Trigger Warning: Starless… no more is needed…okay fine, rape, incest, bestiality, scat, genital mutilation, murder, starvation, confinement, kidnapping, sexual slavery, and all around unpleasant sexual imagery. The game itself is far to grotesque and sicking to recommend to ANYONE! Extreme caution is advised if one wants to play this game anyway!

Starless Nymphomaniac’s Paradise is one of, if not the most disturbing games ever made. This is not the usual levels of messed up that hentai is known for. If you still think something like Rapelay is a legitimately disturbing game, stay far away from this game. If one is not the right type of audience for this game, it can cause deeply scarring psychological problems that will stick with you for a long time. It has been a year since I played this game and I still cannot get the images from it out of my head.

Also what I would like to disclose is that this is not the first time I reviewed this game. I have written a review of it a year ago shortly after I finished the game. The game had caused some very adverse effects on my mental state, which has resulted in a hastily written review that did not explain everything about the game that was needed to make my point, and I worded some things rather questionably. This time, I will try to view the game from a more observational standpoint at how well it achieves what it sets out to do.

Dirty Jobs (Presentation)

Starless Nymphomaniac’s Paradise is what is known as a nukige, a term that refers to a game meant solely as masturbation fuel and nothing else. This is in contrast to the term eroge, which just refers to games that feature erotic content, but don’t have them their sole focus. There are a fair amount of eroge out there that do have very good stories or that are fun to play or read on their own. Starless, on the other hand, cannot be entertaining in any other way unless taken solely as a pornographic work.

This would not be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that the developers did not seem to be under the same impression. Of course no one is going to assume that a game where the main conflict is based around a college student needing to play gigolo to a sadistic female robber baron and her two inbred daughters is high art, but I can’t help but feel that this game is taking itself way too seriously when it opens up with a vague philosophical quote asking about the difference between a moth and a butterfly (a quote that makes no sense within the context of the game even with the hindsight of knowing the entire plot and every ending), the entirety of the game’s aesthetic is of an overly extravagant Victorian era aristocratic design and the title theme is a somber, classical, piano ballad.

There were rarely any points while playing Starless where I felt it was trying to arouse or be sexy. It instead, felt more like it was trying to come up with the most disgusting and vulgar sex acts imaginable in an attempt to shock me, similarly to films such as The Human Centipede, Salo, or A Serbian Film. Starless is NOT trying to just serve as a bunch of sexy hi jinks that one can get themselves off to; it is a pretentious and tedious nightmare that has nothing going for it other than being full of material that would would otherwise require people to search the deep web under multiple proxies.

Starless is not just your typical hentai perversion. It is not just a normal “attractive big breasted girl gets violated by naughty tentacles” type of Japanese porn. I’ve seen the typical hentai material, and I have enjoyed a lot of material that would make others think I deserve to be in prison for enjoying, and this was STILL too much for me. Hell I knew this game was supposed to be disturbing going into it, and I bought the game’s SPECIAL EDITION because I heard it was messed up. I didn’t think it would be like this though, and I still have this game’s grotesque images embedded in my brain over a year after having played it as a result.

However, just saying that this is game seriously fucked up is not enough. I will need to do my best to describe what the game’s sex scenes are like, and I am covering them first because they are what most people are here for. If you are expecting something remotely arousing then you will not find it here. The first thing of note is the character designs. Their designs are far from the worst I have seen in the game and there is a fair bit of detail in most images. The problem is that the women have disproportionately large bodies and all look like the amazonian women from that Futurama episode with the “snu snu.”

Considering how much of an emphasis on femdom this game has, it makes sense for the Mamiya’s to be drawn like this, but with women in more submissive roles like Mitarai and Mikako, such large body structures do not suit them. Additional issues with the character design is that every female character has oversized breasts that do not make the girls any sexier, and instead just make all them look interchangeable from the neck down, with the exception of Marika. Additionally, penises are also drawn too wide and look rather awkward, although there have admittedly been much worse in that category.

For the most part, Starless is fairly well drawn, but it becomes hard to appreciate the art direction when half of the sex scenes in this game re use assets from earlier scenes. For example, you will probably see a certain scene with Mikako breastfeeding Kyouchi at least seven times throughout the game, all using the same images and music. There are some nukige I have played that didn’t even have seven sex scenes in total, and whose sex scenes were not as drawn out and overly long as Starless’.

I can give credit to Starless in terms of the sheer amount of content it has. There aren’t going to be that many nukige that have over forty sex scenes while still having each of them last anywhere from thirty to ninety minutes. Unfortunately, the length of these scenes is precisely the problem; they go on a lot longer than they should. There is an unnecessary amount of description put into these scenes, and whenever you think it’s about to end, it just keeps going. The first sex scene in the game took me an hour and a half to get through, and it was not even a good sex scene to begin with.

