coalescent || tidal rapture (yes, that’s the official Steam page typography) is a game about evolution and heartbreak and glorious, glorious wormsex. It’s the story of a society of merpeople who’ve just discovered the practice of casual relationships, and are enthusiastically embracing what I’d guess you’d class as a very squelchy form of Shibari.
The recently dumped protagonist is on “a journey of self-discovery and self-denial as they experiment with intimacy, experience physical bodily changes, and try to decide whether or not they want to move to the surface”. What kind of body physics are we talking, here? Well, let me try to, er, unravel the intricacies.
Watch on YouTube
On the one hand, there is “swimming”, a “push-and-pull” affair that combines inspirations from Super Mario 64, Ecco the Dolphin, and b.l.u.e. Legend of Water. Swimming also involves singing – there’s a five-note system whereby you “harmonize with a quirky cast of merpeople characters to establish a telepathic bond and talk about life underwater and what it must be like on the surface”.
On the other hand, there is “entanglement”, which I suspect owes something to Donna Haraway. This sees you controlling “a long and sinuous organ” which emerges from your character’s back. You’ll “thrust, entangle, and tie knots with your partner’s [organ]” in the course of four phases: foreplay, main act, climax, and aftercare.
“Explore different touch-based communication styles as the merpeople cuddle and discuss their newfound intimacy,” the Steam page continues. Over three chapters – each taking place in its own collaged low-poly underwater world – you’ll meet “three sexy, mysterious and colorful partners who aquaint [sic] the protagonist with a different sort of entanglement”.
I know, I know. Yet another singing/swimming/entanglement simulator with “hypnagogic” visuals. When will developers stop riding these trends into the ground! Jokes aside, I think tidal rapture sounds lovely. It is my favourite kind of sex game, the kind in which sex is at once earnest, bizarre and farcical.
It could almost be a Robert Yang/thecatamites collaboration, but the developers are in fact Hatim Benhsain and Hanwen Xu, with funding supplied by NYU Game Center. I very much enjoyed Benhsain’s previous ‘plunderludic’ project, Water Level/b.l.u.e. EXPLORATION, itself a homage to the aforesaid PS1 swimming game Legend of Water. In hindsight, that game was rather saucy in its freeform melding of samples from various other artworks.
Look out for coalescent || tidal rapture later this year. In the meantime, you can tell me what kind of knot is the sexiest knot. I myself am partial to a Double Fisherman. Alternatively, go read about the new (SFW) Ecco the Dolphin game.
