The best sex games that don’t suck
The best sex games on PC have a lot of prejudices to overcome. Since Steam began selling uncensored adult games in 2018, there have been so many low-effort puzzle games with recycled art that it’s tempting to toggle the Adult Only filter just to make them go away. If you do make the effort to separate the decent stuff from the slush, whether on Steam, itch.io, Nutaku, or wherever games for discerning adults are sold, you have to wade through the kind of games that love boobs but hate women, and are packed with the bigotry and stereotyping that flourish on the seedier side of the internet.
But there have always been terrible sex games. My first experience of that came via Sex Games on the Commodore 64. That’s literally what it was called: Sex Games. Published by Landisoft in 1985, it was about waggling a joystick back and forth while two bright pink cartoon people went at it like joyless jackhammers. It wasn’t a great introduction to the idea that sex was a worthwhile subject for videogames.
We’ve come a long way since then—quiet, you—but there are still plenty of games about sex that are just as bad in their own way. Those that aren’t deserve to be celebrated, because sex is as worthy a theme for games to explore as anything else. Sex can be playful and funny and exciting, and those are all things videogames excel at.
Today, Patreon provides funding for a lot of independent developers making ambitious adult games. It encourages a state of perpetual development, influenced by subscriber suggestions. While they may be labeled “in development”, they can be just as complete as many other games are at launch, if not more so.
It’s worth noting that these are all “sex games” rather than “games that happen to have sex in them”, if that distinction makes sense. The Witcher 3 is an RPG dozens of hours long that has some sex scenes in it, but it’s not about sex in the same way as NSFWare or Summertime Saga.
The best free sex games
Love Sucks: Night One
Release date: 2021 | Developer: Art Witch Studios | itch.io, Steam
Love Sucks is Buffy if it was about hooking up with vampires and demons instead of slaying them. Actually, that already describes a lot of episodes of Buffy. Still, if you swapped Sunnydale for Crescent Valley, the Hellmouth for leylines, and made it a visual novel, you’d essentially have Love Sucks.
You play the local Xander equivalent—although a future update, which the creators plan to work on after finishing the sequel, will add a Girl Mode so you can play as a woman. Pursued by two lady monsters, all you have to do is live through the night. The story piles on supernatural twists and character comedy setpieces without going overboard—it’s anime, but not too anime, if you know what I mean. While this first taste is free, paid sequel Love Sucks: Night Two is currently in development.
Read more: The best visual novels on PC
Sex Advice Succubus
Release date: 2023 | Developer: NomnomNami | itch.io
As wholesome a game about horizontal jogging as you’re likely to find, Sex Advice Succubus suggests that demons who feed on sexual energy would actually make natural sex counselors. Succubi and incubi want everyone to be having more and better sex, and one way to facilitate that without having to drain anyone’s life is by working as gurus of groping online.
NomnomNami’s game presents a single session in which you, a succubus with a frankly ideal work-from-home situation, choose how to advise a ghost who is about to meet her internet girlfriend IRL for the first time. You navigate this by choosing options you think will boost your nervous client’s comfort level, and hope for the best. Sex Advice Succubus is short and sweet, and feels like an ideal format to be expanded in a larger game some day.
Read more: Sex in games has finally become personal
Crush Crush / Blush Blush
Release date: 2016 / 2019 | Developer: Sad Panda | Steam, Nutaku / Steam, Nutaku
Honestly, who could have predicted Farmville-parody Cow Clicker would lead to a future in which there’s an entire storefront dominated by incremental games where you click on cartoon boobs? They say idle hands are the devil’s playthings, and it seems like idle games belong to the devil too.
Crush Crush and Blush Blush are a cut above the rest. They do contain the standard activity of clicking on anime ladies to make them like you more (or anime men, in Blush Blush), as well as the usual time-management math that buffs your stats and their affection meters. But while these are games about manipulating numbers so you can see more of a hottie, the characters are fun and so is their dialogue. A lost time traveler asks who the current God Emperor is, while a man cursed to be a pegasus decides he’s actually better off this way. And of course there’s Bearverly, who is a bear.
Read more: There’s a sea of hentai junk games on Steam, and then there’s Crush Crush
Radiator 2
Release date: 2016 | Developer: Robert Yang | itch.io, Steam
A collection of Robert Yang’s minigames, Radiator 2 includes Stick Shift (which is about a dude driving a car he’s way into), Succulent (which is about a dude eating a corndog he’s way into), and Hurt Me Plenty (which is about spanking). While the third one straight-up simulates a sexual act, the first two are extended, unsubtle double entendres, and both are hilarious. They’re interactive music videos in which your mouse-waggling builds the visuals toward an over-the-top crescendo.
Yang’s games delight in taking 3D characters who look like they belong in a shooter—his early work included Half-Life 2 mods—then stretching and exaggerating them for effect. They’re like sexed-up versions of an0nymoose’s Source Filmmaker videos.
