game to rate it. This entire artifice forces by design developers to basically game the system in this way. The only reason I got this at all is because of the stupid steam badge resell money. Valve is not as evil a gaming corporation as they come, however the dominance of their digital platform is such that needless devs are stressed to make works that make back their 100$ publishing fee by design. As such, the game needs to constantly 'titilate' the player as much as it can get away with. Whether it be through bright flashing casino visual flair like Vampire Survivors, achievement spam like Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, or literal tits in the titilation like Horny Spell the general valuation is to keep the player engaged so long as to not realize at the very least 2 hours passed.
Steam as a platform is a flea market garbage place where everything is valued in level ups, badges, purchasable cosmetics, endless discounting tactics, devs are given no control over the layout for their store pages. Itchio is so much more developer friendly its not even worth mentioning, but the sad reality is thats not where the money is. Thus this titles pseudo guro eerieness is not a glitch so much as literally what consumption forces incentivize when all games are boiled down into 'competitiors' by attention economies and self invested unpaid wage labor. The attention economy is always itself a gamble and usually requires effective advertising campaigns so its better to just fulfill the base desires of the players you can pull in from the tags.
Even by this incredibly cynical economic metric then, Horny Spell has probably failed to make its money back. There is only 1 user review, and while the amount of purchasers is not accessible information, the fact there are 0 plays on this title at the time of writing before I got here, is telling. However, the question should not be 'did the developer achieve their economic goal' because quite frankly its this vague competative thinking that obscures the reality that, in my view, everyone should be able to achieve the economic goal of not worrying about rent, food, etc. because the system that puts a price on basic necessities in the first place should be undone.
I feel the question should moreso be 'is this really how we want to be titilated?' that question depends very much on what you're actually input into it. It can range everything from achievement spam to rouguelites to various porn game genres. However I feel like it's worth asking it towards Steam, as a platform itself: Is this how we want to consume?
I don't think it is, I pirate games or hell even buy of GOG sometimes in part to avoid the constant 'player is online' and 'external achievement' hell. I prefer almost every other way to get games than from Steam because I fundamentally think that the platform hijacks my mental processes and overwhelms me with so much of a library that my only response is to rip open new cheap games instead like they are funkopops or card packs. Horny Spell is not a reflection of authentic sexual desire, its a desperate facsimile of what Steam aka Valve inc. want.
When I put it that way, I kinda feel sorry for the poor bastard...
"Do you have a favorite? Me? It's hard to choose. They're all my children." - Chunkopop G-Tech Exec
Musical Accompaniment (looped)
It's a jigsaw slide game where you click on two squares of a larger image and swap them to complete the image. In this case, its naked anime women, often of a folk mideval or halloween variety. All white skinned cis women with these absolutely placid stares. No girl in here does the classic anime aheago, in part because 4 out of the 20 'levels' is just a slightly changed version of the same girl wearing a big hat.
I'm not somebody of a firm moralist streak. For instance there's a fairly easy slam dunk critique here that the slaughterhouse B roll 'chopping' of womens bodies and mixing them around that makes this jumble of flesh and genitals you have to properly taxidermy whole again is as objectifying as it gets. However, to the extent this is a fair criticism, it matters a lot less to me than real life issues like wage gaps or structural transphobia. In fact I've argued before that obsessing over obviously sexual content as if its a plight against women is missing the point because sexual pleasure comes out of a connection between objects where they objectify each other. I wont relitigate it here. You can read that point here if you're interested. It's just so much to say it would be contradictory rhetoric for me to take a stab here.
If we just think about the pure mechanics, in spite of it being obvious shovelware. I can't truly posture that I learned nothing from playing. It did give me a sense of spacial awareness of the body and spacial reasoning in general, and due to the fact the difficulty does not actually increase I did eventually get pretty good at doing the image puzzles quickly. However the sexual component of this text is actually at odds with itself do to how all of it is just them posing with no penetration or anything, and there's a looping dentist type lounge music song adorning it all. It gives an eerie quality that makes me think less of any arousal and more of a serial killer butchering a corpse to classical music.
