Fucksweeper is a difficult game to play in shared accommodation, a very difficult game to play in the crowded airport lounge I’m currently sitting in, and an incredibly difficult game to play on the airplane I will shortly be boarding. What is Fucksweeper? Discerning videogame cognoscente that you are, I feel like you should be able to read the title and form some broad conclusions. But for those who never owned a Windows PC in the 90s, Fucksweeper is a free, titillating, revolting, beautiful, apocalyptic new version of classic avoid-the-bombs grid puzzler Minesweeper that incorporates elements of dating sims and a vast quantity of generative AI filth. Maybe turn down the volume before watching this video.
Much like Minesweeper, Fucksweeper ships as part of its very own desktop OS, a shivering purple curtain with a fat, glossy 3D brain rotating in the centre. The brain, I think, is your brain, and your job, I think, is to play Minesweeper while trying to stave off a cranial invasion of “toxic hyperpuffs” or putrescent, AI-regurgitated erotic pop-ups, some of which are capable of conversation. The result is sort of Thanatos and Eros travelling towards each other at the speed of data and never quite meeting, or perhaps, Thanatos and Eros exploding away from each other like individual pustules on the mutant Tetsuo blob at the end of Akira.
Author and wide-ranging digital artist Nadya Lev calls it a “Minesweeper-fetish marketing horror dating sim”. Humanity developer Sam Barlow suggests that you “show this to your senator when explaining why AI is going to destroy us all but be prepared to dive out of the way if they horny explode”. Fellow indie Anton Preader comments on the Itch page that “I was a single jobless nobody before I played this game, now I am cognitively married to 87 concentrically diminished recursive clones of myself and transcended the need for flesh”. Here are the marketing bullpoints, to give you a savour of the writing you’ll find in-game.
ARE YOUR NIPPLES STIFF AS BLOOD-SEASONED STARCRETE AS YOU FANTASIZE ABOUT YOUR OWN INEVITABLE MURDER???
*Compatible as a hard-sinus hallucination with all properly-calibrated astral gore computers.
TIMELESS TORMENT: The clock mocks you, reminding you of the cowardice in your indecision. Only the swift and confident will survive.
PRIMAL GAMEPLAY: No excuses, no respite. This is Minesweeper in its purest, most savage form. No mercy for the weak: only the grim aesthetic joys that come from the relentless pursuit of sterile perfection.
THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE: String inferences together to create a perfect modus tollens. Test this antecedent by gambling the totality of your wicked life on one reason-tested moment of crisp and dizzying risk.
This deserves a longer write-up, but one other takeaway I have is that of course Minesweeper is titillating – why didn’t I realise this before? Minesweeper is essentially a striptease you have to draw out for as long as possible. It’s the distant ancestor of all those shonky hentai games on Steam where you delete squares to reveal a waifu. Ah, this feels like the kind of thing Cara Ellison would have written up if she were still here.