Did the title grab your attention? This is actually the subject I originally planned to write about last week, but I thought it would be better to start broad and narrow in. Complex Relations isn’t just a game about sex, but it isn’t meant to be a game which just happens to contain sex either. I’d really like to see more developers treat sexual content, not just as a hook to draw in audiences, or a spice to add to content which already stands on its own, but as a feature which deserves serious practice and effort to make compelling in its own right. So that’s one way in which Complex Relations is an attempt to create something I’d like to see more of in the world.

There’s a question which comes up a lot when writers discuss writing sexual content (and why so many of them don’t do it.) “Is there anything actually important that happens in a sex scene which actually needs to be said, which you can’t just skip over with a fade to black?” This question bundles in a number of assumptions which I object to as a writer. For instance, just because you could skip over a scene while preserving the comprehensibility of the plot, does that mean that you should? Arguably the only narrative-relevant outcomes of a fight scene are who won and how the participants got hurt, and both of those can be shown in the aftermath after a scene transition. But that doesn’t mean that would be a more satisfying way for the audience to experience the story.

Even apart from that though, I still believe that sexual content can, and often should, play a role in a story which just isn’t as interesting when it’s kept implicit. When people are sexually involved with each other, how does that affect their dynamic outside the bedroom (or wherever else they might be having sex?) Obviously, that depends on a lot of things. What kind of attraction styles do they have, and what draws them to each other? How central is sexuality to their relationship? How unfamiliar or novel does sex feel to them, and how much does it preoccupy their thoughts? What sort of sex are they actually having?  And of course, the sort of sex the characters are having  also hinges heavily on their personalities and relationship dynamic. There’s an interplay between what goes on inside and outside the bedroom, and just as knowing the relationship context between characters in a sex scene can give that scene more magnetism and emotional appeal, knowing about characters’ sex lives can add depth to other aspects of their relationships.

Of course, this makes it all the more disappointing that even visual novels which do feature explicit sex so rarely follow up on these elements. Most often, in games with different routes dedicated to different characters, the sexual dynamics in all the different relationships are extremely samey and one-note, even if sexual content is the focus of the game. And the characters’ sex lives rarely have any interesting consequences on other features of their relationships. But just because they don’t doesn’t mean they couldn’t!

The demo of Complex Relations already gives a taste of all the main characters’ sexualities. And as they get to know each other better, the interplay between their sexualities is going to become an even more significant part of how they connect with each other. I hope you enjoy exploring that part of their relationships, because they definitely will.