Lewd Mod: No Butts

I feel I’m not the intended audience for this game for various reasons, but I gave it a try anyway because it was entered into the Review-a-thon. It’s a very brief demo of a longer game about moderating "sexy selfies" on an online platform. And by sexy, they mean you will be seeing all the (illustrated) body parts.

The gameplay involves reading instructions from your presumably sexy supervisor about what type of photos are allowed, then moderating the selfies accordingly.

Since the gameplay involves accepting or rejecting images à la Papers, Please, the whole thing relies heavily on the graphics. Not to start questioning what IF is, but I think this game would be fundamentally different without images, if not wholly impossible. The "cheeky banter" parts are pretty slight (though it is a ~5-minute demo).

I have no particular complaints about the game, but as a hook for a longer experience, I think I’d need more evidence that it was going to build to something more substantial that wasn’t included in the demo.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/16/26
Playtime: 10m, one mis-classified image

By all accounts, human moderation of social media is DIRE. In some ways it suggests to me an SVU-like policeman. Your entire job is to expose yourself, day after day, to the worst humanity has to offer. Then go home and pretend you HAVEN’T been marinating in depravity all day. How could it NOT impact one’s world view and mental health? Having to navigate the moving line between merely-reprehensible and actively-evil, a line whose very framing is some combination of corporate double-speak and Lynchian corruption? Adult/pron sites have a particular flavor of that where exploitation and human trafficking loom large over the submission pool. As anti-AI as I am (and BOY AM I), if I thought human depravity were a solvable algorithm this is one application I’d acknowledge as vital. Of course its not solvable though. So what is the point of you, AI, if you can’t even help with this?

This demo is very evocative of another game by this author, perhaps the entire series - in gameplay, tone and graphical presentation. As in the other, you are asked (via a cell phone/remote work paradigm) to screen and flag images that adhere to some guideline. Previously, it was identifying a marker that indicated ‘spy.’ Here it is enforcing increasingly permissive decency guidelines. In both cases, the image submissions are mostly of women enjoying some exhibitionism. What made the previous game work was its tone: it seemed beamed over from another universe, the ‘gleeful sexuality only’ universe where a pervasive joy and unapologetic horniness infuse every aspect of life. That tone is very much in evidence here, from the increasingly explicit selfie submissions demanding your evaluation, to a giggly ‘send N00dz!!’ flirtation with your boss.

This is about the best possible tone for these kinds of things, and remains a strength of the proceedings. The images are.. representational? Cartoony, but smacking of digital filtering of real photos. Or rotoscoping-esque. One of their more subtle aspects is to typically only present eyebrows and mouth to convey expressions. No eyes. This choice is interesting - it kind of mutes the humanity of its subjects and abstracts them to prurient objects of Gaze. That impulse is certainly… a choice, one that could be actively offputting if not for the winking humor (and uncomplicated lipstick grins) surrounding it. All in all, I felt this shared the strengths of its companion work, as well as its limitations. If you are looking for a titillating diversion, these works attempt to skirt the most problematic aspects of online erotic images and underline the humor and fun. They mostly succeed at that. Female body focused? Yes. Statistically, that’s where the money is. So all that remains is to decide if YOUR sexuality is compatible with this.

For me though, by centering image moderation as its driving conceit, this work remained a bit more haunted by its darker real-world counterpart than the spy-fantasy of the previous work. Just enough of a pall to compromise its specific charms.

This is my third year of review-a-thoning, which means I’ve now played five different entries in the Lewd Mod series – though I believe several of these demo versions have been pulled from the same mainline (paid) game, while others are discrete, and the titles of these excerpts don’t provide much clarity about any of this, meaning there’s a Kingdom-Hearts-style confusion about how the various games relate to each other. And there’s also a Kingdom-Hearts-style confusion about what the heck the series title is supposed to mean; the “lewd” part is clear enough, inasmuch as the throughline is clearly the hand-drawn no-eyes, no-nose porn, but as for the other bit, is the conceit that these are like a XXX mod to some other, entirely innocent choice-based game about avoiding heat-stroke when the office AC is on the fritz? Beats me, but heck, I watched my law school roommate play through the second Kingdom Hearts game with no context, I know how to roll with a punch.

Comes now Lewd Mod: No Butts, though, and finally we have an explanation! This fundamental (er) text for the series establishes that the protagonist has just been hired as a content moderator for a social media site, responsible for ensuring that only innocent selfies, and not detestable smut, hits the feeds of its innocent users. This is of course a job that exists in real life, one that inflicts such terrible horrors that it drives even LLMs into psychosis, but there must be a super intense pre-screening process before people are allowed to register accounts on this particular network, like early Facebook’s creepy Ivy-League-only rule, except for hot babes obsessed with showing off their butts and sometimes their feet (there’s the occasional boob shot, but they’re conspicuously rare). Interaction primarily consists of reviewing a series of pictures and either letting them go through if they comply with the rules, or blocking them if they’re too hot to handle. In between batches, there are short choice-based dialogue exchanges with your supervisor, who starts sexually harassing you within about two minutes (she can dish it out but can’t take it – if you give her a compliment after she, mid-Zoom-call, shows off and fingers her example of the only symbol on the numpad naturally occurring on the human body, she gets demurely self-conscious).

This is silly and, if you took it the slightest bit seriously, deplorable, but I think Stockholm Syndrome has set in for me – No Butts is too goofy to be mad at. Like, during your orientation, your boss explains that a selfie has to contain a face to be OK to post, clarifying that means “it must show lips or eyebrow”, because of course, there’s nothing else that goes on a face, right? And maybe I’m judging on a curve, but the details of the rules, including the way they change mid-game to allow more risque pics (there is a lot of po-faced belaboring of the precise definition of “buttcrack”), strikes me as an entertaining satire on the absurdist moderation policies of actual social media companies, even as it’s clearly just a mechanic to make sure you need to shell out for the full game before you get the spiciest stuff.

Is No Butts worth playing? No, but it answered questions about Lewd Mod lore I didn’t know I had, so at least that’s something – we’ll just have to see if this year’s second installment in the series, which I’ll get to in about fifteen more reviews, manages to justify its existence.