This is even worse because the story is actually this game’s greatest asset (which is quite sad considering how poorly written it is) and that you often times will have multiple sex scenes piled on top of each other. The worst instance of this was at the banquet where there were at least five of them, which would result in a sequence that will last at least four hours, possibly even more. I will be honest though, there was a point where I just started fast forwarding through sex scenes just to get to the point. The game thankfully, includes the ability to switch between fast forwarding through all text or just through text you already read.

The pacing in Starless pretty much kills any chance of it being enjoyable to read even if these scenes were sexy to begin with. However, the game’s writing also does a pretty good job at making these sex scenes excruciatingly tedious as well. The description given for all these sex scenes consists of the most cringe worthy and overused hentai dialogue there is. If one were to play a drinking game where they took a shot every time the phrase “c**k milk” was uttered, they’d drown themselves before they even had the chance to die of alcohol poisoning. The same goes for other cliches such as “you say you don’t like it but you’re wet so you must be lying.”

The sex scenes often seem to play out like they were written by a very horny and disturbed twelve year old , which results in most of them feeling incredibly exaggerated. Most notably, every sex scene is very messy and ends up with women splattered with semen as if they were just gang banged. However, just about all of these scenes only have a single male character who is given a plot mandated excuse in that they are on the effects of special drugs, that also conveniently prevent the women from getting pregnant.

Those, however, describe the more tame sex scenes. As for the more disgusting and grotesque scenes, well I’ll just warn you not to read the next three paragraphs if you just ate, are about to eat, or if you ever plan on eating again.

The game first started to get notably grotesque is when Marie breaks the toilet after using it, and Sawatari has to clean out the toilet with his bare hands. Then a following scene had Marissa putting laxatives in Mitarai’s drink while both toilets in the house were broken and made her go in Sawatari’s mouth instead. Yes, I feel physically sick just thinking about it.

Starless is very heavy on scatology, which means it will definitely appeal to scat fetishists, but it will mean that it is unreadable to everyone else because of it. It is worth noting that the localization has removed any images relating to scatology (in addition to those of bestiality or genital mutilation), but the description and sound effects are still more than enough to churn one’s stomach. However, that is still far from the most vile this game gets.

It goes without saying that a majority of the sex scenes are rape scenes, but other lines that this game crosses include incest, bestiality, and genital mutilation. The incest is specifically of the mother son variety, that culminates with a Mother son sex show that the father gets to see as his last sight before he is murdered. The bestiality occurs in a bad ending where Mitarai is gang raped by dogs and pigs repeatedly while Sawatari is kept locked in the Mamiya’s basement emaciated until he is killed and has his organs harvested. The genital mutilation occurs in another bad ending where Sawatari gets his penis chopped off by a guillotine and his arms,legs, and lower body are trapped underneath the crawl space of the mansion with only his face seeing the light of day and serving as Marie’s human toilet.

This is what I mean when this game is absolutely nightmarish. It is true that there are some depraved individuals that can find those situations sexually arousing, but a vast majority of even some of the most degenerate hentai viewers will find this scarring and horrifying. This is made even worse because of how misleading Starless’ advertising is.

Other notably disturbing hentai games such as Euphoria and Saya no Uta are games that were very clearly supposed to be psychological thrillers first and eroge second; and they were advertised as such. Starless, however, is advertised as your typical vanilla hentai. The game’s subtitle is “Nymphomaniac’s Paradise,” but the tone of this game is far darker than such a title would imply. The back of the box uses the game’s cleanest images, and none of the game’s promotional material mention how disturbing this game gets. The game tried to intentionally mislead players into playing that could cause serious psychological harm to them. As a result, the excuse of “you’re not the game’s intended audience” does not fly.

However, the key reason why Starless fails as an eroge is not simply due to the extreme nature of its content, but more so because of how the game presents itself. Starless is a very confused mess that cannot decide whether it wants to arouse us, or if it wants to horrify us. The sheer absurdity of its story and writing gives off the obvious impression of it being purely pornographic, but the way that the darker scenes are presented also indicate that this game is supposed to be a psychological thriller. As a result of this, the game fails to accomplish either of them well because the two simply do not go together, as well as the fact that Starless is just poorly written regardless of what its intention was.

