One of these days I'll probably write up something taking a deeper look at Fenoxo's individual pornographic text adventures and possibly comparing them, but for the moment I'd like to spotlight his work in general, particularly Corruption of Champions 1 and Trials in Tainted Space, as the two that I'm most familiar with.
These pieces are interesting not for their specific handling of any individual fetish, but rather the breadth of tastes they cater to, each featuring fairly hefty character customization systems (down to allowing the player to take perks in anal elasticity and semen production and such) and a wide array of horrifying and/or arousing situations for the player to land themselves in. Additionally they feature surprisingly in-depth system by which various aspects of the player's character can be changed over time; get fucked by something a bit bigger than you can easily accommodate, and you'll find your anus stretching over time. Eat certain types of fruit, and you'll gradually turn into one of several species of furry, gaining new animal traits with each consumption. There are various other items and activities to move your other traits in one direction or another, and you can check any of these stats at any time in your character sheet. So on a basic level, it's very satisfying be able to build a character to be your ideal sexual avatar and explore these heavily debauched worlds.
The game throws a wrench in this, however, by having randomized events which, if you fail to find a way out of, may result in this character you spent so much time on being subjected to something you find distasteful or, in extreme cases, even being changed in ways you wouldn't prefer. This, I think, is what puts Fenoxo's work above the vast majority of porn games out there. Most are simply an existing game with pornography tacked on, either as a reward as in Huniepop, or, bafflingly, as a punishment for failure, as in any number of copy/paste platforming action games in which failure results in a CG or animation of the hero(ine) being mercilessly raped by whatever monsters you've found yourself dying to. When the pornography is a reward for success, the game is at least coherent in that the assumed goals are the same as the player goals, but it still suffers from feeling somewhat uninspired.
Fenoxo's work, by contrast, feels more like it was designed to be interactive pornography, rather than pornography tacked onto a non-pornographic interactive system. Your reward for success is pornography in which you get to control the scene, choosing what activities are or aren't performed; your punishment for failure is pornography in which you have no control over the scene, and your avatar is subjected to treatment you likely never hoped to see and would prefer to avoid. As a result the entire piece feels very cohesive in its intent to put extreme sexuality on display in a way which is interesting to engage with on its own terms, striving for the success that allows you to control your avatar and its actions, avoiding failure that rips that control away from you.
These games certainly have their own drawbacks, most notably the fact that most of the scenes are written with rather inelegant chunks of variable wording to allow for it to accurately describe whatever your character's features are, often in a way which feels somewhat overwrought if the feature in question is average and thus doesn't really warrant being described as such, and there's also a definite sense that the game wants to push you into further and further extremes of certain features and fetishes, even when you are in control of your character, but as a whole these are definitely some of the most well-realized and interesting pieces of interactive pornography I've had the pleasure of experiencing, and I'd like nothing more than to see more of the genre taking cues from their fundamental design senses.
These pieces are interesting not for their specific handling of any individual fetish, but rather the breadth of tastes they cater to, each featuring fairly hefty character customization systems (down to allowing the player to take perks in anal elasticity and semen production and such) and a wide array of horrifying and/or arousing situations for the player to land themselves in. Additionally they feature surprisingly in-depth system by which various aspects of the player's character can be changed over time; get fucked by something a bit bigger than you can easily accommodate, and you'll find your anus stretching over time. Eat certain types of fruit, and you'll gradually turn into one of several species of furry, gaining new animal traits with each consumption. There are various other items and activities to move your other traits in one direction or another, and you can check any of these stats at any time in your character sheet. So on a basic level, it's very satisfying be able to build a character to be your ideal sexual avatar and explore these heavily debauched worlds.
The game throws a wrench in this, however, by having randomized events which, if you fail to find a way out of, may result in this character you spent so much time on being subjected to something you find distasteful or, in extreme cases, even being changed in ways you wouldn't prefer. This, I think, is what puts Fenoxo's work above the vast majority of porn games out there. Most are simply an existing game with pornography tacked on, either as a reward as in Huniepop, or, bafflingly, as a punishment for failure, as in any number of copy/paste platforming action games in which failure results in a CG or animation of the hero(ine) being mercilessly raped by whatever monsters you've found yourself dying to. When the pornography is a reward for success, the game is at least coherent in that the assumed goals are the same as the player goals, but it still suffers from feeling somewhat uninspired.
Fenoxo's work, by contrast, feels more like it was designed to be interactive pornography, rather than pornography tacked onto a non-pornographic interactive system. Your reward for success is pornography in which you get to control the scene, choosing what activities are or aren't performed; your punishment for failure is pornography in which you have no control over the scene, and your avatar is subjected to treatment you likely never hoped to see and would prefer to avoid. As a result the entire piece feels very cohesive in its intent to put extreme sexuality on display in a way which is interesting to engage with on its own terms, striving for the success that allows you to control your avatar and its actions, avoiding failure that rips that control away from you.
These games certainly have their own drawbacks, most notably the fact that most of the scenes are written with rather inelegant chunks of variable wording to allow for it to accurately describe whatever your character's features are, often in a way which feels somewhat overwrought if the feature in question is average and thus doesn't really warrant being described as such, and there's also a definite sense that the game wants to push you into further and further extremes of certain features and fetishes, even when you are in control of your character, but as a whole these are definitely some of the most well-realized and interesting pieces of interactive pornography I've had the pleasure of experiencing, and I'd like nothing more than to see more of the genre taking cues from their fundamental design senses.
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