Generally, when writing about or researching sex in games, I try to be as sex-positive as possible. That said, talking about sex should be like how we talk about using the bathroom: it’s totally normal to ask your housemate for more toilet paper, or to talk to your doctor about blood in your pee; but it’s not cool to go into graphic detail with your friends about stool consistency or submit your whole office to whiffy, thunderous farts. My policy is generally “let’s be more open about sex, but let’s not be totally open about everything.” A lady needs her secrets.
NSFW Warning: This story contains graphic cartoon nudity and sex.
And yet, I couldn’t help but feel giddy when a friend DMed me on Twitter to let me know about Quidget the Wonderwiener, a game that gleefully rolls around in its own smut like a dog in manure. Sure, we should all be more open about sex, but it’s also pretty thrilling to have to pass sexy games to each other in a shadowy corner, dressed in trench coats with the collars up, lest the Sex Police find us and take us to Filth Jail.
Quidget the Wonderwiener, a point-and-click adventure game that I played on Gamejolt, is currently in its Alpha phase, and offers a refreshing change from the slew of visual novels that I usually play. Sexy games are rather stuck in their ways, you see, and visual novels are cheaper to make than anything else. Plus, they get the job done; the job being the player’s pleasure. We are simple creatures.
But I’ve been longing for something more: something that doesn’t churn through the slog of talk-to-someone-until-boobs-happen, and here’s Quidget, with ridiculously silly “science experiments,” animated sexy bits, and lots of fetch-quest business to be done to earn said sexy bits. There’s even something called the “SEXtended Edition”, which offers a little more explicit content to anyone who supports the team on Patreon.
The art is fantastic, and the animations really bring the characters (and their robot-induced orgasms) to life in a way that most static sexy games don’t. It’s actually similar to the way the Match-3-porn-game Mirror does it: the subject is held in place, either by a plot device or an actual device, while they jiggle with pleasure for science reasons.
Although the two characters that appear in the Alpha version, Beatrize and Bolty, are both generously endowed nymphomaniacs, there’s something about Quidget that sets it apart from other games populated entirely by generously-endowed nymphomaniacs. It could be its tongue-in-cheek, knowing winks to pop culture (Beatrize is attempting to build a hunky Frankenstein). Or its near-ludicrous recreations of porn tropes (Bolty has to test out a mechanical hand by bringing herself to orgasm; Beatrize has to, uh, “test the hardness of the Frankenshaft” with her nipples). Or it could be the fact that it’s all portrayed as a rip-roaring time for everyone involved, rather than just for the pleasure of the male character (who is a dog).
That’s something I’ve noticed in writing about these sorts of games: it’s incredibly obvious when a game is made by people who aren’t particularly interested in the pleasure of their partners. The fuckable conquests in these games are so two-dimensional that you could knock them over with a light fart; their sexual pleasure is usually limited to a few moans that could easily be mistaken for the noise one makes when getting a papercut between the fingers.
Quidget, and a few others I have written about, make me (as a woman who is interested in men) feel involved. Usually, playing these games feels like being the designated driver at a party: everyone else is having a great time, and you’re too sober to join in, trying to be happy for everyone else having fun, but secretly bitter that you’re not included. Some sex games, in contrast, feel like a party where everyone is sober, and you’re all playing a nice board game or something instead of getting trashed. That way, everyone is involved!
Even though Quidget is very much a game about watching Bolty’s big boobs bouncing while Mr Handy’s gloved extendo-finger probes her butthole—which, I must say, isn’t my cup of tea—I felt as if the prose was more inclusive than usual. Bolty described her own pleasure, asked for more, begged for release, and, finally, came in a glorious disco sunset of colors.
Though Quidget the Wonderwiener is still in Alpha, I came away from the brief experience feeling hopeful for the future of sex games, if games like this can exist. Sure, it’s still a sexy game aimed at people who enjoy boobs—a rather overcatered section of the population—but it does so with more humor, talent and inclusive titillation than most examples I’ve seen so far.