I'm a little conflicted about this game, but not in a way where I don't like it. The conflict is this: these developers could have made an excellent non-pornographic game and achieved a high level of success, however, they're also really good at porn and their efforts aren't necessarily wasted here. Do I have more of a psychological desire for games in general to be good or more of a desire for lewd graphical adventures to be elevated to a new level of quality? I don't know, anymore.

What I do know is that Living with Sister: Monochrome Fantasy does a few things that most games in its genre don't bother with. It goes for a unique art style and pulls it off. It puts a lot of focus on one love interest rather than spreading the focus across a harem. The life simulation and management parts of the game have actual friction.

I am not using friction in the lewd sense, here. During my first playthrough of Living with Sister, I got the bad Netherworld ending. In my second playthrough, I learned that I achieved that bad ending less than two thirds through the game. For the second time in this genre, my bad first playthrough inspired me to do it again, but better. Unlike Welcome to Maison Chichigami, I felt the need to replay Living with Sister immediately. The choices you make over the course of the game have a little weight to them. The game does not overly tutorialize you. In a lot of cases, you actually have to go out of your way to figure out what certain things in the game even do. This might not seem user friendly. If you think about the game in terms of design philosophy and ludonarrative cohesion, it kind of makes sense.

In Living with Sister, you play as the archetypal big brother of a family. Your parents make themselves scarce. You and your sister are both young adults. You are living alone for the first time. You have aspirations to become a JRPG adventurer. Your sister is in school. (College, I guess? There's a splash screen at the beginning of the game thankfully stating that everyone you see is intended to be 18 or older.) You have to step up, take the lead, and figure out life. While you do this, a tension builds between you and your sister.

Any knee-jerk reaction to the game's taboo subject matter is totally understandable. Even I, being the freak that I am, felt some apprehension going into the game. The tone of Living with Sister softens the blow of any incestuous happenings that might occur. It's less like you're having an actual inappropriate relationship with a sibling and more like you're doing a weird roleplaying scenario you might act out with a quirky significant other. Your sister isn't exactly a blank slate meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The common denominator she does appeal to might still be kind of low, but there's some substance to her characterization.

Living with Sister gamifies three statistics involving your sister: Trust, Interest, and Lust. Trust is just that. It represents faith in Onii-chan's competence in some respects and apprehension about his intentions in others. Interest represents your sister's eagerness to explore her sexuality. The higher it goes, the more willing she will be to learn about and engage in lewd scenarios. Lust represents your sister's sex drive. Onii-chan has his own lust statistic that progresses separately from his sister's.

While you control Onii-chan through the entire game, your sister has some actual agency through the course of the story. She can deny spicy encounters. She can also initiate them. One of the plot milestones in the game involves your sister upgrading the adventurer's guild with her culinary skills. Other plot points involve the main character going on extracurricular fantasy adventures with his sister on his days off. To actually focus so acutely on the wants, needs, and strengths of a heroine is a rarity in this genre of game. I feel like this calculated agency should show up in more games, going forward. I also have a suspicion that it might already exist in a great number of games that I don't know about. (People don't really talk about erotic games.)

For many years now, on many lurid hubs of flesh and blood erotic entertainment, the step-family genre has flourished. It always bothered me. I understand that they likely have to consider the optics of the media that they produce for legal reasons. Every time the word "Step" showed up in a video title on an adult media website, I still felt like my intelligence was being insulted. Of course these people aren't related. I have never looked at any kind pornography outside of the context of being fictional. In the same way that real life fights look nothing like cinematic fights, the sex in pornography is often too carefully choreographed to inspire a sense of verisimilitude. The more fictional you go, the more acceptable the taboo becomes. With that being said, Living with Sister: Monochrome Fantasy is pretty good, I guess.

Wincest

quite possibly the game portion of a porn game I've ever played. download the patch and get the dlc. unironically really good turn based combat with well paced daily life mechanics. I hope for a sequel and it's not even about the sexual content, I like the story and gameplay that much. it has changed my opinion on these games and made me more willing to try them in the hopes that I find a genuinely good game and chase that high again. I didn't even realize it was a porn game at first I genuinely thought it was just a stylized and good fantasy rpg at first. Boy was I wrong.