One of the reasons I felt 'something' is that I was playing fast with the intentions of getting my 30 cents back within the 2 hour refund window just to see if I could. I saw there was 20 levels and I thought 'I wonder if I can beat it in time'. I got to the end in 70 minutes. However this very cynical speedrun motive on my part reveals a whole underbelly of the Steam Platform as a marketplace. Were this to be free or non refundable I would have had a remarkably more disturbed experience but that sensation got rerouted. I had in effect created an absurd goal that prevents any feeling of forlorn wistfulness in the moment on shovelware, in my mind there was no time for that. This commodification goes one foot deeper. The reason why anime porn shovelware is so popular on steam is that it by design fills the niche its going after pretty well. Steam as a platform asks for an upfront platforming cost of 100 dollars. In order to make your money back on a 1 dollar game you need 100 people to buy it and not refund it. Since its with your labor the best way to profit is to put as little labor as possible into the work. The trick of making it porn related is the important part because if you can get people to feel gratified they wont refund it but also by making it porn you guarantee that anybody that wouldn't like it wont review bomb you since you need to buy the game to rate it. This entire artifice forces by design developers to basically game the system in this way. The only reason I got this at all is because of the stupid steam badge resell money. Valve is not as evil a gaming corporation as they come, however the dominance of their digital platform is such that needless devs are stressed to make works that make back their 100$ publishing fee by design. As such, the game needs to constantly 'titilate' the player as much as it can get away with. Whether it be through bright flashing casino visual flair like Vampire Survivors, achievement spam like Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, or literal tits in the titilation like Horny Spell the general valuation is to keep the player engaged so long as to not realize at the very least 2 hours passed.
Steam as a platform is a flea market garbage place where everything is valued in level ups, badges, purchasable cosmetics, endless discounting tactics, devs are given no control over the layout for their store pages. Itchio is so much more developer friendly its not even worth mentioning, but the sad reality is thats not where the money is. Thus this titles pseudo guro eerieness is not a glitch so much as literally what consumption forces incentivize when all games are boiled down into 'competitiors' by attention economies and self invested unpaid wage labor. The attention economy is always itself a gamble and usually requires effective advertising campaigns so its better to just fulfill the base desires of the players you can pull in from the tags.
Even by this incredibly cynical economic metric then, Horny Spell has probably failed to make its money back. There is only 1 user review, and while the amount of purchasers is not accessible information, the fact there are 0 plays on this title at the time of writing before I got here, is telling. However, the question should not be 'did the developer achieve their economic goal' because quite frankly its this vague competative thinking that obscures the reality that, in my view, everyone should be able to achieve the economic goal of not worrying about rent, food, etc. because the system that puts a price on basic necessities in the first place should be undone.
I feel the question should moreso be 'is this really how we want to be titilated?' that question depends very much on what you're actually input into it. It can range everything from achievement spam to rouguelites to various porn game genres. However I feel like it's worth asking it towards Steam, as a platform itself: Is this how we want to consume?
I don't think it is, I pirate games or hell even buy of GOG sometimes in part to avoid the constant 'player is online' and 'external achievement' hell. I prefer almost every other way to get games than from Steam because I fundamentally think that the platform hijacks my mental processes and overwhelms me with so much of a library that my only response is to rip open new cheap games instead like they are funkopops or card packs. Horny Spell is not a reflection of authentic sexual desire, its a desperate facsimile of what Steam aka Valve inc. want.
When I put it that way, I kinda feel sorry for the poor bastard...
"Do you have a favorite? Me? It's hard to choose. They're all my children." - Chunkopop G-Tech Exec
1 Comment
This comment was deleted
Thanks unnamed commenter for the feedback. I deleted my reply after realizing you deleted yours (and me realizing that I misspelled your name). I'm just saying this so that I make it clear to the public I didn't delete dissenting comments, which I have no desire to do.
Vaudevillain
1 year ago