In Love And Deepspace, Intimacy Is The Ultimate Gooner Bait

I have a confession: Love and Deepspace intimidated the hell outta me, so much so that I, the horniest Kotaku writer not named Kenneth Shepard, wanted nothing to do with it. I had known about the mobile gacha game ever since its release in 2024. It’s published by Infold Games, the same studio that developed the fashion-focused Infinity Nikki, a game I fell unexpectedly hard for because it managed to expertly capture, “What if Breath of the Wild met The Devil Wears Prada?” And because my social media algorithm intersects neatly at Gamer Street and Gooner Boulevard, I was also constantly fed videos featuring the game’s devastatingly handsome protagonists doing things you’d be embarrassed to show to grandma. Despite those two massive perks, I still felt a discomfort with the game I couldn’t name. But when peer pressure and my own curiosity became too powerful to ignore, I finally started playing a few weeks ago.

I get it now. Both why I was so scared of it and why it’s managed to become one of the most popular mobile games of the last 2 years, with over 50 million players and billions in revenue. The reasons for that success are ones I both did and did not expect.

Because it’s a gacha game ruthlessly engineered for maximum wealth extraction with minimal payout, I expected my time with Love and Deepspace (punnily abbreviated as LADS by the game’s community) to be what I thought of as an anglerfish scenario. I’d be lured in by the bait of attractive men doing attractive things attractively, only to be gobbled up by an endless cycle of mindlessly farming for in-game currency (if not buying it outright) to spin the great gacha gambling wheel in hopes of winning one of those sexy interactive videos.

I wasn’t that far off. This is a gacha game, after all, and I was still beholden to daily busywork, fruitless gacha pulls, and learning the ins and outs of a byzantine in-game currency and combat system. The game has a fairly robust tutorial system and it’s easy enough to learn by doing. There’s also a massive community with resources to help newbies understand what’s going on. Once I had gotten over those technical hurdles and into the guts (heh) of the game, I started to appreciate what Love and Deepspace was actually doing as a sex game. 

In Love and Deepspace, your character pursues relationships with five love interests: Xavier, Zayne, Rafayel, Sylus, and Caleb. Each guy fits a different character archetype, from the sweet and silly Rafayal to the dangerous and mysterious Sylus, with the game offering something for every kind of taste. The way you “pursue” these boys is through progressing through the story and by collecting picture cards of them in gacha pulls. The cards range in rarity from three stars to five, and each rarity offers increasingly romantic moments for you to experience. A three-star card is just a pretty picture. A four star card comes with an audio play that tells the story depicted on the card. A five-star card is the holy grail of pulls, and comes with a sexy (but often sweet) scene between your character.

While there will almost certainly be one guy players prefer, throughout the story you have sweet, romantic, and erotic encounters with all five. The aloof, bespectacled Doctor Zayne was the guy I was initially drawn to before I committed fully to the white-haired Sylus, dragged kicking and screaming by the old parts of me that were once awakened by Sephiroth, Sesshomaru, and Yoko Kurama.  

I was surprised that the game’s romantic content wasn’t limited to the five-star pulls. The audio plays are fun, fluffy little interludes enhanced by the game’s phenomenal voice acting. Hearing Sylus call me “kitten” in his gravelly, breathy voice is enough to have me giggling and kicking my feet even without being explicitly about sex. 

But one of the most refreshing elements of LADS is that it’s earnest about the fact that it’s first and foremost about sex. Love and Deepspace’s marketing presents the game as the female-gaze-coded answer to the quote unquote gooner bait mobile games that quote unquote real gamers like to ridicule others for playing. I’m glad the game’s developers lean into that, directly acknowledging in marketing materials, “You damn right there’s sex going on in here.” 

Though erotic media has been around forever, it’s still largely treated as a thing of shame and secrecy. Attitudes are changing, helped along by a growing sex-positive culture and the success of romance media like Bridgerton and Heated Rivalry. But even in those examples, and in most other instances of erotic media enjoying mainstream acceptance, the sex, though present and titillating, makes up only a fraction of the overall experience. 

While I’m not saying Netflix should blast hardcore porn into every household, it does feel like in order for erotica to be taken seriously, the sex in it cannot just exist for its own sake. It has to be attached to a profound or entertaining story to both justify its presence and, importantly, mitigate some of the shame associated with the fact you’re consuming porn. Yeah, Playboy is full of naked ladies, but it’s got great articles too. It’s not much better with video games. Sex definitely has to be supported by an epic plot or extraordinary gameplay, lest the game risk being labeled and dismissed as “gooner bait.” 

