Taylor McCue | 2022 | Web, Game Boy, Steam
An uncomfortable but very worthwhile experience.
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is the first game I ever played where I can say that I didn't have fun but I really liked it. You revisit a moment of the author's personal trauma, experiencing it through a Game Boy game, and to say it hits hard would be an understatment.
Gameplay here is simple enough. You move around, you interact with entities or menus, and you read text.
It's not a happy title. There's no jouyous ending, there's no "they all lived happily ever after", and there's no high score to rack up.
Instead of all that, what you get is half an hour of extremely effective writing and visuals.
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This might read as quite silly to others but hey this is my site and I want to talk about me:
I've always known that sex work is something that exists. I've had basically no experience interacting with anything around it so naieve me pretty much assumed that it was never that serious. The few friends who discussed it would always talk about how cool it was that people were making money off of a stigmatized pleasure and that was about it.
I never considered that there could be such a thing as a bad experience, let alone a traumatic experience, out of sex work. I guess that's what happens when the only things you hear are positive.
This game just kinda forced me to acknowledge something along the lines of "hey, things aren't always pretty". It wasn't fun to experience, I got no joy in playing through what I did, all it did was make me a sobbing mess. That said, I'm really glad that I experienced it.
I can't express how cool I think it is that a short little game could do that to me. Seriously, I think that's a sign of some amazing work. I love it.
I guess a little tip, don't play this at work. It's not that the game is going to show you anything super explicit, there's nothing remotely arousing to be found here. What it's going to do is, if you're like me, make you really depressed while you sit at your desk and think about what you just read through.
You can get He Fucked the Girl Out of Me on itch.io to play in-browser or even on a Game Boy. There's also a Steam version.
However you decide to play this, if you enjoyed it, I'd defintiely recommend considering giving Taylor a few dollars be it buying the game on itch or getting one of the Steam "DLCs".