Where the Stars Don’t Shine (Story and Characters)

The main character of Starless is Sawatari, a college student who is trying to find a job so he can afford to buy himself a new car. After he is just about to give up, he sees a small ad in the corner that offers four million Yen (which would be roughly $33,000 US dollars) to work as house servants at the Mamiya mansion. Of course this game all but bludgeons you over the head with the fact that this is too good to be true, but Sawatari still decides to go through with it even after a creepy old man warns him about it and the fact that the mansion is out in the middle of nowhere with no one else around.

The twist turns out to be that Marie Mamiya, the head of the household, wants workers that will fulfill her sexual needs in addition to doing physical labor. Once Sawatari finds out, it is too late because he is an idiot and he never asked what the work would entail and didn’t read the contract before signing it.

This just shows how lazily written this story is. What’s that, you can’t think of an interesting or realistic way for our characters to find themselves in this situation? Well then just make him into a bumbling idiot who makes everything worse due to his stupidity as if this game is a bad horror movie.

Of course, if Sawatari’s personality was interesting then maybe I could sympathize with him but unfortunately, Sawatari is about as dull of a protagonist as they come. Sawatari’s personality can best be summed up as “standard harem series protagonist that is made to be a normal everyman but ends up being annoying because the writers think their audience are all complete idiots.” He has absolutely no charisma and what very little personality he is given contradicts itself.

For instance, in an interview at the beginning, he is asked various questions about his masturbation habits (which somehow was not enough to tip him off that they weren’t looking for a house servant) and he reveals that he masturbates three times a day. In a lot of his inner monologues, he just can never stop making sexual remarks about all the women even though he has been repeatedly raped by and after he has ejaculated way past the point where most would be rendered impotent. Despite this, he acts as though he is asexual in about half of the scenes because they need him to play straight man to all the insanity that occurs.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like this is a bit of a missed opportunity in regards to Sawatari’s character. Why not have Sawatari be a sexually deprived otaku with a lot of perverted fantasies, who decides to knowingly take the job but gets himself in way over his head? Such a thing would be far more relatable to this game’s target audience (no that was not a potshot at the game’s audience since I fall into that category as well) and would be far more interesting. Or why not have him instead be the smarmy pick up artist type and have this all happen to him as some form of ironic punishment, or anything remotely creative? Nope, we gotta go with every harem series protagonist ever made.

Our other protagonist, Mitarai, isn’t any better. She has literally no personality other than that she’s a helpless victim and a closet nymphomaniac (Or in other words, a feminist, trolololololo!). She is pretty much nothing other than a walking plot device. Her only purpose is to be a designated love interest for Sawatari and to be ruthlessly tortured in an attempt to make you feel sorry for her. While the scenes that do torture her are grotesque and disgusting, I could never bring myself to actually feel sympathy with her because there was no character to feel sympathy for.

Sachie is another victim who has been working with the Mamiya’s for years because she gambles all of it away like an idiot. She is played off as mysterious and wise but she is really just obnoxious. She is entirely selfish and self serving, yet will completely screw you over if you don’t give her your money at every point the plot requires. The remaining two victims are Mikako and her son Makoto. Mikako’s only traits are that she’s middle aged and has enormous breasts, and Makoto is the stereotypical “femboy” character whose penis was increased in size surgically by the Mamiya’s. Also the two of them are sexually attracted to each other because of course they are.

However, none of them compare to how utterly detestable and unlikable the Mamiyas are. Marie Mamiya, the head of the household and the mother of the rest, is basically a megalomaniacal, sex crazed, psychopath without any sense of human empathy who will always be one step ahead of you no matter what you try to do. In most endings, she won’t simply let you leave after the two weeks are finish and will try and manipulate events to keep everyone who works under her enslaved.

She also has two daughters, Marissa and Marika. Marisa is possibly even more spoiled and devilish than Marie is and she is pretty much the embodiment of every horrible spoiled princess stereotype. Despite the fact that Marie is far more insidious, Marisa manages to be even more unlikable since Marie at least tries to present herself as having some class. Of course, because of how great this game is, she is probably the character that we are forced to be around the most.

As for Marika, she is probably the most likable of the Mamiya’s, but that would be kind of like saying that Jeffrey Dahmer was the most likable serial killer. She, at first, seems nicer than her mother and sister, but the further you go on, the more you realize she is just in it for her own selfish needs. The game tries to play up the fact that Marika is in love with Sawatari, but there is never any distinction made between that and sexual lust. Yes that was likely the point to begin with because we can’t have any character depth now can we? Oh, and she is also a futanari. Lastly there is Kyouchi, the only male Mamiya, who is also a selfish brat, but he has little emphasis on the plot to begin with so he’s hardly even worth mentioning.

