One of Steam’s top-selling titles last month was an intense sex game

Valve released its monthly report of top-selling games on Tuesday, and while the list is largely composed of familiar faces and recent releases, one nugget might raise eyebrows: コイカツ！ / Koikatsu Party, an anime game where you can build a “waifu” to exact specifications. The purpose of the game is to bed the people that you create.

In the last year, Valve has started approaching sex games on Steam with a more lax attitude. Where before, games with suggestive themes could sometimes be rejected from the storefront, Valve now allows nearly anything onto its store — even sex games. The caveat is that while anything can be sold, anything particularly adult has to be labeled as such. These games are also not viewable unless you’re logged in and have the appropriate settings. This, in turn, has led some people to feel that Steam is starting to become overrun with sex games — they’re just mostly out of sight.

But just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Actually, these games seem to be doing pretty well, if Koikatsu Party is any indication. While exact numbers weren’t provided in the blog post, Koikatsu Party is among the top-selling games of June 2019 in the platform, according to Valve.

Why are people flocking to the game? Well, Koikatsu Party brands itself as the “ultimate anime character maker.” Players are given over 300 options to adjust for the women or men they create, as well as a number of shaders to further customize their experience. You can even adjust anything from pubic hair to beauty marks. From the store description:

Shape, size, position, contours, dimensions—customize them all! Want pointy elf ears? Easy! Want to change the color of just one eye? Piece of cake! You have the ability to make a character for any type of setting you can imagine! Choose from a wide variety of different hairstyles. And even better, you can select different hair sections and adjust them individually for ultimate customizability! Sculpt every curve with settings both general and specific. Breasts, hips, arms, busts, legs: seriously, we’ve got options to adjust pretty much anything you can dream of. But wait, there’s more! Why not give your character purple skin, or add in cool shadows, or even change the color of her outline? We support all sorts of coloring schemes and light options. I mean, this is anime we’re talking about. The sky’s the limit!

Once fans have made a character, they have up to 30 different personality choices to assign. All of this fuss is made for one purpose: to have sex with whatever you create. There’s not much else to the game beyond character creation and sex. Characters can have their own sexual preferences and sensitivity options, so they’ll react differently to whatever you do to them. The game will then let you “touch, pull, lick, finger, and pump to your heart’s content.”

Curiously, the game leans heavily on the stereotype of the otaku nerd who prefers 2D girls over actual women. The promotional text boasts that the game will “leave you wondering why you ever bothered with real people. Seriously, who needs reality when you have anime?”

While erotic encounters do not have English subtitles, this limitation does not seem to be stopping Western players. If you look at the reviews for Koikatsu Party, it is full of English-speaking fans who have apparently fallen in love with the game.

“My friends do not talk to me anymore,” one Steam user jokes. “A lifetime of playing horrendous unpolished h-flash games on newgrounds, years of playing overpriced h-shovelware on steam, hours wasted trying to install honey select — it all led up to this,” another says. “P0RN games are finally good,” they continued. Many folks leaving top reviews for Koikatsu Party have spent several hours with the game.

Notably, all of this isn’t available out of the gate: Players must download a patch to uncensor the action, though at this point, that’s become tradition with any risque game on the platform. Steam might sell sex games, but sometimes you still have to go an extra step to actually get to that action.

Other top-selling Steam games in June include My Friend Pedro and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Correction (July 25th): Koikatsu Party is indeed available in English, but erotic scenes do not have English subtitles for the voice work according to the developers. We have updated this article to reflect that.