A Sex Video Game That Always Lets You Say No [NSFW]

The opening scene in Cute Demon Crashers is a bored, horny, virgin college girl who’s home alone during spring break. Suddenly three incubi and a succubus, male and female sex demons, appear out of a portal in her hallway. The player is then faced with one question: how does the virgin react? (NSFW content warning.)

One of the first narrative choices given by Cute Demon Crashers is to call the cops, but that’s no fun; game over. The alternative leads to the player deciding how to spend the next day bonding with these new demonic friends and then picking which one the main character wants to sleep with.

This situation is a mutually beneficial arrangement — the demons gain nourishment from her pleasure, and she gets an opportunity to learn some new tricks. Or, if you’re just not that into any of them, you can decline their advances. They won’t make you feel bad about it at all.

While playing the game you’ll choose the rooms in the house you’ll want the main character to hang out in during the day, and that will afford opportunities for you to talk with one of the four demons. These conversations expose more insight into the main character’s life situation, as well as the histories and proclivities of the different crashers.

They’re all pretty silly and lighthearted, so nothing heavy is dumped on you. Just small talk without any branching. All the choices are saved for the scenes that follow later.

Cute Demon Crashers features short, explicit sex scenes. But instead of being a relationship-driven romp spanning weeks of in-game time, this limited game is more about building up some semblance of trust with one of the characters.

The demons all pretty much know what they’re doing when it comes to the bedding department, so it’s a great opportunity for your curious player character to experiment, via your input of course.

This feeling of experimentation can possibly carry over to the player themselves, which makes Cute Demon Crashers a great game for players who are new to erotic games. It’s got an approachable, fluffy aesthetic with expressive characters, and an opportunity to literally stop the action at any time via the helpful “Stop” button in the upper right corner of the screen. And it’s free to download.

Explicit consent is a rare feature in games. Most interactive stories interpret the act of playing them to be implicit consent, where your choices in the narrative lead you down to a determined conclusion. Players can more actively take this into their own hands and put the controller down, but that is ultimately unsatisfying.

Scripting narrative fallbacks to allow players to exert more direct control over scenes is a daunting task for any developer, something smaller visual novel indie studios cannot spare the programming and testing for. So it’s neat to see a small project like Cute Demon Crashers try out the possibilities of smoothly interrupting scenes and tying things off at any juncture the player decides to intervene.

I originally played Cute Demon Crashers back when it first appeared after NaNoRenO 2015, which is an annual month-long visual novel engine Ren’Py game jam.

At the time it was just a demo version, because the team had been too ambitious and over-scoped a bit so they missed completing the game by the one-month deadline. The original demo included two of the routes and I found it charming enough. The team continued developing the last two missing routes, driven by positive fan feedback and released the full game later with bonus features like partial voice-acting thanks to fan donations.

The original developers of Cute Demon Crashers meanwhile moved on to funding a successfully Kickstarted visual novel, Caramel Mokaccino. These same creators also run the annual Yuri Game Jam, which is currently running for the month of October, where people can make and submit games focusing on relationships between women.

Cute Demon Crashers is available to download for free from itch.io.