The card game Consentacle is an awesome exploration of the complexities of sex, as told via interactions between a human and a tentacle monster. True to its name, however, every interaction is aggressively consensual.
Consentacle has been around for a few years now, but there’s only been a couple of copies in existence. Now, following a successful crowdfunding campaign, the full version is available for pre-order, with copies shipping out in May. It won’t be available much longer, though, so grab it while you can.
Creator Naomi Clark made the game, at least in part, to reclaim a lot of the imagery and ideas behind the rather infamous “tentacle rape” genre of animated and illustrated erotica. One of the more egregious examples was a crowdfunded game from a few years back called Tentacle Bento.
“The issue isn’t the sex with a tentacle monster — that’s unusual, of course — but the issue is the rape,” she told Kotaku. “Who knows? Maybe sex with an alien or a monster is so mind-blowing incredible that we’ll never want anything else.”
In that sense, Consentacle uses the bizarre to try and explore sex broadly.
“When you first see a naked human being in a sexual context, it can be an amazing and weird experience. There is this weird feeling behind that, seeing another being like yourself and their body is weird and different and they’re just there, unclothed, and they’re a real person,” Clark said. “Even if you’re having members of the same sex, or if they are exactly your same body type, it’s a different body, a different person.”
“So why not stretch that all the way and have sex with an alien?”