Man's sweat has spilled over his brow and into his eyes as he's labored over stone, then metal, and the Windows PC for three million years just for romantic fantasy RPG Love and Deepspace to prove that what humanity needs is not complicated. It has already been written on cave walls. It's stick figures having sex.
Shanghai-based developer Infold Games' promotional material for Love and Deepspace's new Lingering Lust event, out April 30, doesn't "reinvent the wheel" – it embraces it. And by that I mean, we're still talking about stick figures having sex. Though, due to internet censorship rules in China, Infold Games has also opted to tease its new 5-Star Interactive Memory series to some of its 50 million users with videos of words rhythmically thumping against other words.
One player on Reddit shares an example of these region-specific trailers originally posted to the Chinese social media app RedNote, revealing – according to their translation – descriptions of Love and Deepspace's self-insert main character and jacked alien Xavier humping as butterflies twirl around them. Visually, this translates to the words 水 water animated to undulate at the bottom of a black screen while 你 you puffs big and small as if panting, held against the word for 泉眼 spring head.
"(I think it's a visual euphemism for another wet hole?!)," the Reddit user disclaims about the spring head. The latest batch of 5-Star Memories – vignettes that can also be used to upgrade your preferred love interest's attack power during battles with psycho monsters – are set in an especially humid hot spring.
Love and Deepspace fans on internationally available social media were instead treated to erotic animations, including one of stick figure Xavier blushing as he presses his hairless noggin to your thigh, represented by a bold, black line, and then moaning contently. It's polite, but on Twitter, the video is nonetheless marked as age-restricted for me (and other Love and Deepspace players around the world report the same).
"Caution: water content: 99%!" warns Infold in a caption.
I can report firsthand that the fully animated 5-Star Memories available to preview within the actual Love and Deepspace app are soaked with hot-spring steam and bubbles. The water content is clearly 99% as Infold says, but I do wonder – what about the remaining 1%? It likely isn't easily identifiable by modern science.
In any case, I know some may find Love and Deepspace's commitment to softcore eroticism – whether in words, the humble stick figure, or love interests constructed to look like Michaelangelo's David as an anime step-brother – cheap. To these people, I say it's true that many games featuring sex can be filthy and repulsive, which is why the entire NSFW video game genre is met with hostility from mainstream storefronts like Steam.
But if games are art, and art interprets life, then games should be able to be as vulgar as being alive – which sometimes features sex, yes, and gore, and other subjects you don't like talking about.
Love and Deepspace, a game catered to and made by women, is bold enough to both embody that idea and bring it to an otherwise frothy, strawberry milkshake gacha game that lets me do house decorating and draw red hearts in my journal. So when I'm not overwhelmed by the shock of stick figures gyrating like hula girls gone wild, there is a part of me that finds that aspect of the game powerful.
Female video game players can crave mature experiences like everyone else, and while video games too often exploit women's sensuality rather than cater to us (I'm thinking of Stellar Blade, upskirt achievements), popular The Sims mod WickedWhims, Love and Deepspace, and upcoming dating adventure game Silent Whispers push the industry forward in treating women like we're… people. Regular, freaky people, who want art to help us feel things in our hearts – and hot springs.
