Lewd Mod: Noir

the appeal of a game like this is the voyeurism. you work at a spy agency with access to private candid photos of all the women in your network, none of whom know who you are. being the new hire, there’s an inherent eroticism in this situation: these private photos are meant only for the eyes of the spy group network—on your first day, have you really proven yourself to be one of them yet? do you deserve to be seeing these? despite being green, a previous outsider, you hold the power of bearing witness to the most intimate moments of these women who are none the wiser that you’ve inserted yourself into the audience.

unfortunately, the game does not leverage this premise to its benefit. in fact, the game feels weirdly conservative in its approach, even with its status as adult work. as the photographed women lose their clothes and playfully pose with their red hats, the player does not take on the lens of a voyeur—every photo is a posed, flat composition where the girl is aware of the camera. these look like professional photoshoots rather than someone’s candid nudes or sex tapes from their phone gallery. all the women are aware that they are on display, posing like models for a men’s magazine. the game’s roleplay of being a spy-hacker feels no different than flipping through playboy or scrolling a pornstar’s twitter feed. it's pornographic, but not taboo—it’s sterilized, acceptable. it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.

this conservatism permeates through the writing as well. to start, your boss scarlet calls you a “snowflake” on your third day. the main conflict between the two love interests is that one thinks the other is a slut, and the other thinks the first is ugly and flat-chested; the male protagonist makes them feel better by complimenting their rack and asking for nudes. the female characters exist solely to fit the needs of the sex fantasy. and this may be a reach, but i keep thinking about the lack of eyes in this art style, and how it has a harrowing effect—it removes the individuality of all the women in this game, forcing their bodies to become their only discernible feature: the size of their breasts, the shape of their figure. yet another method where the women lose their character and agency.

the game gives you dialogue options to have characters elaborate on the premise of this world, but it hand-waves its plot and potential inconsistencies—of course you’re not here for the story, are you stupid? that’s not what you’re supposed to care about here. the game doesn’t allow itself to imagine possibilities; there is merely overarching blithe acceptance of the circumstances it depicts. everything is normal—nothing is taboo.

i think this following example of my experience with this game illustrates my frustrations quite well, but it will require a summary of the plot:

you are working for the red hat network of spies; your job is to filter (increasingly-nude) photos based on whether or not someone is wearing a red hat. the feed of filtered red-hat photos is sent to scarlet, your tsundere red-hat boss. an important thing to note is that you cannot fail these filtering sections; if you incorrectly tag a photo, scarlet tells you to try again, presumably ad nauseum.

cyanne, your real red-hat boss, is introduced a few days later. she is here to create tension both in terms of story and mechanics; the former tension was extremely boring (aforementioned slut vs bitch plot). but, mechanically, this introduced an interesting dilemma: as a foil to scarlet, she receives all unfiltered non-red-hat photos. around this time, scarlet herself is captured in one of your photographs, and it’s announced that (Spoiler - click to show)there is a mole in our midst; cyanne thinks that scarlet is the traitor, given that she’s seen sneaking off in a photo without her hat and she has access to the filtered feed of all red-hat photos. it’s also around this time that scarlet confides in you to work together, off the record, citing distrust of cyanne.

this is a setup for some compelling mechanical tension! as the player, you have control over who gets to see what photos: do you ignore the rules, and send scarlet all the photos of herself, red-hatted or not? do you intentionally obscure cyanne from all of the photos you receive to misdirect this investigation? if you don’t send any photos to cyanne, she would get suspicious. you could also use this opportunity to narc on scarlet: show cyanne all photos of scarlet and red-hats to help investigate where she may be meeting.

this could be a compelling mechanic not unlike that of papers, please—do you go against the rules of your job and let someone pass the border in order to fuck your boss??

i was very interested in the direction this could be going. all of these hopes were immediately crushed in the next dialog. again, if you incorrectly tag any photo, including the ones with scarlet, choosing which party gets access to the photos with scarlet, in this pivotal story moment, scarlet forces you to redo it. you do not have a choice here. sorry, but that felt really lame.

there are elements here that can work, and there are elements that could be sexy, titillating, and intriguing, both in story and in mechanics; but the game doesn’t trust itself to stray from convention. my review of lewd mod: noir is that i am disappointed. this could have been the papers, please of porn games.

Lewd Mod: Noir is "noir" spin-off to the pornographic series Lewd Mod, where you play as a new analyst in a spy agency called the *Red Hats*, which combs through sexy pictures for "reasons". Your arrival also marks the start of an internal investigation, as you learn there is a mole in the agency, selling out its members' information. Your two points of contact, Agent Scarlett and Agent Cyanne, have different motivations on how to deal with the situation. And you can side with one or the other.

Along with the usual phone chatting from this author, the game introduce another game mechanic to add a bit more interactivity: "analysing" the pictures and indicate whether a Red Hat agent has been photographed or not. Very simple, very basic, and as the days go one, pretty sexy. And if you make a mistake? the game makes you check the series of picture again.

There is also a Noir Mode, which adds a greyscale filter to most of the game, particularly the picture you swift through, which honestly adds an air of mystery (and sexiness, in a vintage way). And to the atmosphere of the spy setting.

Story-wise, you have your run-of-the-mill spy story: there's a mole weaving chaos into an agency, putting all the spies in some sort of danger, and *YOU* get the figure out what happens... *eventually*. You know, after you get to flirt with a woman or two. And there's your very flirty and approachable "love" interest (usually blond), and the stern and sulry one (usually brunette). Shenanigans may ensue.

Now, there is some charm to the game. At first at least. The game sort of nudge you to play as some sort of himbo to get Agent Scarlett frustrated with you (and you get some funny back and forth), as a way to give some exposition and explain the main mechanic of the game. It definitely got some chuckles out of me.

