Longtime video game fans have essentially grown up alongside their favorite form of entertainment. Back in the day, we were happy to win a round of Pong or successfully help Mario drop Bowser into the lava. These days, players guide characters like Geralt of Rivia through a hundred hours of gameplay involving breathless battles, branching dialogue, and bonkers relationships.
Once upon a time, video game relationships were as simple as saving the princess and watching the game’s credits. These days, though, games often include bizarre love scenes. While some of these scenes are tasteful, others go way, way too far!
Which games are we talking about? Here are the love scenes that make you hope nobody walks in and sees you watching!
Stick Shift redefines “autoerotica”
Cannes film darling Titane might have helped normalize the idea of having sex with a car. Before that, car lovers had to settle for Robert Yang’s game Stick Shift.
Gameplay involves fondling the gear stick and revving the car into increasingly higher gears. Eventually, the driver’s eyes glow and we see a mysterious fluid leak out of the car’s tailpipe. And, honestly, we could have gone our whole lives without this visual!
God of War: Ghost of Sparta gets embarrassing
Speaking of embarrassing visuals, the PSP title God of War: Ghost of Sparta will make you embarrassed to call yourself a gamer. It includes an honest-to-God orgy minigame in which you have to mash buttons to satisfy the bevy of women throwing themselves at your character.
It’s worth mentioning that this was a portable game. And even if nobody around you actually saw the cringeworthy orgy scene as you played, they’d be able to hear the nonstop moans from your character and the creaking of the bed.
Dante’s Inferno: dead lover
Honestly, there are many reasons to avoid the literary-inspired Devil May Cry ripoff Dante’s Inferno. But one of the better ones is an awkward interaction with Cleopatra, who is very dead and residing in the titular inferno.
Cleopatra is an enemy, but when she sees her death is near, she tries to seduce Dante. And while he rebuffs the offer, there is something very unnerving about watching a walking corpse throw herself at your character to try to jump his bones.
The 11th Hour: love bites
The 11th Hour is one of those early CD-ROM games that combined strange full-motion video sequences with gameplay. And this led to a possible ending that is both horrifying and hilarious.
The game’s “bad” ending involves trying to hook up with a girl named Marie. But “Marie” transforms into the monstrous male character Stauf and ends up eating your character’s ribs like a starving man at a barbeque.
Grand Theft Auto V: the sex tape
Back in the day, Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games got in trouble when hackers detected a sex minigame that was designed but never officially released. Fast-forward to Grand Theft Auto V and they built an uncomfortable mandatory mission where you film two women having sex without their consent.
The scene itself is weird and uncomfortable, made only worse by the fact that one character looks a lot like Lindsay Lohan. And we can’t shake the uncomfortable feeling of the game rewarding you for being a criminal sex pest.
Heavy Rain makes it even harder to take a bra off
What makes an uncomfortable sex scene extra-super uncomfortable? Leaving the player in control the entire time, of course!
In Heavy Rain, there is a lovemaking scene between Ethan and Madison that is already creepy due to the weird animations and uncanny valley aspect of it all. Mostly, though, it’s weird that you have to control every bit of the action, including moving the analog stick just right to take off Madison’s bra. Between this and the over-the-top adult movie moans of the voice actors, we’d like to forget this game ever happened.
DmC: Devil May Cry freaks us out
The original Devil May Cry games were built around the concept of edgy characters. And as the definition of “edgy” changed, so too did the franchise. This is especially evident in the remake game DmC: Devil May Cry.
The game’s big bad guy is the demonic Mundus. And we get a downright horrific lovemaking scene between him and his demonic wife Lilith. The act is violent enough to knock pictures off the wall and even knock Lilith’s face loose, and we’ve honestly never been so happy for the ability to skip cutscenes.
Ride to Hell: Retribution is the ultimate turnoff
Never heard of Ride to Hell: Retribution? Most people haven’t. And all you really need to know is that whatever Grand Theft Auto can do, Ride to Hell can do much, much worse.
And that includes love scenes. The game is filled with women your character can save and then have sex with. In addition to reducing women to sexual objects, the sex scenes are just plain weird. The animations are stiff, the game has weird clipping issues, and the women keep their clothes on during the act, with only the terrible moans and music helping us confirm that these characters bumped uglies.
Far Cry 3 makes us hate first-person
Far Cry 3 is one of those games that presents you with a major choice at the end. And the choice is simple: you can either save your buddies or let them be a sacrifice to the warrior goddess Citra Talugami. If you choose the goddess, your “reward” is one of the most uncomfortable love scenes ever made.
Since this game is a first-person shooter, you see the goddess having sex with you from the character’s POV. In addition to being disorienting, this means you don’t actually see much aside from her heavily-tattooed chest. And then she ends this by killing your character! After watching all of this, you’ll simply wish she did it sooner.
South Park: The Stick of Truth sends us to therapy
South Park built an entire brand on being raunchy and irreverent. Is it any surprise that the game South Park: The Stick of Truth has a “love scene” likely to send you to therapy?
At one point in the game, your character has been shrunk by gnomes and must fight them in an unexpected location: your parent’s bedroom. The parents are, of course, having very vigorous sex, and you spend an entire boss fight trying to defeat a gnome while dodging things coming from the bed that we’d rather not mention.
Witcher 3 justifies kinkshaming
Long before handsome Henry Cavill was cast in The Witcher show on Netflix, the Witcher games gave us love scenes that weren’t afraid to show off every inch of the main character. The most infamous of these is, of course, the scene in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with Geralt naked in a bathtub, a scene homaged in the Netflix show.
But that’s not the weirdest love scene in Wild Hunt. No, that honor goes to a scene where Yennefer mentions the time that the two of them made love on a stuffed unicorn. Even weirder, she held onto the damn thing and is requesting a repeat performance! Geralt goes along with it, but we have to say… if there was ever a time for kinkshaming, this is probably it!