Should You Play He Fucked the Girl Out of Me?

Disclaimer: this game goes into some horrible territory, and I couldn’t rightfully let you read until I give you some trigger warnings: sex work, nonconsensual sex/dubious consent/rape, date rape, sex/nudity, Sissification kink, transphobia, deadnaming, gender dysphoria, age gap, abuse, suicidal ideation, blood.

As someone who was born in the late 90s and grew up alongside the internet, I've seen some horrible stuff online. Although some of it was accidental (being sent links and whatnot), most of the time, it was morbid curiosity that got the best of my teenage brain that was trying to grasp the world and all of its horrors. I thought it was my duty, in some way, shape, or form, to sit down and experience the pain people around the world had: I felt like it was my job to hear them when the rest of humanity turned a blind eye.

Unfortunately, that has caused me to become both overly sensitive and overly detached from many subjects, especially as I grew older. That being said, every now and again, I still jump into the occasional game that promises to give me a new perspective into someone else's life because, if there's anything I've learned when I became an adult is that it's very easy to make assumptions when you've not lived through someone else's experiences. 

Now, I'm not sure I would have ever found out about He Fucked The Girl Out of Me had it not been for X (previously known as Twitter), as I follow a lot of indie devs and caught one of the developer's tweets. In it, she mentioned that she feared that the game would go unseen and would only receive silence in return, so I decided to check it out and also commented to a close friend about it so we could play it together. 

Like I said, I've been drawn to games like these that follow a true story event, although the subject matter does vary. And while it only took us about an hour to get to the ending, I feel like this is the singular time I have ever felt truly horrified by someone's story told as a videogame. I didn't cry or get goosebumps or anything dramatic like that — I just felt stunned, as if my mind couldn't wrap around the fact that I had just gone through something so personal in a stranger's life. 

The game is very simple, played out in a Game Boy style. There aren't any fancy graphics, gameplay mechanics, or sound, and the story doesn't drag on a lot or take you through any ups and downs, but the developer did a fantastic job at making it feel tangible, relatable, and painfully real. In many of the games I have played before (or movies and documentaries that I've watched), they over-dramatise things or make us sit through horrid scenes to really put a point across via superficial shock value. I've always understood where this comes from, as I don't think it's possible to play out a traumatising moment in your life for others in a way that feels satisfactory or impactful enough: it always feels dull and colourless to say things in comparison to how they felt when they happened to you. Unfortunately, this sort of approach has always made it difficult for me to wrap my mind around things, and I think that makes sense because not many of us have ever fully faced true evil in our lives, not really. 

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me takes a different approach: the narrator is down-to-earth and honest. Not only does she choose to directly address that there's a lot she couldn't put into the game, but what she does feels real. There's no dramatisation, and she even makes a point of mentioning it doesn't feel like what you'd expect. The humanisation behind not being able to wrap her mind around your own trauma reaction and being confused about how you're feeling made it that much more relatable, as emotions and responses aren't ever how you expect them — little in life really is how Hollywood presents it, which is basically the majority of our exposure to most extreme scenarios.

The honesty and rawness paired up with the lack of graphic scenes really made it feel like I was listening to a friend tell me their story. I was able to empathise with her struggles and situations much more than I ever have, particularly the ones surrounding transgenderism and sex work: two subjects that are hard to put on paper in a way that really gets to those who haven't experienced it. Yet I came out the other side feeling even a tinge more empathetic and understanding of it all.

The quiet feeling after the game ended is what made me feel so sure that I needed to write an article; even if my friend (and co-worker) reviewed the game, there was a lot I had to say. Namely, if you want to have your best shot at understanding what damage sex work trauma can cause to someone and a bit about how painful it is to be a transgender person, I couldn't recommend this game more. Not only is it short enough to finish within an hour, but it's also completely free: you won't lose anything by playing it, but you'll probably get out the other side feeling different about it all.