Recommending Story-first games

[noping123]

The reading level of most F95zoners are abysmally low. Seriously, they wouldn't be able to discern the themes, tone, motifs, motivations, deeper characterizations, subtext, or anything resembling a literary analysis if it hit them upside the head. Granted, most devs are also amateurs, and most games (even the popular ones) don't require any deconstruction, but taking the majority sentiment on the forums as anything more than coomers wanting the story to stroke their ego would be a mistake.

If you are chasing the money, sure, tickling their balls to get them satisfied with their MILFS and harems is a valid route to take, but if you are actually interested in making something more than basic porn, you are better off believing in yourself and goggling topics on writing.

Hey now. It's perfectly possible to write a good story with well constructed characters, AND MILFs.


I think the harem bit is slightly more difficult to do in that regard... but everything else!

 

[jufot]

Tentative recommendation for Lycoris Radiata.

On a high level, the plot revolves around two very different people occupying the same body, but only one having the memories of both. The story is about the mystery of how this came to be, and the impact of the new person's introduction into the older one's family.

While there is plenty of comic relief to break the tension, I think the story is overall a tragedy. The major characters are all struggling to make peace with the presence of an entirely new person in the body of someone they deeply love. Likewise MC, being the new person, is having a very hard time with it and is quite abrasive with his newfound family.

This is not a porn game. It has a bunch of annoying anime tropes (for which my tolerance is very low), but the narrative is strong enough for me to ignore that. It took me ~3 hours to read through existing chapters. So far, there is almost no romance (MC is not an affectionate person) and only one very softcore sex scene. In fact, I don't think I have seen a single penis! Not even in the sex scene

So if you like (or can tolerate) anime nonsense, you should give this one a shot because underneath the surface, there is a seriously solid character drama here.

I'd love to hear some thoughts from anyone who has played it. I'll wait till the next chapter before adding the game to the OP.

 

[boobsrcool]

from this decided to check out Alexandra liking it a lot thanks

update: finished and enjoyed it a lot excited to try the devs other projects

Thread readers who aren't put off by mafia theme and somewhat dated visuals could get a lot out of this one

 

[Sharinel]

update: finished and enjoyed it a lot excited to try the devs other projects

Thread readers who aren't put off by mafia theme and somewhat dated visuals could get a lot out of this one

He'll always be a werewolf in my head-canon. I'll fight anyone who says differently

 

[TranscendentThots]

I don't expect anybody to believe me on this until I deliver a decent story or two, because the claim is patently absurd, but...

I think I may have just solved for well-written Harem Tag, in the general case.

Fingers crossed. Gonna do a draft, see if it holds up.

 

[Tlaero]

There are many situations where a "harem" makes sense. For instance, a pandemic that kills off most of the world's men, or a failed colony where the sentiment of "Women and children first" results in most of the men dying to save the women. The question is whether any of us would say, "That's a clever story," and not, "You just invented the pandemic to let you tell a harem story."

Though, if creating these games wasn't so much work, I'd be tempted to use a setting like that to tell the story of a guy who falls in love with one woman and refuses to have sex with any of the others no matter how much they throw themselves at him. I'm sure that would seriously piss off the F95 masses...

Tlaero

 

[raynarnab]

I just can't get into incest stories most of the time. If it's "believable", hence interesting, sure, I like stories. But most of it is just not that believable, and yet actively avoiding incest tags narrows down the game choices by a lot.

As someone who does enjoy a good incest story, perhaps I can shed some light about why it is interesting. When I relate it with real life, I have no interest to see this happen with my own family or even someone else's family. So why am I interested in it? The taboo nature is very generic and may not quite describe the exact itch that it feels. On my own self reflection, I think it comes down to thinking about unequal Power dynamics and for me ones that I consider super hot; are the ones that over time decide to give in to carnal pleasure and thereby equalizing the power dynamics where both parties engage in mutual pleasure, world be damned. When thinking about it this way, it makes sense to me not only incest, but other roles where this unequal power dynamics at play also gets me hot and heavy. A chaste person, a teacher, a doctor. Having said that, I think progress of the equalization is important, far too many games dive into it rather quickly and so I don't really end up enjoying most incest games. However the ones that create a tension and sense of unknown whether this power will ever be equalized does create interest for me. Having said that I do think I like a really slow burn which might be much way to slow for the average incest enjoyer.