But then... It kinda fell off. I can't pin-point the exact moment when it went sideways for me. The vibe of the setting just shifted and turned sour. I think starting by the end of Agent Scarlett's backstory, where she essentially slutshame other agents for their bigger chests (making her insecure about her own B-C cup herself), it sort of became... *disappointing*. And the cheating, again...
Up until then, there was some tension between Agents Scarlett and Cyanne -- a sort of frenemies with sexy undertone, the kind you keep hoping they will kiss at the end of the story, because they realise how attracted to each other they are.

But then *this* happened, and it threw the vibes all the way off. And there is nothing wrong with conflict, heck, this is what makes stories interesting. But the pitting the women against each other, with a good dash of misogyny and bodyshaming, almost fighting for *you*, the lowly newbie analyst, cooled me off completely. In an agency that uses sex appeal as their modus operandi, how is there space for... *this*!
You'd think they would just treat it as the job, their body as a weapon, their actions the same you would filling a boring file in an office job. Instead, we get women hating each other's bodies, some slutshaming and accusations... What a bummer... And it takes away from the whole sexy vibe too.

The end of the demo happens after the major choice of helping Agent Scarlett, while she's targetted by a conspiracy, or selling her out to get into the good graces of Agent Cyanne, the boss. Follows a little conversation with whomever you sided, and a strip-tease of some sort. If only the women weren't bashing each other during that conversation... It would seem less sad.

The consequence of this choice, I assume, continue into the next chapters (but I stopped where the demo ends). Part of me sort of hope the Agents actually realise their feeling for each other, ditch you, and drive into the sunset for their cool-lesbian-on-the-road ending. But I'd probably bet on your regular spy story of their both got betrayed by a third person (let's call her... *Agent Yarrow*, and it's the super boss) and team up to take her down (but then don't apologise to each other, and make you choose again who should take the boss' seat). That or the one you pick is actually the mole and you got to "save" the other one. Or they are *both* the mole.
With how the demo ended, I wasn't tempted to find out. I'll just stick with my fanfic of the two Agents making out on a beach. :shrugging:

Last year’s THON was my introduction to the Lewd Mod extended universe – as of this writing, IFDB lists 13 different games, demos, and excerpts, the relationship and interconnections between which are obscure to unpack. They appear to all share some curious idiosyncrasies, though. The most obvious is that they’re pornographic games that present images pandering to an exceedingly specific demographic: people turned on by naked ladies drawn with MS-Paint-style graphics and no eyes. The fact that they have no eyes is never diegetically commented on, to my knowledge (in fact, Noir, which will get to in a moment, has two separate times when a character draws attention to eyes, one mentioning her “angry glare” in one picture or another drawing attention to a character’s “shifty eyes”. This feels like some kind of lampshading, but I don’t get it).

The structure is also fundamentally the same: the interface looks like a phone, you chat with a sexy lady, choosing dialogue options to move the conversation along in between the sexy pics. And they all seem to act as free teasers for full, paid games (the author’s Patreon is prominently mentioned) where, presumably, the really hot stuff lies.

Noir changes things up in adding an additional layer of gameplay. Here, you’ve been recruited by a spy agency to help them catch whoever’s surveilling their agents; you do this by reviewing a bunch of photos and flagging whichever depict one of their spies. How, you might ask, are you to identify these mistresses of the unknown? Well, these are special spies who always wear red hats. So if there’s a red hat in the picture you push the right-hand button, otherwise you push the one on the left (how finding the red-hat people, and not the people spying on the red-hat people, is supposed to help, is not explained).

While this does serve to break up the dialogue, everything about this is incredibly dumb, and as with the eyes, the game insists on drawing attention to itself – your main interlocutor this time is named Agent Scarlett, and you can ask her where these photos are coming from, and she has some hand-wave about social media feeds, hacked red-light cameras, and so on. But like, there are pictures of random ladies alone in their showers, I’m pretty sure the red-light cameras aren’t looking at that! Meanwhile, if you ask about the name of the agency you’re working for, you get this deathless prose:

It’s the hats, OK?

We wear Red Hats.

So we call ourselves the Red Hats.

Satisfied?

Anyway, it is easy to make fun of how unrealistic this is, and of course this is not exactly feminist-friendly porn that respect’s women’s bodies and identities; a major plot element is that Agent Scarlett treats you with barely-disguised contempt because her former partner was also her lover, but he slept around on her because her boobs were too small (I’m no expert on bra sizes, but from the nude pics you of course eventually get of her, Scarlett is rocking at least a C cup).

But playing two Lewd Mod games last year clued me in on the secret interpretation that makes these games a lot of fun: you just assume that these people are married thirty-somethings trying out some sexy roleplaying on the one night a month they’ve got babysitting, so while they’re extremely horny they’re also extremely bad at all this. Like, clearly they thought up this spy theme, and thought the red fedora thing seemed sexy (possibly they got spies confused with private detectives) so they Google image-searched “red hats porn” and ran with it, yes-anding the first ideas that popped into their heads and talking like hormone-poisoned teenagers whose tongues are way, way ahead of their brains (when Scarlett – not a girl’s girl – runs down her ex-partners’ paramours, she says they were “full of tits and easy with them.” Meanwhile, the less said about the PC’s dialogue choices, the better).

And so it’s no surprise how my playthrough ended: after a sexy striptease involving Scarlett pouring liquor all over her body – which would have been hotter if she, y’know, had eyes, like a significant majority of the human race – she suddenly realizes this might not have been the best idea:

Look, I gotta go.

I’m suddenly out of booze??

And kind of need a shower.

Godspeed, Agent Scarlett. Better tip the babysitter so you can try again next month.