Normally, characters like these would make for excellent villains. One would assume that it would be a good thing seeing as how overcoming them usually serves as the main character’s prime motivation, and all the more satisfying it would be when they finally get their comeuppance. Unfortunately, Starless does not work that way. The Mamiyas never receive even an ounce of karma for the atrocities they have committed and they are still free in even the best possible ending.

The only possible reasoning I could see for this to be the case is if Sei Shojo was trying to play up the femdom angle, which required the Mamiyas to be protected by invisible plot armor and always have you be trapped and powerless. Unfortunately, the entire plot suffers greatly because of this and the game genuinely feels as tedious and emotionally draining as what Sawatari actually goes through. When I wasn’t horrified at what the game was showing me, I felt bored and irritated out of my skull and got increasingly more contemptuous to all the inane and immature crap that this game throws at you both figuratively and literally.

While Starless is at least a competently put together game that did have effort put into creating it, it still does not change the fact that I was not only never less entertained by a game, but I probably never had less fun doing anything at all! Starless is the closest that a game has come to literal torture, and that isn’t even an exaggeration. I would say that a game would have to cause me physical pain to get any worse than Starless, but unfortunately, Starless HAS caused me physical pain. Specifically, I have frequently felt nauseous and needed to resist the urge to throw up.

Yet it isn’t even as simple as showing you a bunch of very gross stuff that makes Starless as bad as it is more so than the fact that being disgusting is the ONLY thing Starless can do effectively. Our characters are flat and annoying, the plot is overly repetitive and formulaic, there are more holes in its plot than in a pin cushion, dialogue is often reused, you hear the same 7 music tracks repeated for fifty plus hours, the entire game does nothing other than make you feel as absolutely lifeless, miserable, and trapped as Sawatari and as traumatized as Mitari, and it never even tries to do anything of remote substance.

I am not going to lie, it is a lot harder to judge how competently something is at being sexually arousing than how it is at being entertaining or having any amount of depth. When I find it arousing I can overlook the obvious lack of any serious depth based on the fact that sexual arousal is just another form of entertainment in and of itself. When a game uses a bunch of niche fetishes that most will find disgusting by nature, however, it becomes a lot harder to be impartial considering how abstract sexuality is in general.

That being said, as much as you may not believe it, I WAS the target audience for this game, and I’m not even referring to the fact that the game advertises itself as much more light hearted. The only way that someone would be interested in this game is if there was a part of it that appealed to them. I personally, can find some pretty disturbing material arousing if presented the right way. I figured that this game would at least provide for something memorable and unique even if I didn’t like it, and that was true; I just didn’t think it would be like this.

Conclusion

I don’t doubt that there is an audience of people who would enjoy this game for specifically the reasons I despise it. Some will not care at all about the story and could easily look past it despite the fact that the game still emphasizes it on its own. Some will be so aroused by the situation that they can completely disconnect themselves from the game’s plot and just focus on how much it turns them. I have already given my reasons as to why I, and why likely most others will not find it sexy, but it is clear that Starless was not made with most people in mind.

It is true that there are some observable good qualities to Starless. For instance, the music is beautiful (even if it’s easy to forget after listening to the same few tracks for 50 plus hours), the voice acting is decent (Japanese only obviously), and the art direction is nice when resources aren’t being reused. The fact that you can choose between skipping through all text or limiting it to text you already read is convenient as well, even though these features are kind of visual novel standards.

Every other game I have given a one out of ten rating was a piece of low budget indie shovelware that lasted less than an hour and had almost zero effort. Starless, however, clearly had effort, so I would consider it a better game than any of the aforementioned shovelware from a design standpoint. On the other hand, the worst that would happen with those games is that you’d waste a bit of your time and money, while with Starless, you could end up causing serious harm to your mental state.

I am not even saying this just for the purpose of bashing the game, this game is dangerous. The reason I am saying to stay away from Starless is out of legitimate concern for the well being of whoever plays it. Yes I also believe it is a bad game for the various other reasons that I mentioned, but the part about causing serious psychological harm is a bit more important. Yes I do know that some people can enjoy this game, but there is no circumstance where I will feel I can actively recommend Starless. Even if someone read my entire review and thought “that sounds so hot” the entire time, I still would be very hesitant to advise playing this game knowing the power it has. Playing Starless is like playing a game of Russian Roulette where only one of the barrels ISN’T loaded.

Keep in mind that this is also something that you are paying $40.00. Also throw in the chance that you aren’t grossed out by its content, but you find it boring due to its slow pacing and terrible writing. There is such a limited and microscopic pool of people that could enjoy this game, and almost everyone else will end up traumatized and scarred. The sheer fact that a game has a risk this large makes it impossible for me to recommend this to anyone in good conscience. If you decide not to listen to me and check it out, I’m not paying for your therapy bills when you develop a nasty case of PTSD, which in this case, may as well be called Post Traumatic Starless Disorder.