I apologize for the wall of text, but I figured I would shed some insight about what about the genre itself is attractive.

 

[raynarnab]

There are many situations where a "harem" makes sense. For instance, a pandemic that kills off most of the world's men, or a failed colony where the sentiment of "Women and children first" results in most of the men dying to save the women. The question is whether any of us would say, "That's a clever story," and not, "You just invented the pandemic to let you tell a harem story."

Though, if creating these games wasn't so much work, I'd be tempted to use a setting like that to tell the story of a guy who falls in love with one woman and refuses to have sex with any of the others no matter how much they throw themselves at him. I'm sure that would seriously piss off the F95 masses...

Tlaero

I believe there is a comic similarly of this topic:

You must be registered to see the links

It actually delves into somewhat the dire nature of being the last person and connecting with someone over the abundance of other choices. It was a fun read!

 

[Hildegardt]

On my own self reflection, I think it comes down to thinking about unequal Power dynamics and for me ones that I consider super hot; are the ones that over time decide to give in to carnal pleasure and thereby equalizing the power dynamics where both parties engage in mutual pleasure, world be damned. When thinking about it this way, it makes sense to me not only incest, but other roles where this unequal power dynamics at play also gets me hot and heavy. A chaste person, a teacher, a doctor.

How does "carnal pleasure" equalize power dynamics? It doesn't really and I think that's the crux of the matter. Because fucked up power dynamics can actually be a fetish thing, whether it's from the pov of the abuser or of the abused. Most of the time this self-indulgence stands in contrast to engaging storytelling.
Incest is a somewhat explored topic in highbrow literature and film, but it's pretty much always portrayed as uncomfortable and tragic, while in porn games it's usually a setup for unconditional love between the characters. Especially the more recent games don't even use incest as a plot device anymore, but rather to get rid of any bad vibes by establishing the PC as the best and only option for all the other characters from the getgo.
And this makes sense, because most people don't want to fap to something uncomfortable and tragic, so incest is inhenrently fetishized, when it comes to porn. But then the question is how could the story ever come first in an incest game? Not saying it could never, but it decidedly doesn't ever from my experience.

 

[EndlessNights]

Incest is a somewhat explored topic in highbrow literature and film, but it's pretty much always portrayed as uncomfortable and tragic, while in porn games it's usually a setup for unconditional love between the characters.

When I first started playing AVNs, I expected incest games to be dark and messed up, but in practice they tend to be full of sunshine, completely romanticize family sex, and studiously avoid examining any of the uncomfortable real life issues that would creep up in a real incestuous relationship. Usually the relationship doesn't even feel all that taboo in the world of the story. After the characters get over their initial, minor resistance ("I can't possibly think of my sister in that way...damn, dat ass!"), it's often pretty smooth sailing. In Chasing Sunsets, many outside characters seem to actively want Alex and Jaye to be together...where are the villagers with pitchforks? Where's the societal backlash?

Perhaps because incest isn't a personal fantasy of mine, I still tend to see an element of tragedy even in happy incest stories. It still feels like the characters are losing something when they trade a platonic, unconditional relationship with a sibling or parent for an inherently more volatile romantic and sexual relationship. To me, it seems like the relationship would always have to change. If you start having sex with your sister, she's going to feel less like a sister to you and more like a girlfriend. I can't quite believe the fantasy that you'd simply enhance the relationship by taking the next step and end up with both the perfect sibling and the perfect girlfriend.

