marrow #27 | posted 17 may 2026
flipwitch: forbidden sex hex is a 2023 erotic metroidvania where you can (cisgenderly [0]) switch between male and female forms at will (to complete platforming segments and have some ikaruga-esque boss gimmicks). it seems to be pretty well-regarded for its gameplay and art style, both (for better and worse) very reminiscent of momodora: reverie under the moonlight (2016) (and presumably others in the series, but i've only played this one). i was reminded of it while in a platformer mood, so i figured i'd check it out.
this is an analysis of the game but it's also about hetero porn in general, so stick around even if you don't care about this specific porn platformer (pornformer), ok?
also while the text is obviously nsfw, there are no images. which you may boo tomato tomato at me (because in my personal website there's nothing stopping me from showing explicit images, an advantage over something like youtube) but i didn't take screenshots and don't wanna boot the game just to take them. look at the steam page for a visual point of reference.
i can't believe i'm the one saying this but i really wish this game was interested in men. well, specifically, in making men sexy.
so okay, here's how the game works. you prance around platforming and fighting, as you'd expect. you can also get costumes for both of your forms, and each one unlocks an npc sexual encounter. you also get sex from completing quests. besides yknow, porn for the porn game, these scenes count towards your healing and damage unlocks. it's a pretty interesting economy, because money's kinda tight, so buying costumes means not buying new magic weapons and trinkets. but also i found most of the merchant's offerings kinda uninteresting anyway, so i cannot say it was creating some deep strategy or anything lol. the whole system is undercooked (as part of the game's bloat, which i'll talk about) and i used the first magic weapon throughout the whole game.
anyway the costumes are a perfect encapsulation of this game's approach to gender. the female costumes are exactly what you'd expect: bouncy [1] boobiful nurses and bunnies and maids and such-like. but the male costumes are dissonantly dorky and cute. wizard form always looks like it belongs to a different game entirely, and to me very young. it's extremely jarring to switch from sexy fantasy-nun to offbrand toon link wearing converses, or a goofy goblin suit [2]. one of the upgrades, the angel jump, actually has a fig leaf look to it and it's this glimpse into a world where this game actually uses the damn gender switching dynamic to include slutty modded resident evil type shit. while you're at it have that man moan like leon when hurt too.
because yeah. "eroge where the player character switches gender all the time" should have been a bisexual and transgender indulgence fest. but the game is palpably terrified of alienating the only demographic in the world: straight men. the overwhelming majority of sex scenes in the game is M/F, with some solo F and F/F that are exactly as male-gazey as you'd expect. every scene is phallocentric. fingering has not been invented. women will moan giving a handjob. men of course do not moan, for they lack the necessary organ. even on game over screens, even in the alleged femdom scene [3], a man must never be humiliated. a man must never be attractive either, it's probably better to make him the POV so you don't risk too much of his body being seen. the spectre of male homosexuality, the greatest fear of hetero porn, haunts. tries to do away with it entirely / lives as an inversion of it, thus continuing to refer to it indirectly. and it's boring! it's uninspired! it's a waste of a premise!
oh it's also extremely white btw, although it has an unexplicable weebish japanese aesthetic, and an ancient egpyt themed final boss with exactly the orientalist music you'd expect for her dungeon. and you don't even get to fuck her.
i completed momodora: reverie under the moonlight in a crisp 5 hours, while flipwitch took me 7. it's not that much more but it felt like it. there's just nothing that really warrants the amount of stuff here. in addition to the 40 quest cutscenes, there are 43 whole collectible coins for a few gacha machines on the main hub area [4]. the collectibles are little loops of women getting fucked by ghostly phalluses. and they're always phalluses. and i avoid the word "masturbating" here on purpose because they're not really wielding dildos, these are magical disembodied dicks that move on their own and even cum, and there's a few that are straight up paizuri and stuff.
but i got sidetracked; the issue i have with the gacha loops is that they feel kinda wasteful, and once you've seen one you've seen them all yknow. and the same goes for all the sidequests that have you wandering about this sprawling map that isn't nearly as interconnected as i believe it should be. flipwitch is a competent metroidvania in that moving and fighting feel pretty good (the art, music and voice acting are also quite nice), but the difference between competence and Greatness is vast. far too many little multi-screen gauntlets for upgrades / coins end in a cul-de-sac where you have to walk of shame back through the respawning enemies, it just doesn't feel great.
i also have my qualms with the boss designs, i think they have wayy too much health. which is a momodora trait. the second boss, the goblin queen, is so simplistic in patterns while taking forever to kill that it left me biased against the whole game tbh. it does get better as you power up... maybe to the point of swinging back around and becoming underwhelmingly easy. the fights themselves aren't bad (i think the s&m angel gaining health when you hit her on her maso phase is fun), i just think the difficulty curve is kinda fucked.
