"Initial checks are complete, Captain. You are now officially ready to start some shit."
— DEMI
After a routine skirmish with some Space Pirates, The Captain of the Cool Starship Mary Celeste is contracted by the feisty hacker Fortune to retrieve an encrypted data capsule from the pirates' crippled flagship. With the help of Fortune's associate Dr. Lily and her Mantics, he completes the assignment, only to discover it to be the first step in his old friend Senator Erark's master plan to overthrow the repressive Imperium... and since said plan also requires the Captain to headhunt the hottest Action Girls in the Prodigium Galaxy while causing as much trouble for the Imperium as possible, he is more than happy to play along.
Subverse is a Genre Mashup indie video game from Studio FOW, who are best known for their adult 3D animation. Specifically, it is a Space Opera H-Game with Visual Novel dialogue and 3D cutscenes (both explicit and SFW), interspersed with Turn-Based Combat and Shoot 'Em Up missions and spiced with RPG Elements like Character Levels, Relationship Values, and ship upgrades.
Funded on Kickstarter in May 2019, the game was released into Early Access on March 26, 2021 and has received a steady stream of content updates ever since, with version 0.9.0 published in March 2024. It is currently available through Steam and GOG.comnote . The devs also plan to make it a launch title on their own distribution platform, "Streemster".
The game contains examples of following tropes:
- Action Girl: Practically every female character seen so far is a badass of some sort (whether a straight-up fighter or a mind-controlling empress).
- Ancient Conspiracy: The Coven of Nine is a group of nine influential Senu, including both the former and the current Empress, as well as Lord Azzorion, who have been effectively ruling the Imperium in secret for tens of thousands of years.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The DEVA mode — a Fusion Dance-powered Super Mode that all waifus eventually unlock — is great for clearing out large groups of mooks, but its drawbacks (the waifu and one of the mantics are effectively out of combat for three turns, while enemies still can and will target them) severely limit its utility. If you cannot beat an encounter with three rounds of focused fire from three mantics and a waifu, two mantics and a helpless DEVA cocoon probably won't survive it, either.
- Ban on A.I.: Among other laws Empress Kasidora enacted during her reign was the Great AI Purge across the Imperium and the rest of Prodigium. DEMI is, in fact, one of the last true AIs built before the Purge.
- Big Red Devil: The Vanerrans are a species of tall humanoids with crimson skin, a pair of large black horns on their heads, glowing yellow eyes, and prehensile tails. While not particularly violent (Killi being a major outlier in this regard), their combination of dashing good looks (Dallick is an exception in this one) and Extreme Libido also makes them examples of both Hot as Hell and Green-Skinned Space Babe. Naturally, the Imperium couldn't stand their existence and doomed them to slow extinction.
- Bioweapon Beast: The Mantics (short for "Manticores") are bio-engineered monsters created by Dr. Lily while in the Requital's captivity, specifically so that they could challenge the Imperium once more, after losing most of their personnel at Nü Vegas. During the Turn-Based Combat missions, you can deploy up to three Mantics as expendable shock troops commanded by the waifu of your choice. This being FOW, they also get their own explicit scenes with the girls.
- Binary Suns: The Viducia system in the Dragon Nebula features two stars at its center.
- Body Armor as Hit Points: Some units in ground combat have Armor or Shield, which layer on top of their Hit Points and absorb all incoming damage before any of it is applied to the HP. Furthermore, hitting Armor with physical attacks and Shield, with energy halves the damage (using opposite damage type, e.g. energy on Armor, doesn't).
- Character Level: Each waifu (except DEMI) and each Mantic has an Experience Meter which fills up as they complete ground and space combat missions (though only ground combat for Mantics). Level up bonuses alternate between base stat (HP, attack, defense) increases and special ability upgrades.
- Dismantled MacGuffin: Gornogoth, the previous commander of the pirate Dread Fleet (and Killi's mentor), had split up his Treasure Map into six parts and hid them in encrypted data capsules across the Dragon Nebula. Searching for them comprises the bulk of Act I, as recovering his treasure is one of two conditions set by Killi before she joins the Mary Celeste crew.
