Tentacle Bento is the name of a card game currently up on Kickstarter seeking funding. As of posting, it has received twice as much money as it originally said it needed. Which is a bit of a bummer, since it's a game about raping girls with tentacles.
Yeah, you can say this is a fetish, and yeah, you can say it's a cultural thing (even though this is made not by a Japanese outfit but by Westerners), you can even say the act of rape is only being alluded to, but come on. Fact of the matter is, this is clearly intended to be a game about tentacle rape, to appeal to those people who find such things interesting and/or funny.
Who are usually the kind of people who don't understand its place in Japanese popular culture. Which leads us to awkward and uncomfortable situations like this one.
As Brandon says over on Insert Credit, "The style is a cute, lighthearted, pastel-colored look at the wonderful world of forcing your way inside a female against her will. There are, to my mind, a lot of things wrong with this."
No shit.
To each his/her own is a mantra I normally get by on, no matter how messed up the subject matter, but at the very least this game reflects poorly on Kickstarter, who seem to have no problem (provided they even know about it) hosting the project.
People, myself included, give Apple shit all the time about being too loose with what it lets onto a storefront its nominally responsible for. This shouldn't be any different.
Here's a clip of the game's creator showing how Tentacle Bento works [Update - Video removed at request of creator]. It's creepy as hell. Almost as creepy as the game's official trailer, below.
UPDATE - Looks like Kickstarter agrees, as funding for the project has now been cancelled.
Tentacle Bento and Kickstarter: When No Regulation is Bad Regulation [insert credit]