There's no defending Gumdrop's horrific business practices, but Dual Family is actually one of the few incest games that makes some sense to me. I can imagine incestual feelings cropping up in a family environment characterized by extreme dysfunction and mental illness. The son and mother cling together like passengers on a sinking boat. Their world really is falling apart -- the family unit and their minds are both in serious danger. Of course in my playthrough I just try to have the son be nice to the mom while romancing Hoodie Girl, but that's another story and I'm not sure it's even going that well. While it's not a VN, the brother-sister relationship in Flowers in the Attic also made sense to me. The extreme isolation and abuse the siblings are subjected to leaves them with nothing to hold on to but each other. It seems reasonable that in that hopeless environment neither any concern for societal taboos nor the wish to hold on to a platonic sibling relationship would keep them apart.

(OK, so Flowers in the Attic is not exactly highbrow literature like what Hildegardt had in mind, but it's just what happened to pop into my head.)

 

[TranscendentThots]

There are many situations where a "harem" makes sense. For instance, a pandemic that kills off most of the world's men, or a failed colony where the sentiment of "Women and children first" results in most of the men dying to save the women. The question is whether any of us would say, "That's a clever story," and not, "You just invented the pandemic to let you tell a harem story."

Though, if creating these games wasn't so much work, I'd be tempted to use a setting like that to tell the story of a guy who falls in love with one woman and refuses to have sex with any of the others no matter how much they throw themselves at him. I'm sure that would seriously piss off the F95 masses...

Tlaero

I said well-written harem tag. And no flat-out subversions, either.

I'm talking monogamous LIs with unmet needs that most people would agree make going poly a reasonable decision. I'm talking an MC that still reads as heroic because they put the LIs first when it counts. No gendered apocalypse, no love-related superpowers, no eugenics storyline that makes the MC's baby batter into a macguffin. Just one weird trick that makes you attractive regardless of gender or context and works IRL, and another weird trick that makes you a keeper.

(Of course, the macro-scale structure is a little obvious, once you know what to look for. And I'll need to put time and effort into making all these LIs and their stories different. The devil's in the details. I might not nail the execution. I might not be a good enough writer, full stop. I am a hack, after all. And proud of it. Only a hack would try to solve an impossible writing task with a formula.)

But I'm pretty sure I know what needs to happen at the macro-scale. And there are well-known (benevolent) tropes to make each individual micro writing task easier.

Feel free to ask questions here and debate it with me if you think I'm wrong. And feel free to DM me if you think you're a good writer (you're probably at least better than me,) and I'll walk you through it. I kind of want good writers to get first crack at this technique before it goes mainstream.

Just be warned that it's still in beta, so to speak. And I'm still getting the hang of describing it properly. I tend to wall-of-text it, at the moment. So I apologize in advance if the full explanation gets a bit mansplainy.

And remember, ideas are pretty much worthless. It's your implementation that matters.

 

[TranscendentThots]

How does "carnal pleasure" equalize power dynamics? It doesn't really and I think that's the crux of the matter. Because fucked up power dynamics can actually be a fetish thing, whether it's from the pov of the abuser or of the abused. Most of the time this self-indulgence stands in contrast to engaging storytelling.
Incest is a somewhat explored topic in highbrow literature and film, but it's pretty much always portrayed as uncomfortable and tragic, while in porn games it's usually a setup for unconditional love between the characters. Especially the more recent games don't even use incest as a plot device anymore, but rather to get rid of any bad vibes by establishing the PC as the best and only option for all the other characters from the getgo.
And this makes sense, because most people don't want to fap to something uncomfortable and tragic, so incest is inhenrently fetishized, when it comes to porn. But then the question is how could the story ever come first in an incest game? Not saying it could never, but it decidedly doesn't ever from my experience.

I don't think he means BDSM power exchange. I think he's talking about... hmmm. I don't have good words for this...

At the risk of sounding sexist, for the sake of argument, let's pretend for a moment that there is some sort of difference between the way men and women tend to engage with sex, on average, in much of western civilization. That, (regardless of the reason,) men tend to be more readily promiscuous than women. Or at least that some combination of social pressures and advertising could make it appear that way, from the right angle.