- Doomed Hometown: Nü Vegas in the Griffin Nebula was this for the entire Solar species. Originally a galactic trash heap where the Imperium dumped the newly-arrived humans, a bustling City Planet quickly arose around the reactor core of the Gulag IV. It had served as the Solars' capital and was (in)famous for its casinos, restaurants, amusement parks, and strip clubs, drawing the ire of the Imperium. After the Solar Navy had surrendered to the Imperium, the planet was firebombed back into a giant scrapheap, forcing humanity to scatter to other worlds.
- The Empire: The Imperium is the dominant power of the Dragon Nebula (though also wielding huge influence in the rest of the Prodigium) imposing a strict puritan ideology of the Veil upon the many species it has subjugated. Species that fail or refuse to conform with the Veil are exterminated, like what happened to the Vanerran homeworld, and almost happened to humanity on Nü Vegas.
- Fantastic Drug: Cocaineium is a rare mineral that is highly illegal, but very sought after for its effects, which include Super-Strength for a brief period of time.
- Fantastic Racism: The Senu overlords consider themselves a Superior Species and particularly despise other races with a high libido, like the Vanerrans and the Solars. While their subjects are less extreme, they also display a low-key form of racism by looking the other way to ignore the systemically oppressed or neglected species (or even by actively picking on them, in case of pirates). Killi and Dallick's dialogue lampshades how easy it is to justify inaction in the face of a slow eradication of another species by thinking, "well, if they wanted to survive, they would have done something in the meantime".
- Fantastic Ship Prefix: The Requital's flagship is fully named "SN Turbulence" in the Codex, with "SN" presumably standing for "Solar Navy", which had originally built and operated it until the Battle of Nü Vegas.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Both the kloi and the teelee are strongly inspired by Japan, albeit in different ways:
- The kloi culture is strongly reminiscent of the Imperial Japan with their long traditions of racism, exceptionalism, militarism, and war crimes (isolationism, too, though it was more of a Tokugawa thing IRL, and is involuntary in the kloi's case). The Imperial fascination with kloi fashion recalls late-Victorian Orientalism, and even the most salient (in the game's context) kloi cultural meme — their heavily pixelated porn — is a result of the Meiji-era penal code, which is partially in force in Japan to this day.
- The teelee culture, meanwhile, is heavily based on the post-boom Japan of The Japanese Invasion era, but also on South Korea during the Korean Wave. This is particularly noticeable in the use of language such as T-pop, teeaboo, while teelee Girl Groups like the TTS being direct homages to BTS etc.
- Flavor Text: Loads and loads of it, as every planet, item, character, ability, and upgrade has a short text accompanying it.
- Founder of the Kingdom: The first leader of the first Solar colony on Nü Vegas is referred as "the Pilot" by the Codex and has instituted many key customs of the Solars, such as the mandatory draft into the Solar Navy. It can be surmised that he was the original helmsman of one of the ships humans arrived in.
- Free-Love Future: Double Subverted in that the futuristic galaxy-spanning Imperium is very restrictive and puritan about sexuality, as a result of its dominant species, the Senu, gaining their immense Psychic Powers from complete abstinence (this is, in fact, the main reasoning behind the Veil)... except that on the galactic fringes, where the Captain and his crew operate, nobody really cares and everyone just screws around as they please.
- Game-Breaking Bug: More like a story-breaking bug. Some Early Access versions of the game had a bug that prevented the "Snatchbeast Benefit" dialogue sequence from playing — which was a problem, since it contained a massive reveal that Kasidora has had Erark work on covert superweapon projects in order to overthrow Celestina if necessary, even after Kasidora's death, as well as the cutscene where Azzorion breaks into Erark's office and discovers the dirt that he uses to blackmail him into revealing the location of one of said covert projects in "Azzorion's Dick Move", which otherwise comes out of the blue without any context.
- Great Big Library of Everything: The Imperium Archives are a data storage facility at the Holy Imperium Palace on Varrialus that holds every shred of knowledge to be found in Prodigium.