There’s a bonus in that vein in Radiator 2, an extra game you unlock by clicking the condom on the menu screen. It gives you a sniper rifle that shoots prophylactics and sets you up across the street from a building full of men who need protection. A bizarre parody of modern military shooters follows. Sex can be funny, and Radiator 2 understands that like few other games do.
Read more: This public bathroom sim swaps wangs for guns to make a point about censorship
NSFWare
Release date: 2018 | Developer: Pierrec | itch.io
The WarioWare games are grab bags of Nintendo microgames a few seconds long. You’re thrown into them at random, frantically trying to figure out the controls so you can land a hang-glider or saw through a tree or shave a mustache. It’s like being trapped in a frantic Japanese game show. NSFWare is that, but with fucking.
Each microgame is a pixel-art trace of a scene from a porno, and you have mere seconds to figure out how to mash the arrow keys to, for example, spank someone in a pillory or successfully jerk off two guys in a fair and even-handed manner. The brightly colored pixel sex is absurd, the hectic microgames are unfair, and the combination makes for a perfect spectator sport. It’s Sex Games on the Commodore 64 only fun, and it lets you do what Nintendon’t.
You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter
Release date: 2017 | Developer: Seemingly Pointless | itch.io, Steam
Your parents are out, and the dial-up internet is waiting. A screechy modem is the gateway that connects you to AOL and all the slow-loading bitmaps of naked people you could want. You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter reimagines what it was like to be young in the 1990s when the internet was new, confusing, and kind of frightening. Then it casts you as a kid for whom sex is also new, confusing, and kind of frightening.
The pornography is all impressionistic ASCII art, the kind of porn I imagine characters looking at on those retro computers in Fallout. You explore it via increasingly debased categories while under time pressure, because every noise you hear could be your parents in the driveway.
You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter is a singular recreation of a specific moment in time, one that’s not so far away from us and yet, with its domains like “fourecks.com” and quaint virus unblocker pop-ups, fascinatingly distant.
Read more: RIP, AIM: Remembering how we used to talk on the internet
Triad
Release date: 2018 | Developer: anna anthropy, Leon Arnott | itch.io
After the threesome an awkward conversation happens. How do three people share a bed when they’re just trying to get to sleep? Triad is a puzzle game about arranging people with different sleeping habits on a single mattress, making sure the one who likes to roll around won’t slip right onto the floor, and that nobody’s face is next to the one who snores.
Then, once you’ve arranged everybody’s body to your liking, you press the button to send them to sleep and chaos breaks out. This one flips over with their feet on that one’s head, the other ends up on the floor no matter how much room you gave them, and finally the cat jumps on someone to make the disorder complete.
Read more: Hypersexed Hypertext: Porpentine and the Twine text game revolution
Trials in Tainted Space
Release date: 2015 | Developer: Fenoxo | Website
Trials in Tainted Space (a name surely chosen for its acronym) gives you a spaceship and worlds to explore, but before it does that it puts you through a rigorous character creation process that includes detailing your genitalia in some quite specific ways. No matter what you choose, you end up playing the version of Captain Kirk who exists more in memes than actual Star Trek—the one who spends all his time banging green alien girls.
It’s a text-heavy game, with small character illustrations in the corner of the screen. (In a nice touch, you can choose from several different artist’s interpretations for many of the characters.) There’s combat, grid maps of planetary locations to explore, and a storyline about racing a rival heir, but mostly there’s a lot of sex with a variety of weird aliens. Like, really weird. Everything is somebody’s fetish and there’s stuff in Trials in Tainted Space will make you say, “Wow, somebody out there wants to fuck that?” The answer is always, “Yes, somebody out there wants to fuck that.”
The same creators are also responsible for Corruption of Champions and its sequel, which are the same thing but in a fantasy setting. The Dragon Age to its Mass Effect, if you will.
Read more: Sexuality and gender in science fiction games
The best sex games that cost $$$
Mirror
Release date: 2018 | Developer: Kagami Works | Steam, itch.io
Tile-matching games and porn have been weirdly linked since the arcade release of Puzznic, Taito’s 1989 post-Tetris puzzler where you slowly uncovered topless pixelated ladies, but Mirror owes more to Puzzle Quest’s innovation of combining Bejeweled with Final Fantasy: Tactics. Lining up three or more symbols is how you power up spells and attacks and potions while engaged in duels with its sexy anime ladies, and, yes, there is a toggle to enable “clothing torns”.
The matches aren’t always fights, however. Each visual novel storyline introduces a new character, whether rival thief or Queen of pseudo-Egypt, and the matches are conflicts that separate chapters of her story. They might be mental duels between a demon and the nun he’s trying to corrupt or playful arguments between a dragon knight and his mount who has been given human form. Some are better-written than others, with the best well aware of their own ludicrousness.