basically i think this could have been a much better game were it 3-4 hours long. smaller and denser map, fewer bosses meaning more attention and resources could be put into each of them, fewer quests / npcs meaning less menial walking around looking for stuff. i don't mind that it doesn't really have any story, but it also really ought to have had a proper ending sequence. beating the final boss just teleports you to the start where you get a little dialogue with the mentor npc. it's so underwhelming.
praise of this game for its gameplay now leaves me rather confounded. i know the bar for quality in porn games is lower (because it's not a respected medium, because if you're gonna make a Really Great Game it's economically best to make it sfw so you're not kneecapped by the growing inability to sell and market it. etc etc we all know this), but well idk. it really isn't anything to write home about.
this was originally just gonna be a silly little analysis of why i found flipwitch very disappointing, which funny enough turns out to be pretty much exactly the same as this video review i found after this one was done. but i Kept Thinking yknow.
of course feminists have been grappling with the matter of heterosex forever, as well as hetero porn (and i must make clear that porn is not sex, despite the two being related and all too often conflated). if there was a simple answer we'd know by now. still. entertain me for a bit.
i think it's a sexist lie to claim that cishet men and women have fundamentally different taste in porn, and so you can't cater to both groups at once (or, if you do, it's porn for couples). i suppose part of the issue is how we view pornographic / sex-centric media too... it's a genre often so focused in pleasuring the consumer — thriving in hyperspecificity, the exact kinks that are a solid part of your identity... i must link bringing sexy back again.
there's an assumption that one must only ever want to see the object of their desire. i've pondered before whether the sexiness of seeing someone handle an object isn't frequently about wanting to use someone / be used like that, an acknowledgement of a subject-object dynamic. but need the subject-object dichotomy even exist?
and i don't mean "can sex and/or its representations be completely devoid of power exchange?", because i've walked that road and at the moment i believe it can only ever create and feed complexes. i'm at peace with power, for the most part. but i mean: is that really how arousal works? is consistent, guaranteed, arousal of the audience-customer the only goal of pornographic media? well i think my personal answer to this second question has been made clear everywhere lol. is this the only way things can be for the heterosexual (especially the man)?
but flipwitch (our case study here) hasn't ever thought of asking these questions because it doesn't have to. that is the luxury of being The Norm: you get to have your erotic imagination suffocated and not even realize it.
once you define man as the single active subject, any intrusion in that agency becomes a violent degendering. in hetero porn, the True Subject is the viewer, not the performer — especially in a medium where the performer isn't real, like a videogame. as such, deviating from what the platonic Straight Man (a pleonasm) is allowed and expected to enjoy is the strongest of violations. and one does not violate a customer, because he'll whine in the steam community forums and get a refund.
that's the power of images and the frailty of hetero masculinity. a sexy male body isn't just something they don't want to see: being made to see such a body, being made to realize the erotic potential of another man's body, is the biggest of turn-offs. it has to be, lest it turns out to not be as undesirable as one would wish.
i don't know that i have a proper conclusion to this. just wanted to yap a bit. that's what the marrow posts are for, after all. hope it was an enjoyable read. don't play flipwitch. if you want a cute pixel art erotic platformer i found marilulu: escape from horny jail quite enjoyable, and it's bite-sized and free. it's a shmup, but i also really liked reclaimer, made for the same game jam. and it's not eroge but if you wanna play the best platformer of 2026 then you want love eternal.
[0]: yeah no shit the game's view of gender is fully cis. i briefly thought one of the game over scenes had a slimegirl with a dick but upon second watch i realized she was just translucid.
[1]: oh my god they're so bouncy. overanimation is a plague upon this earth. i think it's fair to jiggle your boobs, even on the idle animation if you must. but every single animation here is so exaggerated it felt like being slowly roasted alive. yeah i agree boobs are awesome but they don't need to move like yoyos. that must hurt :(
[2]: the next game, temples of temptation, is in development with a different art style. there's no wizard form to be seen yet, but the witch form is much higher fidelity and i suspect the difference will be curious.
[3]: where a man asks to be dominated so you buy the dominatrix costume to complete the quest. and it's just dick-riding, with an animation that's been used before. and no shade about animation reuse, idgaf. but you're not fooling anyone here, especially since a silent protagonist means the dialogue is the sub talking about how much he's being dominated, trust. is this the most dominant woman the Average Man can handle before getting scared?
[4]: with the game over screens (two per area) we get to about a hundred porn clips in total (as per the steam page). all that sex and it doesn't even have unique boss game overs... smh my head...