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.