Welcome yet again to Joyful Stick, our ero-game review series. Miss the last one? You can catch it here. Today, we’re going to take a sexy look at the zombie apocalypse.
But before we do that, a word:
Overgrown Genesis is a game that features extremely problematic content. Trigger warning for sexual assault. If you’re someone triggered by such media, exit the review right now. This is your only warning.
With that out of the way, let’s continue with the review.
The Hows and Whys of Marketing Problematic Content
If you’ve ever sent in a request for Splat Speaks or followed me on twitter, you’ve probably noticed I have certain rules for my content. For posterity, here they are again.
No aged up characters, no pre-established intellectual properties, no content of any kind that in any way discriminates, no content that in any way advocates or promotes any act that could be considered sexual assault or violence.
I’ve these rules for professional reasons, but also personal ones. I don’t stand for any of those things, and have built Splathouse from the ground up to be a place of love and acceptance the best I can. I like to think I’ve done a decent job of doing that. However, it wasn’t always like that, especially when I first started. I made some audios I absolutely regret (more than a few of them have been deleted).
I did so because I was utterly desperate to prove myself in any fashion whatsoever. I wanted to show that I was a professional that could meet industry demand. I didn’t fucking like or enjoy a single minute of it, but I did them specifically to inject myself in an algorithm and thus get curated. I gamed the system, and when I won I told myself I would never, ever create crap like that ever again. I’ve stuck to that and I have had absolutely zero regrets whatsoever-save that if you’re looking to get into the ero-VA industry?
Don’t make that mistake.
Don’t do it the way I did.
I don’t mention this to bag on other performers (hey, we all gotta eat), but rather to illustrate the very open and hungry market demand for problematic content. It’s an incredibly lucrative industry that despite public outcry and discussion persists. You can throw a rock on your favorite erotic subreddit and hit a “rape” or “forced” tag before the stone even leaves your hand. The demand for problematic content and all it’s various niches isn’t a hundred different small, seedy places.
It’s all the places you go already.
People enjoy problematic content for a variety of reasons, most of which are benign or so deeply personal that it would be cruel of me to dissect. As such, I won’t. Rather, I want the focus of this article to be specifically on how problematic content marketing allows games like Overgrown: Genesis to find a foothold and critical acclaim. I will go ahead and state I enjoyed my time with the game, despite the content therein. For what it is, it is a quality title with plenty of user-end options that make play enjoyable. However, the problematic content is directly baked into the games marketing appeal.
Tangled Briars
OG is an RPG maker styled game that features a female protagonist trying to survive a post-zombie outbreak world. The virus isn’t actually a “zombie plague”, but rather a fungus that turns men into super horny walking pollinators. It’s an idea cribbed from a real life fungus and The Last of Us, but with a hard-cock twist. It features a sprite style appearance that’s neo-retro, packed with color and style. There’s no voice acting whatsoever, but the dialogue, script and narrative flow cohesively and appropriately. People aren’t ever happy about their circumstances within the world of Overgrown. They’re tired, depressed and desperate to make it another day.
This is the setting Juno (the player), a former electrical engineer, finds herself in. It’s not a “happy place”, with The Suits (what’s left of the federal government) scrambling to assist people despite the fact they can barely keep the lights on. Riots, crime, disease and poverty face the player the second they wake in Juno’s apartment. The kick for the primary quest is simple.
You’ve completely run out of supplies. You’re unarmed. Your talent is in demand, but The Suits require paperwork as proof you are indeed qualified enough to work for them. So you contact a friend from “the time before”-a former strip club owner turned pimp who offers to create falsified documentation so you can get the job. But, there’s a catch. You can either run him a package of drugs, or give him a blowjob. The decision isn’t inconsequential, as the fungal virus wrecking havoc is very specifically exchanged through body fluids.
So what do you do? What do you choose? Either option could potentially lead to infection. One is quick, the other is not. And you need those papers as soon as possible.
Being put against the wall with narrative choices-of what to give, how much and to who/what-is where OG shines. There is never an easy answer, and the options before you (often in the vein of a binary choice) are usually difficult. For the first time in a long while, I actually weighed my choices before following through. I didn’t blow the drug dealer-I decided to tangle with the zombies.
