"RapeLay"

At a Glance: In the past Hentai games have often catered to casual rape enthusiasts. These are perfectly normal folks like you, me and your next door neighbor who only leaves his apartment to buy canned meat and plastic tarps. I like to think of this audience as the "beer and pretzel" rape gamer. They're interested in a fun "pick up and play" rape game and they don't want to get bogged down in details. Then there are the rape grognards who want a rape simulator to be as realistic as possible. They want it to include accidental pregnancies, crying, abortion, threat of murder, fuel mixture, full elevator control, and pre-rape start-up checks. RapeLay is the grognard's rape simulator. It is the Falcon 4.0 of rape. Language: Japanese and some horrible fan-made English translation. Sexual Content: The original game includes a pixilated mosaic, but the fan-made English translation includes various uncensored textures. That includes my personal favorites; the bloody penis and vagina.

Ahhhh yesteryear! When I fire up a modern game on a modern console or PC I am often struck with nostalgia. I recall the joys I once experienced, hunched over my Atari 2600, entranced by the vaguely human shapes moving around the screen and throwing dots at each other. I can't help but look at the roaring demonoids and wailing 5.1 surround drop ships and bounding Pinatas and marvel at how far videogames have come, but there is the nagging suspicion that those simpler games and simpler times were in most ways better. Eating prostitutes with a crowbar in Vice City is great fun, to be sure, but does it still have that same innocent wonder to it as chowing down on power pellets and blue ghosts?

In the immortal words of Eleanor Roosevelt, "So, too, go the rape games". Custer's Revenge was a joy to play, just you and the Indian squaw tied to a pole with her angry red blocks for nipples. Your proud white man's erection thrust towards her as you avoided the many perils of the Wild West, come to sting your penis. The joy of raping that Indian woman tied to the pole was simple and pure.

RapeLay is in every way a wonder of technology. It is the Gears of War to Custer's Combat, the Madden 2007 to its FOOTBALL, the Oblivion to its Venture. It is a soulless, high-resolution rendering of rape. With nearly photo-realistic giant bedrooms and crying children that can get pregnant if you ejaculate inside of them. I never had to decide whether or not I was going to make that Indian tied to the pole get an abortion. There was no meter that would gauge her sexual pleasure. She stood there up against the pole and accepted things.

It was a simpler time. A better time.

Praise the Lord! RapeLay is a rape simulator. There is a thin wisp of a plot that was less than clear because of the poor translation. The fan-made translation is not so much a translation as it is a mockup of what a translation might look like. It works fine for the menus, but the game's dialogue and narration make very little sense and the text is often replaced with squiggly lines or empty boxes.

As near as I could discern, you play an evil rapist with a penis the size of a baseball bat who methodically rapes his way through a family of three women. You start with the mother, Yuuko Kiryuu, whose name is apparently the one thing I always have the pieces to spell when I play Scrabble.

You begin by stalking Yuuko in a subway station as she waits for the train. There isn't really a whole lot to do in these parts (they are repeated with her two daughters), but you can "pray" and god will answer your rape prayers by summoning a gust of wind that blows up her skirt. You can spin the camera around and do that as much as you want, but at some point you're going to have to board the subway train and begin the molesting.

On board the subway you have to methodically molest Yuuko by rubbing various parts of her body and pulling up the front and back of her skirt. The game utilizes the now-classic disembodied hand that you can use to squeeze her but, her breasts, or drop down the front of her panties. Yuuko fights with you, making the skirt lifting portion a bit tedious, but it will all be over in a couple of minutes. Once you have successfully rubbed the key parts of her body and elevated her arousal meter (and painted her thighs with the ubiquitous girl juice) the train arrives in the station.

That's her A short series of static screens tells the story of how you stalk her, but most of the text was so poorly translated that the best I can gather is that the rapist made Yuuko's cell phone vibrate and then handcuffs appeared in her chest. After the static screens you enter a full-fledged rape sequence in the park. It's very scenic. Yuuko cries and screams as you would expect and you can force her into a variety of positions. Once you're done, you take photographs of her naked and covered in ghost jizz, which allows you access to her two daughters, Aoi and Manaka.

