Master Recs: Toxic Yuri Taste Tester
CW: slurs, mentions of transphobia
Playing Operation Eventide served as a gateway drug that pushed me into the intoxicating embrace of the independent Yuri VN scene. A space that formed itself around Itch.io and self-organized game jam contests. Thousands of hours of reading material, unconventional stories, the antithesis of mainstream genre conventions, right at the tip of my keyboard pressing fingers. Naturally, I had to write about these games. Consider this article naught but an appetizer for the massive (and very specific) meal that's to come in the future. You don't need to be a licensed toxicologist to handle these unhealthy dishes... but it might help!
di/aphragm para/digHm by Azalinworks
Hey, you. Yes, you! You like Toxic Yuri, don't you? Don't lie to me. You like it when the girls are PrObLeMaTiC and not good for each other. You enjoy a bit of Degradation Play, right? One-sided abuse? One girl being deeply traumatized, the other a murderer? Then check this one out. It's a short visual novel with a "fun" conceit, an abundance of allusions, repressed memories forcefully brought to the surface through S&M dynamics dressed up as "exposure therapy", voyeuristic objectification and a whole bunch of relatively obvious Wonderful Everyday references. I think it's interesting, definitely worth the price of admission - which is nothing. The art direction has that rough, sketchy presentation reminiscent of an underground comic book scene from 30 years ago by way of "How to Draw Manga", which creates a distinct aesthetic.
You will probably have a miserable time with it... Go on and have fun, you crazy kids!
Id & I by Throwpup
Id & I is a harrowing experience, one I was not emotionally ready to behold. It left me shaken, crestfallen, perturbed as it hit dangerously close to my mental abode. That is probably the second best way to sell you on it. Here's the first: it's Psychological Horror Selfcest Yuri. Technically.
Id & I unfolds in claustrophobic darkness, softly lit by computer monitors, enveloped in alien purple hues as squiggly, floating thoughts mercilessly intrude themselves upon the world. It's an aesthetic that grabs you by the chest, throttling you by the collar bone. The writing is subsumed within said aesthetic, fused with it, creating this suffocating atmosphere. It captures a feeling of profound, crippling loneliness, drenched in depression, self-loathing, guilt and a desperate yearning. Interactions with the environment are limited yet significant. There's an optional clicker game titled HEARTBREAKER, browser search "gameplay", and a piss bottle emptying sequence... On that high note, I must refrain myself from saying anything more.
This is a short visual novel. It can be completed in less than two hours. It was created by Throwpup, with character designs by Kolulu (Operation Eventide), and music by Lolratz. It honestly looks and sounds great. Still, heed the warnings and approach it at your own discretion.
PASSENGER X PRINCESS: NO HOPE // MUST DIE by Lunaticker
This novel hits you in the lower abdomen with an oppressive feeling of manic melancholy; red-tinged backgrounds and surreal visages juxtaposed to dire mental states, a third-person narration akin to a purposefully dissociated inner monologue hating itself. In preparation for this, I read GIRLS' SYMBIOSIS by the same author, made for the Toxic Yuri Jam 2025. It certainly laid some of the groundwork for the game. Namely, the dynamic between a domineering cis woman and the deeply traumatized trans girl she treats as her property. Also, the colour of violence red.
PASSENGER is about an abduction, a suicide pact, a road trip towards an inevitable destination with a looming oblivion hanging above the world itself, as if to emphasize the depressing finality of it all... There is more to it, lurking in the subtext.
The two main characters, Clover and Lotus, appear as twisted, "gendered" mirrors of each other. The latter projects her self-loathing unto the former's trans body, the former is willing to cede agency to her abusive, transphobic yet weirdly validating affections.
A certain interpretation emerges from reading between the lines. One that re-contextualizes the entire diegesis in an allegorical key, from the writing format to the particular texture of the entwined characterizations, to the existentially terrifying backdrop. The ending all but confirms said reading, but I won't spoil what it was actually about. You shall have to discover it for yourselves. PASSENGER X PRINCESS is well-written, well-illustrated, well-composed, generally well-made. Play it while in a good head space. Hey, does anybody want to grab a snack at WOMAN's?
LONER_DOG//:Snuff Puppy Carnage Society by Snek RK
This novel is as interesting as it is un-sanitized. A colour-bleeding maw of unsavoury, unmarketable, viscerally authentic queer art. Aesthetically pungent, its backgrounds akin to viewing the world from the inside of a cataract smeared in the abrasive lights of LSD-induced acid trips. Its UI is a Dark Web's chatroom with low-quality popup windows. The characters who inhabit it are monochromatic sketches on an alien canvas.
It's uninviting for all outsiders but it's familiar to those who live in it, those who would not function within "acceptable society." This is a small community of non-conforming, drug-addicted, trans queers who only have each other - and their inpawssible fetishes.
The writing reflects the frantic, intoxicating pace of their lives, often fragmenting its structure to check on what everyone is doing at any point in time, always discarding a more traditional format in favour of this... carefully crafted mess. As messy as these people are.
LONER_DOG is not gentle. It exists in the foreground of a truly horrific, bleak landscape, wherein trans "puppygirls" are used, abused and abandoned, collected by state-funded shelters, killed off and mutilated. Their corpses lay half-buried in a massive ditch filled with the gore of their entrails, a monument to violence.
It's a slaughter that's been tacitly normalized, easily ignored by society at large, the disposal of undesirables atop which the Status Quo is maintaned. Simply existing is an act of resistance, and the occasional puppygirl rescue is the most anyone can do when they themselves are at the bottom. And yet, in spite of the horror, life must continue: Argo works its night shift at the gas station. Argo and Nessa cut each other romantically. Maya and Haley have relationship problems. HarshNoise and Roaches broke the toilet. Audrey shot her dick off. It's a flawed community, but a community nonetheless. It's all they have.
So, yes, this is an emotionally raw journey, bordering on the psychotic, the repulsive, the downright unpleasant. Its destination isn't a hopeful future but, rather, a present where you're (hopefully) still kicking, surviving past your episodes, desperately clinging to what gets you going. I shall say, it did not occur to me it was thematically and narratively possible to earnestly reframe necrophilia as a means to process grief while still being fundamentally rooted in ultra-complex psychosexual feelings. These characters are capital F Freaks and not in a cute way.
In case I didn't make it abundantly clear, you should not read this novel if you're too "normal." You should behold its brutal atmosphere as a window to the souls of deeply unwell queer people surviving at the barest minimum, stuck together in the depths of a fascist dystopia. The vital necessity of togetherness supersedes the inevitable toxicity that percolates in their circle. This is not a story about things working out fine thanks to the power of companionship, it's a reminder of how much worse it would all be without your only (bad) friends around you. You have to firmly, desperately love each other because no one else will, outside of your group. You have to keep on living for the same reason. This is both, somehow, bittersweet and bleak beyond anything I'll ever experience in my cisgender life. ... Well, I feel like shit now so I'll call it a review. Great game! Thumbs up! The final sequence is Cinema! Support your community-run puppygirl centres! Trans rights and death to fascism, forever!
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