Next, imagine if you had been assigned male at birth, and had grown up in such an environment. Imagine that it was somehow your lived experience that you, personally, want every woman you see that you consider above-average. But also, imagine that you're constantly hearing from society that women only want to be with one person each. Or at least one person at a time for extended periods of commitment. And even then, only after very careful vetting by the woman to make sure that the person they pick is worth it.

This might create the false impression that women are allowed to have sex with basically anyone they want, as easily as saying 'yes,' but men are only allowed to have sex with one person, if they work very hard to "earn it."

Within that context, you can imagine how you might start to internalize toxic thoughts such as"Sex is forbidden to me," or "If anyone knew I wanted sex, they'd reject me," or "My penis is inherently disgusting," or even "Women are allowed to ask for sex. Men aren't."

Within that context, a contrived situation in which a woman "desires forbidden sex" might transcend those self-imposed mental barriers, kink or no kink. And by the same token, porn that reinforces the toxic thoughts propping up those barriers (but without it actually getting in the way of the sex, of course,) might read as "more realistic" on some visceral level to guys who struggle with those types of intrusive thoughts.

You know, hypothetically speaking.

 

[camube]

As someone who does enjoy a good incest story, perhaps I can shed some light about why it is interesting. When I relate it with real life, I have no interest to see this happen with my own family or even someone else's family. So why am I interested in it? The taboo nature is very generic and may not quite describe the exact itch that it feels. On my own self reflection, I think it comes down to thinking about unequal Power dynamics and for me ones that I consider super hot; are the ones that over time decide to give in to carnal pleasure and thereby equalizing the power dynamics where both parties engage in mutual pleasure, world be damned. When thinking about it this way, it makes sense to me not only incest, but other roles where this unequal power dynamics at play also gets me hot and heavy. A chaste person, a teacher, a doctor. Having said that, I think progress of the equalization is important, far too many games dive into it rather quickly and so I don't really end up enjoying most incest games. However the ones that create a tension and sense of unknown whether this power will ever be equalized does create interest for me. Having said that I do think I like a really slow burn which might be much way to slow for the average incest enjoyer.

I apologize for the wall of text, but I figured I would shed some insight about what about the genre itself is attractive.

what title would you recommend and you think is the best 1 or 2 games that present the topic well?

 

[jufot]

I expected incest games to be dark and messed up, but in practice they tend to be full of sunshine, completely romanticize family sex, and studiously avoid examining any of the uncomfortable real life issues that would creep up in a real incestuous relationship. Usually the relationship doesn't even feel all that taboo in the world of the story.

Agreed. Incest has been explored much better in other media. I've mentioned this one before, but now that it has come up again, I can strongly recommend

You must be registered to see the links

. Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves are siblings, and Alan Rickman is her husband. It's an excellent example of how an incestuous relationship would go in the modern world.

While it's not a VN, the brother-sister relationship in Flowers in the Attic also made sense to me. The extreme isolation and abuse the siblings are subjected to leaves them with nothing to hold on to but each other.

It also helps that the series is very depressing. All the way to the end of Seeds of Yesterday, Flowers in the Attic is one tragedy after another. It made sense that, given generations of abuse (it's not just Cathy & Chris, but Corinne and Olivia too before them) the eventual incestuous relationship became a refuge. Cathy and Chris having sex never reads as titillation, it's always full of comfort and sadness.

 

[TranscendentThots]

Unfortunately, graphics do matter. They're the thing you see before you even read what the story is.

A game only needs to do two things, in theory, to be successful: Get noticed, and be entertaining.

But it needs to do them in that order.

It doesn't matter how entertaining your game is if most people scrolled past it. They literally don't know what they're missing.

 

[Gwedelino]

Adding to level of support, I was really surprise when I saw Summer Heat had 500 patrons, well-deserved and props to the dev team but the game has 0 story so far. The characters go to Summer Camp and do summer camp activities, and then?

