Something so intricately deranged could never be AI slop.

The 21st century to date has been a procession of situations in which you’re forced to explain the readily explicable. Nothing is true, no lessons were learned, nothing can be taken for granted; thinking adults in 2025 are occasionally forced to argue with fellow travelers about such fundamentally obvious things as “you should have a baseline level of care for other people” and “bleach is not medicine.” Anyone who feels angry and insane right now is just paying sufficient attention.

That same disconnect lies at the heart of the furor over generative AI as a creative tool. On one side, an army of plagiarism robots that burn forests and drink the sea to create infinite pages from Thomas Kinkade’s How to Draw Manga; on the other, anyone who understands the value of human expression, emphasis on the human. Offshoring any part of your creative mind or soul to glorified autocorrect is an act of unsolicited surrender. You’ve volunteered for erosion. There’s less of you now, whether you acknowledge that or not.

If there’s one silver nugget in this septic tank, it’s the potential for a new appreciation of the elemental strangeness of being human. This is a messy, imprecise, unstable existence, and it’s the only game in town. In any form it takes, from disposable kitsch to a great national novel, art is a story we tell one another to try and make life make more sense.

This week, we’re celebrating that. These are games that we appreciate specifically because a large language model could never have produced them: they’re too weird, too horny, too specific. In an age where the entirety of pop culture is threatening to collapse into thin gruel, these are projects with a careful human touch. In 2025, that’s become more valuable than ever before, and worth celebration.

There are parts of Mary Skelter’s premise that are tropey and cliched enough I could see some sad, salivating dork prompting his “vibe coding” software for something similar. What if magical girls were edgy? What if characters from fairy tales and classic lit were sexy? Yeah, we’ve all seen that before. But this DRPG descent into the depths of erotic horror goes far deeper than a couple of its back of the box bullet points. This game isn’t just “horny,” as our themed week boilerplate you just read offers as criteria. It is intricately horny. Mary Skelter is existentially horny, its lore so deeply tangled in throbbing, violent macabre that there’s hardly a single piece not splattered with thematic fluids. It’s awesome. And crucially, human.

Developer Compile Heart and Publisher Idea Factory aren’t known for nuance or subtext. This is the house Hyperdimension Neptunia built; it’s largely all vibes and gags from top to bottom. But Mary Skelter and some of these companies’ other horror-adjacent work feel more interested in digging deeper into things we might not be so proud of. Lust, for example. What if such a mundane, but powerful, loud, and messy part of our lives was shown back to us in a mirror as the antagonist of a story? It’s not pretty, and it might not be fun to think too hard about. But Mary Skelter packages it in a fun, albeit gross, way. It’s an apocalyptic story, one that combines the novelty and hype of magical girl tropes with the darker side, namely loss of self-regulation, that can come with the overpowering natural force of… horny.

An alien entity falls from the sky, mistaken by people on the ground as a shooting star until it lands and embeds itself in the Earth like a seed. The roots spread and corrupt everything they touch, from inorganic mass to people. The surrounding city sinks underground and is enclosed in an otherworldly membrane, pushing survivors to the outskirts as a massive, evil as hell tower forms in the center. The tower is come to be known as The Jail, as corrupted humans soon become puppets that seek out, capture, and bring the uninfected into The Jail’s confines by any means necessary. Trapped humans are tortured on a rigid schedule as The Jail itself moans and writhes in reaction to the categories of violence inflicted on its victims. The tower is alive, it’s violently libidinous, and it has kinks, folks.

Satiating The Jail’s libido is an element extending to the gameplay itself, as this malevolently reproducing alien presence spreading its seed has biologically backfired. Newly born humans evolve upon exposure to The Jail’s blood, obtaining the power to fight back. As a crew of escapees and “Blood Maidens,” you explore The Jail, battle the “Nightmares” inside, and hope to figure out how to defeat this giant, phallic evil once and for all. But in exploring The Jail’s dungeons, your actions appeal to its libido, granting you bonuses such as healing, extra EXP, and more if you satisfy its… cravings. Yuck.

In battle, the Blood Maidens inevitably get splattered in Jail goo (glowing, pink blood). With enough built up the characters can go into Massacre Mode, a temporary, powered-up state as their inner Jail DNA too is stimulated by the violence. But the blood corrupts over time, darkening and risking the transformation will instead be “Blood Skelter,” during which your characters are even stronger than before, but completely uncontrollable. Usually that means a party wipe right in the middle of a dungeon. You can push and risk Blood Skelter more and more, but you can also spend protagonist Jack’s own blood to clean the corruption (his main combat role is a gun connected to the veins in his wrist, which is hard as fuck) due to his immunity. You can also have the Blood Maidens clean each other up by licking (of course) each other, earning combat bonuses but forgoing Massacre. It’s the risk versus reward element many DRPGs play with, combined with the danger of letting hormones take the wheel.

While Mary Skelter’s complicated relationship with sexuality is probably enough for this topic, the developers are also interested in other things, such sci-fi concepts like overwriting memories and the Star Trek teleporter dilemma, and exploring the common structures we expect to see in dungeon-crawling. Mary Skelter 2 is interesting in that it presents what seems like an Alternate Universe scenario, before ultimately circling back and merging with the first game’s world (especially since it literally couples to the original and provides a brand new ending if you play it first). The third game, Mary Skelter Finale, goes absurdly hard in the dungeon crawling area, splitting the large cast of characters into multiple parties that explore different parts of each dungeon separately, unlocking areas piece by piece as you swap between the groups on demand.

There’s simply too much going on in Mary Skelter that is not just niche genre work, but intricately designed and utterly deranged work within a turboniche genre frame. I haven’t even mentioned the job system yet. Generative AI could probably spit out a clean, wobbly little RPG-like landscape with fairy tale characters looking like edgy pastiches of popular anime artists and Disney, but it could never challenge us in the ways something like Mary Skelter does. This is a series made by humans that looks inward and sees something horrible yet unavoidable, and wonders what, if anything, can be done to make it better. The answer is some combination of tenacity, friendship, and self-control, qualities I’d love to see beaten into some of these AI grifters fighting so hard to ruin the few nice things we have left.

Anyway if you like DRPGs, blobbers if you will, read my column here at Skybox. But also play Mary Skelter, if you’re okay with the kind of experience that comes with a Chris Jericho: The Man of 1,004 Holds-sized list of content warnings.