If you expect me to apologize for having inappropriate thoughts about Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre and his dirty bat claws, or for quoting the part in Andrzej Żuławski's Possession where Isabelle Adjani says about the quivering mass of pus and tentacles in her bed, "He made love to me all night," you're even sicker than I am. Go play Construction Simulator 2015 and lie to yourself about how phallic a concrete pump is while visual novel writer Vio Shimokura and I confront the truth: …nevermind, you couldn't handle it.
OK, fine: desire is a weird chimera. It's both a little goblin in your kitchen and a dreamy bachelor on the boardwalk. And I'm glad that Shimokura tells Japanese news site 4Gamer – according to an Automaton translation – that he'll keep it that way even as online stores like Steam become more strict about NSFW content.
"Regardless of how things turn out," says the Nitroplus writer behind titles like The Ugly Mojika Child, in which a hideous boy takes revenge on girls by reading their minds, "be it games or anime, I'll just create the things I find interesting, without overthinking things or paying mind to cultural considerations."
Though, Shimokura admits that he's already been impacted by moralistic tsk-tsking. Even at the age-restricted Nitroplus subsidiary Nitro Origin, he says, "we haven’t been able to release many adult games lately." But, again, he isn't deterred, telling 4Gamer "I'd like to keep creating opportunities to make adult games in ways that fit the times."
Nitro has helped make some of the most viscerally bizarre visual novels out there, many of them beautifully venomous like snakes, and geared toward women. Take 2019 novel The Song of Saya, for example, which was written by shoujo Puella Magi Madoka Magica co-creator Urobuchi Gen and features college kids going insane, getting pregnant, and eating each other's skin.
I think this kind of media – a concoction of horror and romance so putrid, it's exciting – perfectly fits "the times," as Shimouka calls them, despite storefronts like Steam trying to resist this. Otherwise, the parasitic Count Orlok in Robert Eggers' Nosferatu wouldn't have married his hollow angel Lily-Rose Depp, and I wouldn't know what to do with myself.