Further Thoughts

I am unsure if I can ever truly express everything that disgusted me about this game, but I legitimately never want to think about this game again after I am done with this so I will try. This review was far nicer on this game than my actually feelings are; I LOATHE this game, and I despise it far more than anything else I have played, even games that are objectively worse. I have made it clear that I am against “obscenity” laws in regards to what can and can’t be shown in works of art. The reason for this is because of games like Euphoria that use their obscene material for artistic purposes. Something like Starless, on the other hand, is a far better argument in favor of video game censorship than anything that Jack Thompson or Anita Sarkeesian could EVER say.

The truth is that, yes, Starless is just a work of fiction and it is just porn. It is just meant to appeal to a small and niche portion of the population to get off to, and who am I to say they can’t as long as they are not hurting anyone in real life? My own feelings toward the game are merely a result of psychological trauma, similar to how someone will develop a phobia if they ever witness or are involved in an accident.

I have recently written a political article about the #metoo hashtag in which rape survivors have spoken out about their rape, and I ended it with my own confession that I have been sexually harassed. However, I never mentioned what made me feel the most uncomfortable and the most violated. Starless was the game that made me realize that it is possible to be raped by an inanimate work of fiction. I know that such a thing is impossible in a literal sense, and I am aware of the risk of it coming across as insulting to people who have experienced literal rape in real life. I may not have experienced it in a literal sense, but I have psychologically, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that.

According to Rapecrisis.org, the psychological symptoms of rape trauma syndrome are as follows…

Increased fear and anxiety

Self-blame and guilt

Helplessness, no longer feeling in control of your life

Humiliation and shame

Lowering of self esteem

Feeling dirty or contaminated by the rape

Anger

Feeling alone and that no one understands

Losing hope in the future

Emotional numbness

Confusion

Loss of memory

Constantly thinking about the rape

Having flashbacks to the rape, feeling like it is happening again

Nightmares

Depression

Becoming suicidal

I will admit that it could very well be confirmation bias coming into play considering the broad interpretations of them, but I have felt every single one of these after playing Starless, and I still do feel some of them; although I admit I have plenty of other issues coming into play.

I felt increased fear and anxiety after playing due to the sheer horror and discomfort that I felt from certain scenes. During the period after playing it, I felt what could be described as symptoms of depersonalization and like I was detatched from both myself and the rest of the world. That is also what I am feeling right now as I write this. I have undoubtedly felt ashamed of myself for having played this game. After all, eroge are already niche enough, one can only experience this game if they seek it out. I saw what the reviews said before buying it. Hell I got the game’s special edition for Christ sake, I specifically got it because I do not like paying large prices for digital copies.

Starless is just a game, and I choose to expose myself to it, I have no one to blame but myself, and I must be a sick and disgusting human being for even thinking of playing a game like this. I often feel like the inside of my mind is this horrific vortex leading to hell, and that I am putting people in danger by talking to them. Any joke that I have made about this game is just a vain attempt to cope with the feelings of distress.

I have felt helpless since I already took the wrong path in life. There is no going back now. I partially think it may be due to the trauma of untreated gender dysphoria and social isolation, but the fact that I played this game only confirmed that there is something wrong with me as an individual. I can’t change myself, and I will never be a normal girl no matter how accepting people become of trans people.

Humiliation and shame, I feel like that now just writing this. I also felt that when I put my first review on GameFAQs where most people either liked it because they thought it was hilarious or they got pissed off at me and called me a prude. If only they knew…

I don’t feel as though I have to go through every single symptom because of how closely related they are, but yes, I have felt every one of these as a result of playing this game, and it likely added even more baggage than I already had. I may joke about it, and I thought I was over it for the longest time, but looking up the images for this review and needing to see them while I blur them out… it brought everything back. God fucking dammit…. how did I let this happen to me?

I want to make it clear that I bear no ill will toward the developers, the publishers, or any fans of this game, nor do I bear any judgements. I just want to make this as stern a warning as possible; DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME! The idea of anyone enjoying this game is almost inconceivable to me, and I can’t recommend it to even the most depraved of perverts under any circumstances. I am not the only one this game has done harm to, I’ve seen other friends of mine react the same way; some who were more perverted than I was. Your curiosity is not worth it, I wish someone would have told me the same.

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This review was originally put up on GameFAQs on January 23rd of 2017 and has been edited with enhanced presentation.

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