Office Temptation

TW: mention of eating disorder

*Office Temptation* is a demo for the larger pornographic game *Lewd Mod*, where you "converse" with Maddy, a train-wreck of a coworker in your office. She is trying *really hard* to flirt with you, teasing you with snapshots and hinting at a sexy surprise at the end of the day. And she won't stop talking to you, whether you accept those advances or not (well, you can't *really* say no, it just translates as playing hard to get). The only big difference is whether you get the sexy surprise at the end or not (and *even then*, it's a tease).

This was... *weird*. There's no way around it but *weird*. I tried to play as the reticent co-worker first, that just wants to get through the day, see if Maddy would leave me alone (she doesn't, and the game kinda shoehorns you into giving in), and the one who's all into the whole thing. And both times, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Sure, it's porn. But gosh darn, I have standards!

First of all, you have doughnuts and you don't even make a porn joke with it? Stack em or lick em, there are so many ways of using the treat smartly and smutly. But no, Maddie just doesn't know how to eat them and ends up with jelly on her chest. Which.... *WHY?* Why the doughnut?? when you have the phallic *éclairs* right there, or the booby *religieuse* or *profiteroles* or *choux* right there! If the MC is not gendered, the *religieuse* work even better, in the game's context too (with the AC and Maddy)! Such missed opportunities.

Second of all, Maddy has a boyfriend. She's actively cheating on her boyfriend by essentially sexting you at work (and then at home if you took the right path). What's sexy about cheating? How are we supposed to be ok with being the affair partner? Why can't I call Maddy out on her actions??? As soon as she mentioned a boyfriend, I was out of it completely. I was ready to call HR and report her. Which you can't, because the game is hell bent on responding positively about Maddy's advances.

Most egregious of all, and that's not even touching the whole office affair, which its whole canworm, the way the game deals with Maddy's relationship with food is just... *questionable at best*. Maddy refers to herself as disgusting if she eats the doughnuts during the day, that she ate a whole box of cookies the day before and it made her feel bad, that her boyfriend essentially fatshames her when sending him sexy pics... and *she urges you to fatshame her so she won't eat the doughnuts she obviously want to eat*. In the year of our Lord 2025... why are we still doing this? This is not sexy to restrict someone to *not* eat something, especially you can pick the options of *calling her a GREEDY PIG*. Even as some sort of degradation/feeding fetish I don't buy it. It only reads as a woman who has some sort of eating disorder and not dealing with it (and *you can make it worse to get sexy pics* yay! /s).

Smut can be fun, smut can be flirty and cheeky, smut can titillate with neat graphics. This... was just uncomfortable throughout. I kept wishing for a *Report to HR* button so I could stop the game early. But, in retrospect, this would have been like monkey paw's request: instead of HR, I'd have *Horny Resources* on the line, and end up in a whole new layer of corporate hell.

Pornography is not a genre known for its narrative inventiveness. This, frankly, is probably for the best (whoever decided to replace hoary old pizzaboy scenarios with the incest-baiting stepfamily thing: thanks I hate it), but it does mean that Office Temptation, which is another in the long line of Lewd Mod demos, excerpts, and previews, wrong-footed me for a minute since the setup is almost exactly the same as that of Hot in the Office, which I played for last year’s THON. Once again, you’re chatting with a sexy coworker (who you may not have previously met or recognize as a coworker, depending on which dialogue options you pick?) via a phone-based interface as she engages in some light flirtation and texts you the occasional risque selfie. The game’s clever enough to nod at the similarity – the previous game hinged on a faulty air-conditioning unit that led to stripteases to beat the heat, whereas this time the AC is on full blast so perky nipples are the order of the day – but this is still very much retreading some of same ground.

As a result, even on its own terms Office Temptation suffers in comparison to Lewd Mod: Noir, its companion entry in the THON. That had some pretensions towards a larger plot, more stylish visuals, and rudimentary gameplay; there’s nothing of the sort in this one, and without the shine of novelty I wound up fixating one the specifics, which I think was detrimental to the experience. Like, at one point there’s a long section where Maddie (your interlocutor) tells you about a time she wore some fishnet stockings in to work, but got written up for violating the dress code, which seems like it should be a prompt for some suggesting pictures or at least loving descriptions of how hot her legs looked in the fishnets – but no, it’s just an extended digression about an unpleasant interaction with HR, which feels like an idiosyncratic fetish (speaking of: there are still no eyes in the pictures).

Then there’s the fact that the central branch-point of the game hinges on the uncomfortable topic of Maddie’s body issues. See, she loves donuts, and there’s a big box of them in the break room, and she’s worried that if she eats one she won’t have the self-control to stop there, at which point she might not fit into the new lingerie she just bought and is eager to show you. This is awkward enough to begin with, but then it also turns out that Maddie has a boyfriend who calls her a fat pig and has made her internalize his body-shaming. So she asks you to berate her to prevent her from gorging on the donuts. You’ve got the choice of doing as she asks, or encouraging her to go to town on the sugary treats, which again I guess is somebody’s fetish, but the whole thing was pretty off-putting to me, lending credence to my these-people-are-trying-to-roleplay-a-sexy-scenario-but-intensely-bad-ad-it theory of these games (also, maybe once you bring mention the boyfriend throw in a “but it’s cool, we’re poly” or something?)

Where Office Temptation succeeds, though, is in dialing the loopiness of the dialogue, and especially the player’s options, up to 11. When Maddie says she’s wearing a thin vest and suggestively asks whether we know what happens to her when it gets cold (these people have the subtlety of a brick to the face), you can answer YOU DIE?; similarly, after the lingerie photo-shoot is aborted following an unfortunate incident with hot cocoa, you can swoop in with a desperate ARE YOUR TITS OK? Maddie isn’t much better; another long (oh god it feels so long) bit has her look for a hot drink because the AC is making her so chilly, leading her to seductively croon that she’s gong to “get a nice hot coffee to warm up my cold nipples.” So yeah: if you like coffee, boobs, donuts, body-shaming, and lingerie, and hate eyes and naturalistic dialogue, boy howdy does HHRichards have your number – others might want to steer clear.