
Some are part of an endless supply of hentai captions puzzle games.

Others are placed under “Visual Novel,” which is where anime-looking games end up by default. The Steam page has visual novels sorted by concurrent users. The sad panda storyĬrush Crush had been available on Steam for over two years when Steam began allowing and categorizing NSFW games. It was first released on Kongregate with no adult content – it wasn’t until after reaching out to adult game developer Nutaku that Crush Crush’s creator, Sad Panda Studios, started working on an expansion over 18. “At the time, Steam didn’t support adult content, so we had to be careful about making it available after launch,” recalls Sad Panda founder and art director Morgan Long. In Crush Crush, players improve their relationships with various ladies by buying gifts or making appointments. New characters and certain upgrades are behind statistical improvements.

These stats rise by assigning time blocks to hobbies of character building, which automatically improve over time, or by taking on jobs that give money or appeal to specific characters. Prior to creating Crush Crush, Long and several other Sad Panda developers worked on one of the most popular idle games on Steam: AdVenture Capitalist. (Prior to that, Long worked at Disney on art for the MMO Club Penguin for seven years.) While at the AdVenture Capitalist Studio Hyper Hippo, Long began devising the personal project that became Crush Crush and needed to start a new studio. “We went for a riskier idea with far fewer resources because we felt we were pursuing something interesting and valuable,” says Long.

She describes Crush Crush and its spin-off with anime boys Blush Blush as something different from other NSFW games, in part because of the studio’s approach to writing, which she speaks passionately about. “We always start with a desire to create charming, interesting, believable characters. Even if the context of a character is fantastic (like a robot girl from space or a demon boy or something), we want the dialogue to be natural Using humor as a foundation to establish familiarity and edify the player before transitioning to a character tone that feels sincere and engaged. “īecause of this, Crush Crush’s characters include a philosophy-obsessed narcoleptic, a stalker introduced to murder your high school sweetheart ‘Generica’, and Bearverly, a bear in a dress. These include a wolfman with personal space issues and a Pegasus who seems pretty happy to stay cursed. “There is a tendency in games with sexual content to play directly on a certain type of power fantasy,” says Long.
