It is what it says. Image by Romantic Room

By Mira Fox February 14, 2022

Kink comes in all shapes and forms. But I still doubt that what you were hoping to do with your time was play a game featuring a very buff and oddly shiny Hitler as your sexual avatar.

One of the five unique heroines in her her most clothed form Image by Romantic Room

And yet.

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Unfortunately, “Sex with Hitler” dropped in late January on the gaming platform Steam, and is doing pretty well in the reviews. It’s basically what it sounds like — a sex game, not merely a game with sex in it, in which you play as a low-quality, ahistorically-jacked Hitler who shoots people and has sex with extremely large-breasted anime-style women. The plot identifies Hitler as the protagonist who has “lost everything” and is now “looking for a new life.” The game promises you some fighting along with “five unique heroines” who are both friend and foe. “War-shattered Berlin has new rules,” the description ends, dramatically.

I’m unwilling to actually play this game, which retails for around $7, even for the lofty aims of journalism, but the screenshots featured on the game’s page show very explicit sex, overblown in a bad porn sort of way, and egregiously bad art — it’s not really obvious that Hitler’s penis attaches to his body in at least one screenshot, for example. There are typos even in the selected scenes used for its advertisement, and reviews complain about cheap animation and bad gameplay.

I’m no video game expert, so maybe I’m missing some veiled sinister references, but to my eye, “Sex with Hitler” seems designed to ruffle feathers in an attempt to boost its publicity, not to legitimately lust after or glorify Hitler. It feels like a tasteless inside joke of the variety you often find in the bowels of the internet, where edgelords compete to see who can be most provocative. For example, the fact that the Fuhrer’s armband features an erect penis instead of a swastika seems like proof that the game’s designers were not taking themselves seriously.

A definitely serious review…but the upvote still helps the game reach more eyes. Image by Steam

My guess is that most sex games are pretty campy and poorly done, and this is both spoofing the genre while also contributing to it. It’s not even the only one of its kind; somehow, there’s also a Stalin sex game that’s not even from the same company.

Perhaps that’s why the biggest complaint in the reviews is not the poor animation but instead the historical inaccuracy — not because the real Fuhrer was famously wan and flabby instead of muscle-bound, but because some historians believe he had only one testicle and the game depicts him with two. (Of course, a few reviews and quite a few posts in the discussion section complain that the game is tasteless, and, on the flip side, a solid number seem to have actually liked it, or at least found it to be an effective aid in their masturbation.)

The game is probably not actually trying to attract fascists or neo-Nazis; it’s too absurd and amateurish. Still, while no one should be looking to a sex game for historical accuracy, I can certainly imagine a horny teenager finding their way to the game, knowing little about World War II, and coming away with at least a semi-positive picture of Hitler — at the very least, that he was stacked and got girls, neither of which was true. And it’s easy to miss the whole Holocaust part of Hitler, which doesn’t seem to play into the game at all. (It is maybe for the best that the game apparently doesn’t attempt to take on the Jewish question, which I’m sure it would have mishandled horrendously.)

One of the game’s reviews. Image by Steam

Generally, the reviewers seem in on the joke, upvoting the game with reviews such as “very kid-friendly” and “Christian game for the family,” or florid comments that I have to believe are in jest, such as one calling the game a “masterpiece of an educational visual novel” or another calling it “a true testament to post modernism.”

But many of them found their way to the game after it was featured on Steam’s homepage, which seems like an irresponsible choice, especially given that Steam has a history of poor moderation including games and users that unambiguously glorify Nazism. Some of the people finding their way to the game almost certainly actually love Hitler and enjoy getting to live out fantasies that aren’t purely sexual in nature when they play as the Fuhrer shooting down his enemies.

On the discussion boards, one user complained that the game hadn’t been banned, but not because they thought Hitler should be censored; instead, they complained that they’d had their profile banned for a week after posting a portrait of Hitler as their profile picture. If the game was allowed, the user argued, then they should also be allowed to post adulation of the dictator to their page. Others in the discussion section argued that Hitler isn’t that bad. Spoofs can help defang issues, but they can still encourage those who miss the joke.

Besides, if you really want a game about Hitler, there are better options — instead of playing as the Nazi leader, you could shoot him in his accurately rendered single testicle. Or — radical idea — maybe just avoid Hitler entirely in your gaming experience.

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