My heart pounds in perfect rhythm with the oscillating clicks of the timepiece behind me. The modem connects with its familiar sequence of chirps and squawks. The house is empty. The shades are drawn. The lights are off. I’m ready to masturbate.
That’s the premise of You Must Be 18 or Older To Enter, a pay-what-you-want PC game from developer Seemingly Pointless, about watching porn on an old computer for the first time. It is exactly as awkward as it sounds.
“Seeing naked people is a normal experience for adults,” designer James Cox says. “But when that experience is new, it’s uncomfortable. We don’t know what sex is, or what porn is, or why people think about them.”
To capture that sense of surreptitious exploration, You Must Be 18 is structured like a horror game. You play as a kid delving the early internet searching for what is framed as arcane knowledge. As you click through different sites, you can probe them with a rotating roster of search terms. There’s always four options like “MILF” or “orgy,” plus a fifth choice of action that’s offset from the others: “Look behind you.”
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