For the last week, several news outlets have published shocking headlines about a game called No Mercy on Steam that features incest and “rape.”
In the UK, Peter Kyle, a member of Parliament and the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology described the game as “deeply worrying” and demanded Valve, which operates the PC’s leading digital game store Steam, take it down. The Sydney Morning Herald called it a “Rape game available online for Australian Children.” Two organizations, Women in Games and Collective Shout, called on Valve to remove the game.
I downloaded and played No Mercy today for about 20 minutes. It’s crude, badly made, very boring, and about as pornographic as a seventh grader who is really good at drawing boobs. You click through endless lines of inane dialogue and eventually get to a point where two characters who look like stiff action figures of the same age are miming sex in a way that is barely recognizable as human. This is what many of the sex games on Steam look like, and the only reason you’ve heard about this one is that one of the characters is labeled “son” and the other is labeled as “mom.”
I understand how conceptually, in the way it is written out and pitched on Steam, No Mercy can sound highly offensive. That’s the point. But playing it makes clear that it’s not interesting or well made enough to follow on its own shocking pitch. It’s just shovelware, low quality games published in huge quantities in hopes of making a few bucks.
No Mercy is a visual novel, meaning it’s a kind of choose-your-own-adventure presented mostly with still or barely animated images made with crude 3D models that players click through to advance the story and occasionally make choices about how that story unfolds. With adult games, those choices usually result in some kind of sexual encounter that is also rendered with those crude 3D models. It’s a common type of game on Steam, and No Mercy differentiates itself by focusing on taboos.
“In this game, you’ll either become every woman’s worst nightmare… or rather: the best dick they'll ever have. Your goal is simple: leave no pussy non-fucked, since that's the only thing they all want. Never take 'no' for an answer,” the games Steam page reads. “Fuck your mom, fuck your auntie, and even fuck your friend’s mom. Why not?”
It’s a shocking way to pitch a game if porn tube site algorithms aren’t already serving you similar pornography, and doubly so if you haven’t kept up with Valve’s policy surrounding adult content on Steam, which is extremely permissive when compared to other platforms.
Valve’s current position is that pretty much anything goes when it comes to adult content. Users can easily choose not to have any of those games surfaced to them, and if they do, Steam does a good job of filtering that content out. If they choose to see that stuff, which I do, it’s all over the place, including the front page, game recommendations, and lists of new releases and best sellers, where at least one of these games is always featured.
Looking at my Steam account right now under the list of “popular upcoming” games, I see Office Affairs : Executive Decisions, an adult only visual novel with a an office romance angle, Saviour of the Wasteland, an adult only visual novel with post-apocalyptic/Fallout-y premise, and Lust’s Cupid, an adult only “pleasure simulator” with an anime aesthetic.
As PC Gamer helpfully keeps track, there were over 19,000 games released on Steam in 2024. A lot of those games are not good, and the list includes plenty of copycats, cheap asset flips, and shovelware. There are exceptions among Steam’s sex games, but the ratio there is even worse. There are a few formulas that developers in this space follow. There are games that basically use existing, well-known game mechanics like bullet hell and breakout-likes that reward players with some form of nudity, often furry or anime themed, and there are visual novels that usually follow porn genres and conventions, and are often rendered with cheap 3D graphics. Often, and especially in the latter category, these games have some kind of shocking, edgelord premise in an attempt to get players’ attention. For example, back in 2022 Sam and I played a Steam game called Sex with Hitler, which was a very bad top-down shooter/visual novel where, after a lot of very boring filler, you occasionally see a few images of having sex with Adolf Hitler. Most of these games barely rise above the level of the type of games advertised on porn sites that dare players “not to cum.”
No Mercy is just a more extreme example of what Valve has been allowing on Steam for years. I understand why people are upset that it’s on the platform, but at least Valve makes it easy to filter out those games if you don’t want to see them, something much bigger platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are terrible at, as we report on constantly. This is not to say that Valve is doing a great job of moderating its platform. I’ve been reporting on its problem with hate groups since 2017, which it still deals with today, and which there is no simple filter for as there is for adult content. Steam has also previously hosted games with an explicit connection to pick-up artists, the manosphere, and misogynist world views that are straight up marketed as instructions on how to talk to women in the real world, as opposed to the ridiculous fantasies included in No Mercy.
We’ve also reported on the adult industry for years, and there’s an infinite variety in genres and fetishes. Sexuality can be strange, funny, and weirdly specific, and because it is generally a suppressed aspect of the human condition, it’s often offensive to people.
Step-sister/step-brother porn is such a popular trope in pornography it’s become a punchline. There are more than 97,000 videos under Pornhub’s “Rough Sex” category. There are many things people get off to that other people find objectionable, but a good rule is that if the adult content is entirely consensual and is not hurting anyone, people should be able to engage with it if they wish.
Every platform decides the terms it’s going to allow, and then the people who make and play games, write ebooks, or make porn find whatever the edge is. Pornhub does not let users search for “rape,” and not all of the “rough sex” videos on Pornhub are rape fantasies, but some of them are. From what I’ve seen, No Mercy is like many other games that are on Steam but has successfully won the outrage lottery, allowing it to stand out from thousands of other games that are doing much the same thing.
