The First Hardcore Porn Game on Steam Is Not Fucking Around

When I first opened Negligee: Love Stories, I’d never played a visual novel before, a type of video game focused on story and relationships. A lot of them are dating sims done in a Shojo anime style. Others are more voyeuristic diversions, with a focus on undressing women. Negligee: Love Stories is a little of both. In addition to being the first visual novel I’ve ever played, it’s also the first hardcore pornographic video game released to Steam.

For adult gaming fans and developers, Negligee: Love Stories is a test of Valve’s commitment to its new “anything goes” rules. On June 6, Valve announced it would no longer censor games released to the Steam store unless they were obvious trolls or illegal software. The announcement came a month after Valve served notices to visual novel publishers, telling them to remove adult content from their games or get delisted from Steam.

On September 5, Valve released a set of tools to help users filter out adult content if they didn’t want to see it. Customers can’t even see Negligee: Love Stories on the Steam store unless they’re logged in, and if this filter isn’t enabled. Searching for the game returns some of its additional content, but informs the users that “3 titles have been excluded from the search.” When you do find the game, Steam presents you with a list of its mature content and asks you to re-verify your age before seeing its store page, even if you’re already signed into Steam.

Image: Dharker Studio screengrab

I’m not going to lie. I had fun playing Negligee: Love Stories. It’s the story of the erotic awakenings of four women—Karen, Charlotte, Sophie, and Jasmin. Karen’s marriage is in a sexual rut and she meets a tall dark stranger at work. Jasmin is a stripper having second thoughts about her chosen profession. Charlotte is a young woman with sexual feelings towards her female friend. Sophie is … well, Sophie is a nymphomaniac with a lust for danger.

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Players choose which woman they want to play as and navigate them through different situations in their life. There’s some branching dialogue choices, music, cutscenes, and lots and lots of NSFW situations. Ten minutes into Karen’s story, she tried on lingerie for a customer at work. Karen lets the customer go down on her, and the game’s portrayal of the encounter was explicit, complete with intense squirting. So yes, in case you're wondering, Negligee shows everything. In the opening moments of Sophie’s story she has sex with a stranger on a train and you see everything in astounding detail: penetration, thrusting, ejaculation. The camera never pulls away, it zooms in.

Having never played a visual novel before, Negligee: Love Stories reminded me a lot of romance novels with dirty pictures. Sometimes the game is giving me the inner dialogue of a woman and I felt like I was reading something directed at a female audience. Then a big-bosomed anime woman would lose her top or talk about her ovaries aching, and I knew I was reading something designed for men by men. It’s a weird blend.

Negligee: Love Stories reminded me of a filthy version of romance options in a Bioware RPG. You talk to people, do a lot of reading, stare at a lot of dirty pictures and occasionally make choices that send the women down different narrative branches. I can see the appeal—sex and gameplay—but I’d like to try something with a bit more depth. I hear good things about Doki Doki Literature Club.

Dharker Studio, Negligee’s publisher, is taking a chance here. No one knows how Valve will react to the hardcore content. Erotic and adult game publishers such as Manga Gamer, who previously had Valve clamp down or deny the publishing of their explicit content, are watching to see how Negligee is received.

“We're currently excited yet skeptical at the prospects of this latest development,” John Pickett, a spokesperson for Manga Gamer, told me in an email. “If Valve is truly allowing explicit adult content without restrictions, then that would be a great advancement for gaming.”

Pickett pointed out that Valve has still blocked the unedited version of Manga Gamer’s A Kiss For The Petals: Maidens of Michael. “To us, this suggests that Valve still has yet to form proper standards around what they consider acceptable and unacceptable adult content within their new systems and policies,” he said. “We have already reached out to Valve for further clarification on their new standards…but we have yet to hear any response from the company.”

Valve did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment about adult games.

Negligee: Love Stories is available from Steam for $13.99.