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.

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.