The story hasn't even begin and yet it garners 5x more patrons than games I consider to be actually good in terms of their stories.

The one single thing Summer Heat does exceptionally well is face proportions and in general how real the character looks. It's character's looks is one of the best if not the best in the genre, and that in itself is enough to garner 500 people backing it. I don't think there's even that many adult scenes yet.

I find the high number of support for the game to be an interesting thing because it showed me that a game doesn't have to have good story or even adult scenes to have that level of backers. The market also accept something unique like extremely realistic face proportions.

Speaking of, I do still think for reasons I still can't fathom, Honey Select developers are just gimped on the level of support. In general they have less patrons for their game despite the fact that some HS games do have good stories.

Most of the people that play porngames aren't looking for stories, they're looking for "context".
A story just have to be "good enough" to give a "realistic context" to most of the it's scenes to have people supporting it.

 

[TranscendentThots]

Most of the people that play porngames aren't looking for stories, they're looking for "context".
A story just have to be "good enough" to give a "realistic context" to most of the it's scenes to have people supporting it.

I respectfully disagree. I think that if you can find a way to do both at once, satisfying wish-fullfillment and satisfying storytelling, you really will do better overall than either individually.

(In theory.)

Because the one thing that makes me hesitate is: what if "bad" stories aren't actually bad, they just seem bad because our definition of entertainment is different from theirs? If that's the case, it's possible you can't hit the target, because the product would be trying to aim at two separate demographics, and therefore miss both.

Or, on the other hand, maybe it's possible to make a really long and bittersweet eroge with really slick and lascivious art, and make both the people who skip the story and the people who try not to make eye contact with the art happy.

(Then again, maybe tags would filter out one camp or the other before anyone even saw the screenshots, let alone started reading the thing.)

 

[Gwedelino]

I respectfully disagree. I think that if you can find a way to do both at once, satisfying wish-fullfillment and satisfying storytelling, you really will do better overall than either individually.

(In theory.)

Because the one thing that makes me hesitate is: what if "bad" stories aren't actually bad, they just seem bad because our definition of entertainment is different from theirs? If that's the case, it's possible you can't hit the target, because the product would be trying to aim at two separate demographics, and therefore miss both.

Or, on the other hand, maybe it's possible to make a really long and bittersweet eroge with really slick and lascivious art, and make both the people who skip the story and the people who try not to make eye contact with the art happy.

(Then again, maybe tags would filter out one camp or the other before anyone even saw the screenshots, let alone started reading the thing.)

I got you, but my point is that usually a game doesn't require to have a good story to become popular and liked by a large audience. Graphics and content (A. K. A fetish) are usually far more important for most of the people who play porngames.

That's kind of a hot take, but I think story writing shouldn't be the primary focus of a dev whose looking for making a popular game.

- For a game if a story is terrible, it's becoming a problem.
- If it's average, it will works.
- If it's good, it's great, but it won't make a big difference compared to an average story. Dev could have spent more time working on something else like the model of their character.

 

[camube]

I got you, but my point is that usually a game doesn't require to have a good story to become popular and liked by a large audience. Graphics and content (A. K. A fetish) are usually far more important for most of the people who play porngames.

That's kind of a hot take, but I think story writing shouldn't be the primary focus of a dev whose looking for making a popular game.

- For a game if a story is terrible, it's becoming a problem.
- If it's average, it will works.
- If it's good, it's great, but it won't make a big difference compared to an average story. Dev could have spent more time working on something else like the model of their character.

its not a hot take per se but most games that have many patrons usually have good stories on top of the adult scenes though

 

[TranscendentThots]

its not a hot take per se but most games that have many patrons usually have good stories on top of the adult scenes though

Oh, bless. Of course that would be a hot take in this thread. OP literally opened with "Where are all the games with good stories, please???" It stands to reason they'd have tried the top 10 games already and found the stories lacking. Otherwise, why even ask the question? They could just keep playing the top 20 or 30 or 50 games indefinitely. They update pretty frequently.