Aoi Kiryuu, whose name is pronounced exactly like the sound a fire engine's siren makes, is the elder daughter and a sporty schoolgirl. You pray for upskirt and molest her on the subway just like mom, but this time you rape her in a grungy bathroom. She and her younger sister are both virgins, which means the first time you rape them there will be a crimson surprise all over you and them. A delightful touch.

Finally, there is wee Manaka Kiryuu. She looks about ten and you get to rape her in her gigantic bed while teddy bears look on. This was certainly the most disconcerting of the rapes in the game. Not only does she look like a child, not only does her room looks like a child's room, but Manaka visibly cries. If you zoom in on her face you can see tears welling and vibrating in her gigantic eye sockets.

Beds in Japan are pretty big. Once you have raped all three women you enter the freeform phase of the game where you "rape train" the three ladies. You do this by selecting a setting and a woman you wish to rape. You can rape them in the bathroom, the kid's bedroom, the park, a hotel room with a bed large enough for Paul Bunyan, in an alley or even on the subway train. At this point you have a much wider variety of positions and you must complete certain unwritten challenges to unlock subservience in the women. It's sort of like Tony Hawk, only instead of a 720 kickflip off a statue, you have to make Aoi swallow semen three times or make Yuuko spread her ass cheeks.

An interesting wildcard - and by interesting I mean "horrid" - is that every time you ejaculate inside one of the girls there is a chance she will become pregnant. If she does become pregnant you're supposed to force her to get an abortion, otherwise she gets more and more visibly pregnant each time you have sex. If you allow the child to be born then the woman will throw you in front of a train! Take that pro-life movement!

Another one of the fun features in RapeLay is that you can really let your creative side run wild and invite three of your best creepy friends to assist you in your rapes. No, I'm not talking Internet multiplayer, it's more of a rape hot seat where three other dudes crowd around your victim and you create some weird geometric rape-prism. Like the cover of that Pink Floyd album, only with rapes.

There are only two endings to the game. The "thrown in front of the train" ending and the "Aoi stabs you" ending. Other than that it's rape forever for the three unlucky ladies, demonstrating once again that the only way the cycle of rape can end is if rapists are murdered.

We're forming the power symbol! Defining Moment: I wish I could say that the first instance of bloody cock or the rape that takes place on top of the child's enormous bed were the defining moments of the game. That would have been enough - more than enough - but, these are both things I have seen in Hentai games before. Pregnancy and abortion are new twists on this filthy genre, and they were disturbing, but they still don't quite win out. No, the winner on this one are the tears that glisten and move in the little girl's eyes. That sort of attention to detail wins this game a huge pile of disturbing points.

Difficulty: There are many lessons to be learned from RapeLay, about not wearing a skirt on a train in Japan or the need to equip your daughters with suicide pills, but the lesson foremost in this game is that rape is easy. You can wantonly grope women on a train without consequence and repeatedly rape their entire families without much fear. The only thing you can't do is not force them to get an abortion, because that's a sin in the eye's of god and leads to murder. He is the same god that answers the prayers of rapists standing on subway platforms.

Final Thoughts: RapeLay comes to us from Illusionsoft, which also makes the best Hentai games. I know, I know, oxymoron, but Sexy Beach 2 and 3 are actually kind of fun and innocent enough despite all of the hardcore sex. The fact that they also make one of the most disturbing and unpleasant Hentai games shouldn't really come as a surprise to me, but it does come as a disappointment. On the other hand, I would love to be a fly on the wall in Jack Thompson's office when someone anonymously mails him a copy of RapeLay. I have a feeling after about ten minutes he would either be having a coronary or he'd be masturbating furiously. Nah, he'd be doing both. And choking himself with his belt.

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

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– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)