Completing the lot unlocks a challenge mode that’s properly tough. It’s not the kind of match-3 game where a time limit forces you to play frantically—instead there’s a turn limit as well as a countdown showing how many moves before your opponent uses an ability that might chip away at your health, turn gems into beetles, or otherwise mess with the field. It’s genuinely one of the better match-3 puzzlers since Bejeweled 3, but if it’s the boobs you’re here for you’ll want the R18 patch (there’s a patch for the DLC too).
Read more: Steam now has an endless supply of hentai puzzle games
Memoirs of a Battle Brothel
Release date: 2022 | Developer: A Memory of Eternity | Steam, itch.io
Equal parts Sin City and Shadowrun, Memoirs of a Battle Brothel is an RPG set in a cyberpunk-fantasy city called MoonFall that has lore so deep krakens could be swimming in it. As a facilitator for a branch of the MoonFall Courtesan’s Guild, part of your job is managing and upgrading a brothel, but the majority of your job is negotiating with the city’s many factions and occasional outbreaks of cosmic horror.
The Courtesan’s Guild is a well-regarded diplomatic institution, the one organization that has dealings with every level of society from street gangs to corporations, as well as occult cults and crime syndicates. With your party of well-trained fuckwarriors, you navigate a dangerous political situation where earning the trust of any faction without losing another’s is like walking an oiled tightrope.
Read more: I’m glad I looked past the name because Memoirs of a Battle Brothel is exactly what I want in an RPG
Ladykiller in a Bind
Release date: 2017 | Developer: Love Conquers All Games | Steam
While a lot of saucy visual novels cast their protagonists as arrogant jerks or desperate losers, Ladykiller in a Bind puts you in the role of a suave lesbian womanizer who is confident and cool. Even if inhabiting that character isn’t your fantasy, it’s a fun space to explore and one that no other game does.
Though there’s a complex plot involving a popularity competition worth five million dollars and the reason you’re disguised as a man, what Ladykiller in a Bind is actually about is being stuck on a cruise for a week with a ship full of horny young people. Horny, kinky young people.
While you can spend the days pursuing votes in the popularity competition while dodging suspicion to maintain your cover, you’ll also be pursuing sex. No matter what happens during each day, when the sun goes down you choose one of two characters to share a room with—one dominant and the other submissive. Ladykiller in a Bind is an introduction to BDSM, and a great one. If you thought “subspace” was where Optimus Prime keeps his trailer you’re gonna learn some stuff.
Read more: Ladykiller in a Bind review
Coming Out on Top
Release date: 2014 | Developer: Obscurasoft | Website, Steam
Coming Out on Top takes the kind of subplots the gay sidekick gets in a sitcom, then expands them until they become the A-plots. That guy at the bar last night seemed so nice, then you go to college the next morning and your new lecturer is that same guy. DRAMATIC MUSICAL STING. The plots are full of twists, but usually resolved in fairly wholesome ways. There’s no problem that can’t be solved by three roommates talking about it while throwing around one-liners.
When I was on a date with a pop star who wanted to stay incognito because his fans didn’t know he was gay, we went to a country & western bar then did karaoke. It was one of the most romantic things I’ve seen in any dating sim. Then afterwards we went back to his hotel room and it got real explicit.
I called Coming Out on Top “fairly wholesome” but it does feature actual raunch. It also gets dark and weird sometimes. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the stuff with the goldfish really goes some places.
The best sex games in development
Summertime Saga
Release date: 2015 | Developer: Kompas Productions | Patreon, itch.io
Summertime Saga takes the traditional dating sim and rethemes it as an American teen movie: Fast Times at Tokimeki High. As a young man in his final year of high school, you decide how to budget your time between study so you don’t flunk any of your classes, hobbies that raise your stats, part-time jobs that fund your social life, and, of course, dating. You’ll have to take someone to prom, after all.
It wouldn’t be a teen movie without complications, and Summertime Saga has plenty of those, from the local battle rappers and bullies to mobsters and hitmen chasing down your late father’s debt.
Read more: The most popular adult game on Patreon is being made by someone who’d never played one before
Hardcoded
Release date: 2018 | Developer: Ghosthug Games | Patreon, itch.io (demo)
You’re a semi-organic robot on the run in a cyberpunk dystopia who happens to fall in with a friendly group investigating a mystery that might be the fault of an evil corporation’s experiments. Where does the sex come in? Well, the mystery being investigated is that everyone in the city has become inexplicably horny.
Each day you choose whether to pursue the main plot or one of your new friends, who are of course romanceable. You can also just wander around the city, busting up surveillance droids for valuable scrap, talking to people, and, yeah, getting down.
Hardcoded is so well-written, and has such a great pixel-art adventure game look that I’d recommend it even if it wasn’t about sexbots who’ve just had their boobs upgraded and would quite like a chance to test them out.
Read more: The best cyberpunk games