- Great Offscreen War: Downplayed, as it wasn't so much a war as a single engagement, but the Battle of Nü Vegas, fought between the Imperium forces and the Solar Space Navy a few years prior, is a major event in the backstory. Nü Vegas was the capital world of the recently-arrived Solars, as well as the largest hub of drug trade, prostitution, and pornography in Prodigium. Naturally, the then-Empress Kasidora couldn't stand such an affront to the Veil and ordered her navy to demolish the whole planet. The Solar fleet rose to defend their colony, but was eventually beaten into submission, then the Imperium firebombed the planet into stone age. Characters directly affected by this event include Kasidora herself (who had to abdicate the throne to placate the resulting unrest), the Captain (who worked as a security chief on Nü Vegas at the time), and General Blythe (who commanded the Solar Navy and nearly died in the Battle, and deserted when the rest of the fleet surrendered).
- Harem Genre: The whole premise of the plot is you, as the Captain, flying around the galaxy to recruit (and shag) hot Action Girls. The haremness is actually lampshaded after the Captain's first fling with Dr. Lily, when he wonders whether it's okay to for him to be screwing around when he is technically "a thing" with DEMI. Of course, both ladies assure him that they don't mind.
- H-Game: Your reward for recruiting a waifu is a short explicit cutscene, and as she levels up, you can purchase additional explicit snippets featuring her and watch them at any time while aboard the Mary Celeste. That said, almost all of the explicit content in this game is skippable.
- Humans Are Not the Dominant Species: The Solars, being just recent arrivals in Prodigium (with the current generation being grandchildren of the first "colonists"), are estimated to comprise about 0.01% of the total galactic population and are therefore considered a minority.
- Humans Are Warriors: Lily's bio mentions that all third-generation Solars in Prodigium must serve in the military upon coming of age, meaning that all adult Solars, regardless of sex, are trained soldiers.
- Humans by Any Other Name: The human residents of Prodigium are all descended from the inmates of two Prison Ships, named Gulag III and Gulag IV, that got sucked into a black hole in the Milky Way and found themselves in the Griffin Nebula instead. They are referred as "Solars" by the natives, due to them originating from the Sol system.
- Interface Spoiler: Even though both Erark and Fortune say that Sova is your final team member, the fact that the waifu selection screen still has four vacant lots can clue you in that your recruitment drive is not over yet. And anyone who has followed the Kickstarter campaign will know that these missing waifus are Fortune herself, the Huntress, Elizabeth Blythe, and Fow-Chan (the devs' digital mascot).
- Internal Reveal:
- Act 2 culminates with Lord Azzorion admitting in front of Taron and the Captain that the Imperium and the Veil are just tools for him and the other senu to control the rest of the galaxy — something that all but the least attentive players have long figured out from the earlier cutscenes and Codex entries.
- Act 4 has several:
- Blythe learns that Erark was the Mysterious Backer for the Mary Celeste crew when Erark admits it to her as part of his Evil Gloating when he pulls a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on her.
- The Mary Celeste crew find out that Erark was also secretly the backer for the Requital.
- Celestina and the rest of the galaxy find out from Erark that the Mary Celeste crew were responsible for killing Lord Azzorion, resulting in the Captain and his crew becoming the Imperium's most wanted.
- Killer Robot: The "Fuccbotts" are an armada of insane, sex-obsessed robots that prowl the edges of the Imperium space and wipe out entire fleets while trying to "mate" with them. While the Imperium downplays their danger, organics are often terrified to even think of them.
- La Résistance: There are at least three factions attempting (without much success) to resist the Imperium: the pirate Dread Fleet under Killision had exclusively targeted imperial ships and worlds until she was deposed by Tibold; the Requital under General Blythe are a band of Solar fleet veterans who survived the Battle of Nü Vegas and refused to bend the knee; and, finally, there is Senator Erark's conspiracy involving Fortune and the Captain.
- Lethal Negligence: When the Imperium scientists had first discovered that the tectonically unstable planet of Vannera was about to blow itself to pieces, the then-Empress Kasidora ignored their report instead of ordering an evacuation of the native sentient species, condemning the latter to extinction.
