March 4, 2024 ; Catergory: essays
NSO is a game best enjoyed blind, so if you haven’t played the game already, I highly suggest you try it first before reading my take on it. It’s short (around 3 hours per playthrough) and cheap. Do your research first before playing as there are several elements that may be disturbing to some players.
Needy Streamer Overdose (NSO) is a game where you (playing as ‘P-chan’) are tasked by your mentally ill girlfriend ‘Ame’ to plan out her entire life for her (on account of the fact that she is, in her own words, “too stupid”) in order to help her achieve her goal of internet streamer stardom. The premise, on the face of it, is both off-putting and seems ripe for a male-saviour-esque plot where you are able to fix your girlfriend on her behalf. However I want to argue that NSO is instead a deconstruction of this trope - that it seeks to frame the gameplay experience through this lens and use it to ultimately critique this mindset. In exploring how exactly NSO achieves this, I’ll first run through how the game works, interspliced with how my own first playthrough went before discussing how the final true ending recontextualises what came before it.
Upon starting the game, the objective is made clear - get Ame to 1,000,000 followers in 30 days. You do so by choosing what she does each day, similar to other social sims such as Princess Maker and Tokimeki Memorial. The challenge comes from balancing her 3 stats: ‘stress’, ‘affection’, and ‘mental darkness’. All will cause issues if too high and all but stress will cause issues if fully depleted. Streaming - the main way you get followers - will almost always increase your stress and mental darkness, so the main gameplay loop focuses on being able to balance the downsides of streaming well enough to accumulate followers. So, what are the best ways to decrease stress and mental darkness?
There are several minor ways to decrease both by small amounts - but if you want to get rid of a chunk at once the best options are to either sleep during the day or, apparently even more effective, tell her to have sex with you. Yes, you heard me right. According to the text of the game, the best way to help a girl with her mental illness is to tell her to have sex with you. There is an ending that is caused by getting her mental darkness to 0 and the quickest way to achieve this in game is to have sex with her repeatedly until she is ‘better’. I don’t think I need to explain why this is incredibly gross and misogynistic. There is a mechanic in place to make sure you don’t ‘abuse’ the benefits of sex - which is that there is a hard limit on the number of times you can have it. However it’s not because she refuses you - she will always oblige since you’re in control of her life - but because she ‘gets addicted to sex’. It’s framed as her problem for wanting sex too much, and not the fact that you’re actually the one constantly demanding it from her.
There is an extra punishment for having sex from a gameplay perspective - it skyrocket’s Ame’s affection. Should it hit its maximum, she becomes totally infatuated with you and you get a ‘game over’. Obviously this gets in the way of getting 1,000,000 followers so we want to avoid it. How do we lower affection? Well, ignoring how morally dubious doing things to intentionally make her like you less is (the game certainly doesn’t seem to care much), we have two main options: make her go on dates with random men, or make her do ‘sexy streams’ to her online audience. Once more I believe the negative implications in dictating that she do these things I hope are obvious.
So taking all this in, the ‘optimised’ playthrough of NSO (and how I ended up first attempting it) may look something like this: we want to alternate bursts of streams (since consecutive streams give follower bonuses) with ‘rest days’ decreasing our stats to manageable levels. This means making her stream until she’s at her breaking point in terms of stress before sending her off to see other men and fucking her afterwards (or just making her sleep all the time). If done properly, you’ll get your 1,000,000 in time for the end of the game. Well done! You’ve done what was asked of you - but something doesn’t seem right. A private tweet from Ame states that her happiness was bland and that streaming for her fans was a drag, before the game tells you that “An ordinary happiness may not have been what she wished for”. In fact, it seems that whatever ending you get, Ame isn’t truly happy or satisfied (or actively worse in many endings). What’s going on? You did what was asked after all but apparently it isn’t enough?
In order to get the true ending, you first need to get all other endings. That means trying every conceivable way to make things work for Ame. No matter what you do though nothing does the job and often you make things irreparably worse by causing her immense psychological and physical pain (several endings require overstressing her or even causing her to self harm). Should you choose to start up another run after getting all other endings, Ame steps in and finally takes control of her own life. She decides what she wants to do. She chooses options she finds optimal. And by the end, she decides to take the future into her own hands and leaves you. The game clearly believes this to be the best outcome, since it is the canonical true ending. Clearly the main message is that you alone cannot be the one to ‘fix’ her - seen in the contrast between your failures and her success but I believe there’s more to it than that.
So far we haven’t really talked much about P-chan, the main protagonist. While on the surface P-chan may not seem to have much of a personality or character, its important to note that as the protagonist, its implicitly the case that we see the world through P-chan’s perspective. We are meant to be him after all. If that is the case then the fact we undertake the mission at all says a lot about P-chan, that he believes he can control Ame into happiness. The options we are given and the relative effects they have then, in my view, shouldn’t be taken as the only available options or the accurate effects respectively but rather P-chan’s view on what he ought to do and what he thinks will be best for her. Sex is a great tool to help her because P-chan believes it to be. In essence then, the lens through which the game is filtered through is exactly meant to mirror the one that exists in the minds of misogynistic men with saviour complexes. One that boils down the complexities of a woman down to her affection towards you, her stress and her mental state. One you can fuck and romance into getting better.
The game however doesn’t agree with this lens of analysis. As stated above, when made to operate under the guise of the male saviour you literally cannot do anything to truly fix her. All you do is hurt her with your control over her life. This, ultimately, is what the game has to say. Not only that to be saved requires one to save themselves, but that those who believe they can engineer women towards a more amicable state will not only be misguided in what they think is helpful in the first place but also actively be a harmful presence in the lives of the women around them.
I hope now you can see where I come from when I say that NSO is a smart deconstruction of saviour mindsets. That isn’t to say it still doesn’t have its problems. Certain aspects remain problematic in ways even after the true ending. The fact that the true ending requires both 15-20 hours of work and for you to do some truly immoral things to Ame may feel horribly perverse to force a player to do (for discussion on this see my extra essay here: Needy Streamer Overload: How much can you expect a player to see?). Despite this I find it a brilliant piece of art - one of the best at conveying the weaknesses of saviour mindsets. I didn’t talk about it here, but the utterly insane and uneasy vibe of the moment to moment gameplay is one of the most effective ways a game had instilled a feeling of dubious morality into what I was doing - which works even better in making a player doubt the efficacy and ethics of what they are asked to do. Definitely one of my favourite games of recent memory.