But humans like sex, we like porn, and we shouldn’t feel guilty about not always wanting to wade through hours of character development or a forest full of bears to get there. What I love about LADS is that although there is a deeper story going on involving memories, immortality, past lives, and a whole lot of monster hunting, all of that is secondary to the fact that my main character is banging dudes any which way she can. 

If well-executed sex scenes featuring a variety of beautiful men was all Love and Deepspace had to offer, it’d be a top-tier sex game. But I was surprised to find that it’s also a competent-ass cozy life sim. There’s a robust photography mode that allows you to take and edit photos and videos. At a certain point in the game’s story, your character gets access to a house, offering another outlet for your decoration skills as well as another venue for photos with your lads. Each male character gets an “office space” you can customize with trinkets you buy from the shop or plushies you can win in the game’s crane minigame. Whenever you log in, you’re greeted by one of your love interests and can talk to him. There are prompts to share with him your day, what you ate, or if you’re feeling sad, and he responds in kind. Throw out your productivity apps because you can set a timer and work, study, or work out with him. And yes, there’s even an option to sleep with him too. It’s everything the AI boyfriend/girlfriend apps are, without the potential for devastating mental health side effects.

Love and Deepspace’s most interesting quality is that it isn’t coy about its sex despite the fact that it has to follow strict guidelines to not run afoul of Chinese censorship rules or an app store’s terms of service. With platforms like Steam, itch.io, Patreon, and recently Kickstarter banning games with NSFW content, it’s harder for erotic media to reach the consumers that want it. Games that want to play with sexual themes have to follow an ever-narrowing set of rules that creators claim are unclear and unevenly applied. This creates a chilling effect where developers might feel pressured to self-censor any sexual content they wanna put in their games, or that might make them think twice about how they talk about the sex that they do include.

The developers of Love and Deepspace don’t seem to have that fear. No character ever gets naked, you’re never shown penetration, and yet the highest-quality scene I’ve pulled, known as a kindled memory in the game, had me blushing like a nun who accidentally stumbled onto Pornhub. 

Part of that is because game development software has progressed beyond the days of hands, mouths, and bodies awkwardly clipping while trying to simulate touch. But it’s not so much that kiss technology has improved; it’s how the developers use it. These men are kissing, mouthing, biting, touching, and nuzzling every inch of your character’s body. They run their hands down her legs before pulling them apart. The camera focuses on his fingertips grazing your character’s lips or tilting up her chin as his other arm pulls her flush against his body. 

Then, the camera perspective changes, and I’m no longer merely watching as he looks at my character, but as he looks directly at me. Suddenly I’m the one being thrown against a table as Sylus grins down at me, watching as his face takes up more and more of the screen. It’s my vision that jumps with an unmistakable rhythmic pulse and my ears he’s panting, grunting, and growling the most innuendo-laden phrases this side of the Quinn app into.

That point-of-view change was something I’ve never experienced in a sex scene before, and I realized that’s what initially scared me away from the game. The sex you usually get in games is a third-party viewing affair (unless it’s God of War). LADS, however, blurs the line between you and your character. I was taken from passive observer to active participant, which changed the nature of how I experienced what was happening. 

Porn for women is often categorized as such because it focuses on the intimate and romantic aspects of sex. There’s a greater emphasis on communication, softness, vulnerability, and love. 

There wasn’t any act being depicted in Love and Deepspace’s sex scenes that was too graphic for me. But what I was unprepared for was a simulation of intimacy—the eye contact, the POV changes, whispered endearments, gentle touches—so thorough that I felt exposed just by participating in it. Essentially, what shook me to my core about Love and Deepspace is that it’s the first time a porn game made me feel the mortifying ordeal of being known—biblically or otherwise. 

I’m not quiet about the porn I enjoy, and I’m glad that culture is changing such that it’s not shameful for women to be open about their sexual desires. Love and Deepspace plays into that openness. Rather than trying to subvert expectations of what a horny, sexual game can be by being “more than just porn,” it challenges its players to be open, honest, and vulnerable with their own desires. And honesty is always sexy as hell.