- Limit Break: In ground combat, units gain Momentum points whenever they use basic attacks or take damage. Four of these can be spent to unleash a powerful (and unique per unit) Ultimate ability, of which Mantics have one each, while waifus have two.
- A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...: It's set in the Prodigium Galaxy, a "mysterious galaxy tucked firmly away in the asshole of the universe". But it does have human residents who got sent there by an Unrealistic Black Hole.
- Lore Codex: Just like the BioWare games that inspired it (first and foremost Mass Effect), the game features an expansive Codex that is populated with entries about characters, places, and historical events that get brought up in the dialogue and story. Owing to the game's irreverent nature, however, there is also quite a lot of silliness mixed in, such as a Codex entry on the Codex itself:It's what you're reading, idiot.
- Loyalty Mission: Very late in the game, if a waifu's Devotion level is 30 or higher, she will contact the Captain about a personal mission to resolve some long-standing issue from her past, e.g. DEMI's search for her final firmware patch or Lily's mission to rescue "Mantic Zero", the first Manticore she has ever created, from the Requital. Completing the mission ensures the waifu's complete dedication to the Captain and to the Revolution, as well as unlocking an extra long explicit sequence with her.
- Mind Control: One of the main tool the Senu use to dominate the rest of Prodigium is their ability to mind-control every other species (except Lanncunians) — in fact, this is the reason why the Imperial Senate exists: to give the Senu (who are very few in number) concentrated access to influential individuals of every species, who then carry out their will on their respective homeworlds. The Senu are also forbidden by tradition to reveal their Psychic Powers to other species, with only the current Executor of the Veil being aware of their true extent at any time.
- Murder by Inaction: More like "genocide by inaction" in the case of the Imperium and the Vanerran species. Vanerra is an extremely tectonically unstable planet, and the Imperium scientists knew that its largest supervolcano Mount Shikaka was due to erupt soon, dooming all life on the planet. However, they sat on that knowledge until it did erupt, and then the Imperium Navy blockaded the planet, preventing escape or outside relief, which effectively wiped out the vast majority of the Vanerrans. And even after that, they had delayed their ruling to declare the Vanerran survivors' rights to live and thrive... long enough to allow the Vanerrans' fledgling colonies to stall and fail while they waited, as pirates and slavers prayed on them and desperation set in with the population. By the time the ruling went through, it served its purpose as a PR stunt to establish the leaders as "merciful" and accomplishing their intended purpose of Vanerrans now being too spread out, socially devastated and few in number to viably sustain their population.
- Murder, Inc.: The BountyHelper service is ostensibly an app for hiring Bounty Hunters, but since it also serves private citizens, anyone can just put a bounty on anyone else's head, effectively making it one giant assassination marketplace.
- Mushroom Samba: The entire species of the Lanncunians (whom Senator Erark represents) seems to have gained sentience from consuming mind-expanding mushrooms native to their planet. The same mushrooms are theorized to have made them all Immune to Mind Control.
- No Fourth Wall: Both the Captain and DEMI (and, to a lesser degree, other members of their crew) are perfectly aware that they are the main characters in a sci-fi porn game, and while they never directly address the player, they do frequently lampshade story developments from a character's point of view. This awareness diminishes, however, the further away from Mary Celeste you go, with the Requital and the Imperium court intermissions maintaining the fourth wall integrity throughout.
- Non-Lethal K.O.: A Mantic or a waifu who falls in ground combat will be just fine as soon as the battle is over.
- Oh, Crap!: The Captain and the Huntress share this reaction in Act 4 when they discover the planet they've crash-landed on is the Fuccbott homeworld.
- Order Versus Chaos: The story already has shades of this:
- The Senu and the Coven of Nine are the most extreme form of order given their mind control powers and absolute dedication to abstinence for the purpose of keeping said powers — at the expense of anyone and everyone in the galaxy.
- The Imperium is the lighter side of the order dynamic, being extremely repressive and willing to condemn entire species to extinction in the name of their preferred style of rule. Not everyone involved agrees, and in recent years, the senate has tried to push for more concern for the citizens.