For all the praise given to the writing, OG completely fucking drops the ball on combat, which within a game specifically focused on survival is an unavoidable design flaw. You can often avoid combat simply by out-running the zombies, which stop tracking the player if they evade their line of sight. Sometimes zombies pursue, sometimes they don’t. It’s hit or miss if they choose to do so and rarely did I find myself in actual combat with a monster. To balance this, OG simply swarms you with them. It’s narratively appropriate, but is something that could have been avoided with better AI tracking.
Speaking of which, “combat” is that in name only. You’re given simple melee weapons (which break down after a certain number of uses) and firearms, which require reloading and timing as they have limited range. Meaning, if you want to shoot a zombie, you often have to line them up at the END of your range and “double tap”. The game even flat out tells you through dialogue with a police officer that one shot isn’t enough. With ammo being a scarcity and the first merchant not showing up until roughly thirty minutes in, the opening of the title is a mad scramble to get away. Terrible weapon controls will fail you unless you learn them.
Let’s say you don’t make it, and a zombie gets the drop on you. What then? OG gives you a quick-time event via a “struggle bar”, in which you furiously have to tap the A key a certain number of times before the timer goes. If you look away from your screen for even a second, you fail. If you succeed, the zombie gets pushed away and momentarily stunned, which gives you enough time to skidaddle. The struggle bar is on a thirty second cooldown however, and isn’t always going to save you. This results in the player hiding in rooms (a nice thematic touch) waiting for the cooldown to finish so they can continue.
If you don’t kill the zombie and fail the struggle QTE, well. Then you get raped by the zombie. If there’s multiple zombies, they all take you. Every single failure raises Juno’s infection rate, which leads to a lower moral bar (think of it as your HP). The higher your infection rate, the hornier Juno gets. If you reach 3 or 4 on the infection bar, Juno will spontaneously start masturbating, making her easier to capture by zombies. You can lower this with items in the game, but the infection rate builds faster than you can acquire these items. Likewise, taking the wrong turn in an area will sometimes trigger events where you get overwhelmed and meet a bad end. Getting an empty moral bar will also trigger a bad end. Save frequently.
Between the zombies, random psychotic opportunists and just general assholes, Juno is in constant danger of being sexually assaulted. For an ero game, there’s a heady amount of dread during play. You never have enough supplies, you’re constantly fighting and losing, then balancing how high your infection rate can get before you lose the game and have to reload. It creates a manic experience that I’ve not felt playing other titles.
It doesn’t have to be that way. The game very openly tells you that you can cheat, with an entire room devoted to it in your apartment building from the first moment you play. If you survive an encounter, you can view the sex scenes via a gallery without an infection penalty. Thus, if you just want to chill and make your way through the narrative, you totally can. This surprised me when I started playing, as countless other titles forced you to grind their systems to get ahead. Melty’s Quest comes to mind.
However, none of these are why I’m writing this review.
The real reason is this game very easily could have been made without any of the sexual assault or rape.
A Fist Full of Dollars
Overgrown: Genesis is an odd duck to critically analyze. Because if you remove the “erotic” elements, this is a fully functional, fun and narratively enjoyable RPG Maker game. You could easily swap out the zombie rape for simply getting attacked and eaten. The interactions with skeezy dudes even could have stayed in, and this still could have been an “adults only” game.
But it wouldn’t have stood out.
At all.
There’s still a sea of “survival zombie horror” games out there. Steam alone has thousands of them from as many publishers in various shades of quality. Developer Tiny Hat was, much like Juno, up against the wall with how to inject the title into a world built around curation and algorithms.
So they made a choice. Likely a hard one.
And they cashed in.
It’s a decision I actually understand in full, even if I don’t agree with it. Perhaps I’m wrong, and this was the game Tiny Hat always wanted to make. I don’t know, though if they’re reading this I’m absolutely open to conversation. You can reach me at my socials pinned at the bottom. But the actual quality of Overgrown is so high aside from the problematic content, with so much attention given to it being an enjoyable play that I can’t simply assume this wasn’t a choice.
Overgrown: Genesis features many things I want from other titles at a very reasonable asking price of fifteen dollars. It’s also a giant red-flag for many people, and something that makes me extremely curious about the effects of curation on market demand for the larger NSFW community. It’s a title hardline anti-adult content conservatives would point to as a reason to remove adult content from platforms.
It’s also genuinely a good game.
As such, I’m going to stay my hand from giving this a recommendation or not. I enjoyed my time with the title, though I likely won’t play through it again. There’s a certain section of the consumer market that is likely chomping at the bit to play this. If you’re one of those people, be my guest.
-j