Love & Country, a World War 1 period piece visual novel by a rookie studio, is both very surprising and also inspiring. It’s almost certainly going to fly right under the radar, but it’s a tightly-written, smart little thing… and also very, very steamy. Dear lord is this game sexy in places.
Before I get to the game though, I do want to quickly overview why I was so surprised by it once I started playing. The press release that dropped in my inbox to share the impending release had some howling best practice errors. The feature list, or example, has:
- Set during World War I. Wow, there might be another one of those soon!, and;
- Over four hours of original music that reacts dynamically to the text—the composer literally gave himself a nerve injury to make it happen! Are you gonna relish the fruits of his pain? (We sure hope so! Yum!)
Now I get the impulse to have some fun with the press release. When you’re an indie launching your first game you haven’t got many other options if you want your game to stand out in an inbox filled with stuff from Nintendo, Square Enix, Ubisoft, Activision and others. Especially when you decide to launch it right in the middle of not-E3.
At the same time, however, to make light of a global conflict when there’s an entire city in the Middle East currently being purged and the region is looking dangerous like a WW1-type situation does not do any favours to any claims that you have for professionalism. Furthermore, to joke about game artists overworking themselves in an industry where crunch kills (and those it doesn’t kill increasingly get fired after every game launch) comes across as less of a charmingly quirky PR line and more the humour of an arsehole that has spent way too much time on 4Chan. I get what the developers were trying to do with the PR, but this is why you want to hire a PR agent to launch your game. Yes, it’s an expense, but given that you just paid all that money to make the actual game, it’s an expense that you should wear.
I know this is a lengthy digression, but the point is that based purely on the press release I loaded up the game fully expecting it to be a pile of steaming trash made by try-hard edgelords. If the review code wasn’t also included in that email I would have simply deleted it and missed out on ever playing the game. That’s one of the worst PR efforts I have ever come across in this industry, and I’ve had indie game developers quite literally threaten me if I didn’t give an “honest” review their game.
Then I played Love & Country and got even more annoyed, because this game deserved a much better press release.
The story follows Lillian, a spy who is operating in the French intelligence agency. She’s a rookie, but certainly enthusiastic about her job and learning the trade. Suddenly (and given that World War 1 is raging outside, you assume because of a lack of other available experienced agents), she’s given a full-on life-threatening mission to rescue another agent deep in enemy territory. It’s like a clandestine Saving Private Ryan, but with far more attractive people in it.
Along the way, she runs into two men – one French and one German – and needs to juggle her feelings for them with the broader mission. You’ll want to explore all the various pathways this story can take, too, because above and beyond everything else, Love & Country is written really, really well.
Within a mature novel that takes no prisoners Love & Country has a truly interesting and believable set of characters and the developers have clearly done their research about the period, because it comes across as a very earnest and authentic take on the history and society of 1916. What few art works get made about this era tend to be focused on the battlefield heroics. It’s rare that we get a story that reminds us that, just like what we experience today, away from the battlefields there were functioning societies, doing society things. In addition to the setting and plot, there is also a very cinematic quality to the script, and the intrigue is as vivid as any other good spy novel you’re ever going to read.
I think what impressed me most of all, however, is just how well-written the smouldering, seductive scenes are. Lillian has been trained to use her… feminine features… in the service of espionage. It’s a big source of her internal conflict over the two major male characters, and that’s handled well as a theme, but more than that, these scenes are just plain sexy.
When it comes to visual novels… or just video games in general… games that aim to be sexy tend to be written by men, and men often write sexy in a certain way. It’s typically fairly blunt and to the point, focused on the physical side of things and – to put this inelegantly – generally uninterested in literary foreplay. Most of the people reading this review on DigitallyDownloaded.net will have read at least one visual novel written by men with erotic or sex scenes and know what I mean. It’s rare that a game breaks with this approach to “sexy writing.”
However, it’s good that games like Love & Country here showcase other ways to write the kind of scenes that get you in the Mood (TM). There’s a decent essay looking at why male writers tend to earn the Bad Sex “Award” in literature every year. In it there’s this line: “In this realm of unrivalled joining, they conceptualise the other, the desired one, the obscure object, the lover as flat and dim, a mere surface upon which the protagonist’s fantasies and self-absorbed interiority are projected.” This is a good way of describing many erotic scenes in many visual novels written by men. Not all of them, but many of them. The essay’s criticism of James Frey’s “winning” book for this award goes further:
“Nowhere is this more true than in this year’s winning text, James Frey’s Katerina. Given Frey’s rapacious appetite for soul-grinding repetition, quoting Katerina here seems besides the point; if you want to know what the book is like, just interpolate the words “fuck” and “cum” with random nouns. In what I believe is a very genuine attempt to express deep truths about a young person’s heady experience of powerful sexual connection while traveling abroad, Frey is not only cloddishly puerile but even worse, boring. The harder he tries to strike at the secret heart of enigmatic power — its G-spot, if you will — the limper and less sexy he becomes. Like a tech CEO offering a tour-in-pictures of the genocide-torn country where he took a nice meditation vacation, Katerina is all about the solipsistic and juvenile preoccupations of the man at its center and not at all about the world he passes through. He can’t see outside of himself, because he has never departed his perspective. Katerina herself might as well be a Beauty and the Beast-style anthropomorphized Fleshlight.” (Emphasis mine).
This could, fairly, be applied to many visual novels that have been written by men. As the essay then concludes: “That men have received many more Bad Sex Awards than women suggests not that they are worse than women at writing sex, but rather that they are more likely than women to approach the erotic interior as an already conquered known world rather than respecting it as terra incognita.” This statement also applies to a good percentage of sex-themed games written by men.
However, Love & Country has been written by a women-led team, and that different perspective gives the sensuality and sexually charged scenes a very different tone and texture. To be clear, it’s very, very sexy, and frequently so. It’s not explicit, per se, but the way it tantalises the imagination it may as well be. I would suggest that this is probably the sexiest game that you’ll play that isn’t outright pornographic, but the different authorial perspective in how it’s written is appealing, and interesting. And so, so goddamn sexy. Given that this is an otome game, and whatever the rest of the context is, the ultimate purpose of it is to give players the opportunity to squish characters together like they’re playing make-believe makeout between dolls, the writing here is pitch-on perfect for the genre.
I can only hope that my own visual novel, which will also be a first-time commercial product by someone that looking to contribute something different to the wonderful genre, will be as fundamentally enjoyable to read as Love & Country. What I do know is that it doesn’t matter how poor the next press release is, I won’t have any concerns over the quality when I load up the next Guhuhu Games title.