- The soft side of chaos would be the Player Character and his crew, actively trying to overthrow the current government of an entire galaxy but not willing to drive people extinct in the process or to murder practically everyone to satisfy their own carnal needs.
- On the hard chaos side, you have the Fuccbotts, a loose conglomerate of rogue AIs with a very nasty virus who will fuck anything they encounter to death. As expected from the Chaos side of the equation, they have no apparent self-control and only a very loose sense of organization mixed with a drive to mate with reckless abandon. It's so severe they'll literally throw themselves at EMP fields with fervor for the faint chance of success.
- Point-and-Click Map: The space travel controls are one giant homage to Mass Effect: you are given an overview of the whole galaxy, where you first click on the nebula, then on the star system that you want to visit to instantly go there. Within systems, you navigate the ship with WASD keys, scanning nearby planets for anomalies and landing for short combat encounters and side quests.
- Polluted Wasteland: The core reactor around which Nü Vegas had been built has begun to leak since the planet was abandoned, turning the surrounding areas into irradiated wastelands.
- Portal Network: Individual star systems of the Imperium are connected by warp gates that allow almost-instantaneous travel between them.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The crew of Mary Celeste so far consists of a washed-out, sex-and-drugs-fueled Ace Pilot, an illegal AI converted into a Sexbot, a bioweapon engineer on the run from her former employer, an outcast from a dying species, a pirate captain whose crew mutinied against her, and a space elf cast out by her species for daring to suggest mingling with other races, a technology-obsessed Cat Girl whose home planet is stuck in the stone age, and a Rebellious Princess who despises her own status and obligations.
- The Remnant: General Blythe's Requital are a group of Solar military personnel who refused to lay down their arms after the Battle of Nü Vegas and went rogue to continue the fight against the Imperium. So far, they've had more success in killing their fellow Solars sent to bring them in than in seriously damaging the Imperium, however.
- Replay Mode: The Archives datapad in the Captain's Quarters lets the player watch any past story cutscene or dialogue sequence again.
- Scoundrel Code: Killi insists that all Space Pirates operate under a strict code... but DEMI is quick to point out that there are 46 different variants of "the pirate code" among the 46 major pirate fleets of the Dragon Nebula.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In Act 4, the Coven of Nine (now the Coven of Eight following Azzorion's death) abandon Empress Celestina during the greatest crisis the Imperium has ever faced. Celestina depressingly notes that the rest of the Coven were Kasidora's yes-men. After Blythe's superweapon traps Kasidora and the Imperium Senate on the Imperium's capital world underneath a bukakke blockade, the Coven wrongly assume Celestina orchestrated the Requital's attack (since it happened mere moments before Kasidora and the senate were about to impeach her) and go into hiding out of fear they'll be targeted next, leaving her to manage the crisis alone.
- Shoot 'Em Up: The space combat missions are very much a Bullet Hell affair, with enemy ships and missiles coming at the Captain's F3N1X from all sides. Oh, and you have to weave between free-floating asteroids the whole time, too.
- Shmuck Bait: One of the anomalies the Mary Celeste can investigate is the Kloi's off-world space navy station. It's described as basically the refueling, take-off-and-landing point of every single ship in the kloi's expansive fleet, and is a short flight from their heavily-armed, staffed, and highly developed homeworld. You can choose to investigate it, especially prominent after the end of Ela's recruitment when you've humiliated the entire kloi government and species and are now being viciously hunted down, even in violation of their agreement with the Imperium to never perform any more interstellar military operations. Subverted when the game prevents you from doing so, saying that it's a really bad idea.
- Space Pirates: These are a constant plague in the Prodigium, especially around the rich Imperium-controlled coreworlds of the Dragon Nebula, with the largest group being the Dread Fleet under Dread Lord Tibold. At the start of the game, the Captain and DEMI moonlight as pirate hunters to keep them away from densely-populated worlds.
