AUTHOR’S NOTE: This series of posts discusses games which often have very explicit content. This series can be considered very, very Not Safe For Work, although no photos or screencaps contained within will be R-rated, only the text itself.
In this piece, Jon and Justin (the Two Bi Men, more info here) discuss Encyclopedia Fuckme, a text adventure-style pseudo-dating simulator from creator Anna Anthropy. Spoilers follow. Here’s the official description of the game, which is free to play here: If there’s one thing Encyclopedia Fuckme knows – and this is a hypothetical statement, of course, because she’s actually got a lot crammed in her big fat brain – it’s how to get off! But in addition to her brain, our hero also has a very greedy pussy – one that sometimes leads her into trouble! Such is “the case” today. But if she does what she does best, she just may solve… THE CASE OF THE VANISHING ENTREE.
WARNING: This game features scenes of graphic physical and sexual violence.
Jon: Encyclopedia Fuckme is probably the most unexpected of the games I picked. It showed up on some fairly mainstream lists and searches, and sure, Lesbian Cannibals sounds absolutely like a band I’d see live, but I was still taken aback by just how explicitly pornographic this game was. That’s not a bad thing – it was almost more welcome than Coming Out On Top‘s porn content was given that it was so completely part of the narrative… even if that narrative had a certain meat to its bones. This is also very different to the other two in terms of he kind of dating simulator it is – unlike Hatoful and Coming Out, this was a case study in which you played through a specific date. How’d you find that, Justin?
Justin: I was familiar with Anna Anthropy from the game Triad (a puzzle game where you try and fit 3 people into a bed) and her book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters but I certainly wasn’t expecting a racy wine-me, dine-me xxx-me lesbian text adventure. Of course having said that, from the start the game plays both with and against type.
Jon: That’s very true. Genre-wise it’s a literal dating simulator, in that it’s date night at the cannibal lesbian murder manor, though I suspect it’s the mechanics you’re referring to. Certainly I found the text adventure format to both play up and smooth over some of the things we’ve discussed about the last two games.
Justin: Early on we talked about cheap porn games we’d played and how they where the introduction a lot of people would receive to games that were about human sexual relations. Of course even by the time we’d played those games the genre of dating games was well ensconced in Japan and so what we where playing was a crude reflection of that. Encyclopedia FuckMe (which must surely be one the of the best titles to type ever) almost takes me back to the early experiments not to mention the nostalgia text only games give you. Having said that, this game has a rather magnificent second act twist that takes things up a notch.
Jon: Is that the fact that it’s secretly a survival horror game?
Justin: Yeah totally, and I don’t think its even that secret. The games wears the influence of the Clock Tower/Haunting Ground franchise on its sleeve. If you aren’t familiar, these PS2/1 era titles put you in the role of a pre-teen girl being chased around a dilapidated mansion by a murderous monster. You have no weapons and must hide to survive. Encyclopedia FuckMe plays with the same ideas while also referencing 70’s slasher (I can’t be the only one who saw this game in first person) and exploitation films. The game however is keen to replace these titles lack of player/character agency with erotic frisson as you race around terrifed but also turned on.
Jon: It seems to me like it’s meant to read as a joke – you’re trapped and scared, but you’re actually into that – but the more I played through trying to, well, escape, the more it became pretty apparent that the sex itself was a mechanic. Without it, the lesbian cannibal survival horror game loses the one weapon its main character does have. It makes the 2 choices per page system it has pretty inspection-worthy when you start blazing through trying to find the ‘good’ ending. Which I did, and lo and behold, it was indeed because the sex was weaponised. Clock Tower et al are your standard virgin-in-a-horror-scenario-tries-not-to-die. Like most movies ever made, pretty much. But Encyclopaedia is a submissive – her sexuality is for her first, but it is engaged through the actions of others that are outside of her control (in a very, very simple distillation). Text adventures, and really all games, are a set of rules any player must obey. There is no being outside those rules, and failure is punished. In this game, that’s very literal.
Justin: That’s a really fascinating take for me, personally I tend to play a brat/switch role in these sort of situations and, like I do with most games, I played as myself. Of course I couldn’t even finish the damn thing, which led me to believe that maybe I wasn’t meant to? I know the ending suggests there are “happier” options but I was never sure if I was the hero of this brief affair or if I was merely an energy restoring non-player character briefly given free will to provide a challenge. For me it drew a line under the way we try and impose our own will on games and stories and the way they fight back and try and make us play them “properly”. I’m not joking, try as I might I can’t finish this game without being eaten. Text adventures and dating games are a bit like that, a lot of the experience is created by the player, in Hatoful I created other, unseen parts of the relationship. In Coming Out On Top I added depth and difference where there wasn’t any, and in this I put myself in the game and made my choices acceptable in its eyes. No matter how many times the game told me I was wrong.
Jon: I tried to be good, I tried to nice and submissive (true to form) and it just ended up with me getting eaten. The game is, of course, about getting eaten by your cannibal lover. How can you not? So I tried kicking it up a notch each time, eventually getting closest by finding an actual weapon (the cannibal queen’s cleaver) and getting a little swipe happy. It still forced me down the same path, and eventually I ended up in the cycle of being stuck in the bath. I’d either get drowned or eaten. Not much choice – except, of course, to use sex. It cuts against the obvious. That ending – which I call a UFO Ending in homage to Silent Hill‘s batshit history of hard-to-unlock joke endings, is just… incredible. I won’t spoil it for anyone wanting to experience it first hand, but it really sunk its teeth into that idea of agency in games being artificial. There’s very much a dominant/submissive mechanic in game development – a game is a rulebook to certain kinds of pleasure that can be taken from it. Sometimes they’re loose, sometimes they’re very strict. Encyclopedia Fuckme wants you to know it’s domming you – and the only way to win is to flip that mechanic… which is, of course, false, and why the ‘good’ ending (although not ending with your death) still looks an awful lot like the bad endings.
Justin: Well while we where talking I had a run at it and finally got that “good” ending and, yeah, I was playing it right all along (just a little early). Smaller games like this aren’t playing in the same sandbox (pun intended) as triple A open world adventures but in many ways the freedom those games present can rob us of these kind of moments. Encyclopedia FuckMe wants you to know its a game, Anthropy understands the language of games and plays with those rules within the context of submission/dominance and hunter/prey. Its easy to get lost in comparing this tiny text adventure to larger, hulking games like Haunting Ground and Alien: Isolation but that’s because they all have that same core idea. In fact Alien is a game about a women running in fear of being devoured, which if you think about it, is exactly the description of this. For a brief (five minutes if played fast) browser game this says a lot more then many others.
Jon: I think it’s really important to have games like that, and I’m not entirely surprised that content-wise it’s so very, very altgames in its construction. This definitely didn’t aim to get me in the mood like Hatoful and Coming Out might have done, but I’m very glad I played it… if ever so traumatised. So, onto the most important bit: what kind of score do you give a game like this?
Justin: Two severed thumbs up? Or one bloody (sideways) smile?
Jon: So morbid. I’m thinking five stars-I’m-seeing-as-I-fall-unconscious.
Anna Anthropy’s Encyclopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree is free to play at http://www.auntiepixelante.com/encyclopediafuckme/
Jon tweets at , Justin tweets at .
