“I have given up on having shame. To have shame is to let them win.”
Mirror is a sex game that I should not have told my family about
I’ve had a weird couple of weeks. I live in Canada, but my family lives in England; when my grandfather was taken ill, I flew across the Atlantic to be there with him and my family. The tone was solemn. That is, until my uncle—whose purpose in life is to make fun of me—asked what I’d been working on recently. I mean, what am I supposed to say? Games journalism is so ridiculous a career to most people over the age of 30 that it’s hard to describe your latest work without it sounding like your office is a crèche. My approach is to tell them exactly what I’ve been working on, because even if I say something like “the underwhelming political message of Far Cry 5”, I’m fairly sure all they hear is “the bang bangs in the shooty game”.
“I’ve been writing about sex games.” It was almost too easy a target. “Sex games?” he repeated, the glee in his voice hard to disguise. Thank goodness we were sitting on my grandfather’s deaf side.
And so, I regaled my end of the long dining table, filled with cousins and aunts and uncles. I have given up on having shame. To have shame is to let them win.
Mirror is the game I told them about: a game that has over 6,000 positive reviews on Steam despite only being officially released in November, 2017. If Mirror were a restaurant, it would be sagging under an embarrassment of Michelin Stars, but it is a sex game, and thus no one will ever talk about it, lest other people think they’re some kind of… sex-liking pervert.
It is a match-three game. A sexy match-three game. A sexy matchthree game in which you have to fight cursed women in order to make them have sex with you, even though the sex-having is mostly something you end up coaxing them into anyway.
Crotch bunny
But the best part of Mirror is not its sex scenes, nor its lacklustre match-three games, despite those being perhaps the intended reason to buy it. No, the best part is the rosy-butt-cheeked rabbit that lives in the crotches of every woman in the land. Censorship rules on Steam and in Japan (where Mirror was made) dictate that the genitalia in a sex game must be masked in some way, but at no point do they specifically request said censorship to be in the form of a creepy, goofy-faced rabbit. What’s wrong with chunky, blurry pixels? Or even just a black censor bar? Is there not anything they could have come up with that is less likely to drain the phallic blood than a cartoon bunny?
My extended family, after hearing a similar tirade to the one in this piece, have combined hyperbolic imagination with more than a touch of middle-aged misunderstanding, and come to the conclusion that I am a porn director. Somehow.
“Sex games?” he repeated, the glee in his voice hard to disguise