- Standard Evil Empire Hierarchy: The Imperium faction fits the model rather nicely. The Emperor is, de jure, Empress Celestina but de facto, Lady Kasidora, who, despite having abdicated in favor of Celestina, now rules vicariously through her, with everyone important still reporting to her, rather than the titular Empress. The only one actually loyal to the latter is the Right Hand or the Executor of the Veil, a.k.a. Senator Erark. The General is the morally-upright but oft-mind-controlled Admiral Maeyomodo, while the Security Chief is Lord Azzorion, who usually gets his hands dirty in matters that are too sensitive to involve either Empress.
- Summon Bigger Fish: After tracking down the final piece of Gornogoth's Treasure Map, the Captain discovers that Tibold has beaten him to it and is protected by the entire Dread Fleet. So he has Fortune fake a distress signal to draw in The Dreaded Fuccbotts, who proceed to lay waste to the tightly-clustered pirates, while the Captain and Killi hop into the F3N1X to pursue Tibold's new flagship through the ensuing chaos. They manage to snatch the final piece of the map and get out just before Tibold's ship is blown to smithereens by the rampaging Fuccbotts.
- Take That!:
- The first trailer released jokingly claims that the game will have "three differently colored endings" — a dig at the controversial ending of Mass Effect 3.
- Another at the end of the trailer, directed towards the infamous "Do you guys not have phones?" line from the disastrous Diablo Immortal reveal.
- The Captain: What's wrong? Don't you guys have Steams?
- One of the easier foes faced in the game, a beanie-obsessed lobster-alien named Dim Fool, is a clear jab at the controversial internet personality Tim Pool, due to his short and fruitless legal battle over the right for the name "Subverse".
- Another sidequest deals with "Sandy Glitchford", who is a parody of Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford, and involves finding some questionable pornography attached to company documents
, as well as Sandy shilling one of his games ("Solars: Colonial Marines") via promoting its porn.
- Teleporting Keycard Squad: Both in space and in ground combat, enemies come in multiple waves, with the mission boss usually arriving in the final one. This can be particularly unpleasant during ground combat, where, if your units are spread out, enemies can teleport in-between them, effectively splitting your party. At least in space, they have the decency to approach you from the edges of the map (for whatever reason).
- This Loser Is You: The game made its opinion of its Featureless Protagonist clear in the very first Kickstarter teaser trailer:Announcer: In a universe full of alien dickheads... you are a loser of no significance.
The Captain: That's... a bit harsh, mate. - Translator Microbes: Aliens Speaking English is explicitly Hand Waved by the Codex by having them implanted with Universal Translator chips.
- Turn-Based Combat: The ground combat missions take place in turns on an isometric square grid, with units acting in order of a Visual Initiative Queue. Typically, a unit can move up to its movement speed, then perform an action (attack, defend, or use a special ability), but many have passive special abilities that mix that up (such as Dromstik, who can disengage and defend after scoring a kill).
- Unrealistic Black Hole: The humans in this setting are descended from prisoners whose ships were sucked through a black hole.
- The Unreveal: Upon finding Gornagoth the Snucklefucker's fabled treasure, the Captain finally confronts Killi about her mentor's moniker. After several warnings, she whispers the explanation in his ear, which is apparently too disturbing even to the Cap, but which the player never hears.
- The Virus: The Fuccbotts seem to be driven by a computer virus that can infect any artificially intelligent platform, constantly bolstering their armada. Kasidora's Great AI Purge a few years back seems to be the main reason why they still remain confined to the fringes of the Imperium space.
- Visual Novel: Most of the story is presented in the VN style, with fully-voiced (if not lip-synced) 3D characters in the upper two-thirds of the screen and the dialogue text on the bottom. There is no Story Branching, however, at least not in Act I, making it more of a Kinetic Novel.
- We Will Spend Credits in the Future: Credits are the primary currency used by civilized species of Prodigium.
- Who Writes This Crap?!: During the Huntress' third space battle, she manages to hack the Captain's F3N1X to invert its movement controls. The Captain immediately demands to know who thought that randomly throwing this status effect in was creative game design, to which the Huntress just quips, "It's called a 'deadline'!"
