A review of “Camp Buddy,” a crowd-funded gay erogame

About a week ago, when it looked like the site would soon be gone for good, @bladeofcreation started a thread entitled “I’m Ready to Speak My Truth,” and admitted actually liking Redfall.

A brave thing to admit, we can all agree.

In the same spirit, I made a confession of my own:

As long as we’re making confessions, some years ago I played a kickstarted erotic BL/gay-themed visual novel game called Camp Buddy, and early last year I PM’ed ZP for permission to post a blog about it on here (what with all the explicit fucking in it). I got permission (as long as I didn’t post explicit images or videos), but never got around to writing it.

I know, I know. It’s not actually as embarrassing as enjoying Redfall. But it’s, like, a little bit embarrassing. And like all good deathbed confessions, I got to share the embarrassing thing without having to suffer any real consequences for it.

Then, of course, GB went indie. Thank fucking God. But I also ended up outsmarting myself a little, because now I’d made my vaguely embarrassing confession about an abandoned blog project, and now I felt obliged to actually go through with it! Well, at least @bladeofcreation and @tartyron told me I had to, so you can also partially blame them for this.

All kidding aside, my original inspiration to write this thing actually came from our own fearless community leader, the inestimable @zombiepie. ZP had written a blog on a Persona-like knockoff game called Eternights in early January 2024. In that blog, ZP noted that

if you elect to make your protagonist homosexual, [your friend] Chani still has your back … there’s no homophobia or racist bone in anyone to speak of. I get that’s not even the slightest bit realistic, but it was a breath of fresh air that a game let me be gay or straight and not have that romantic journey defined by trauma or tragedy. It’s a romantic “power fantasy,” yes, but I like it all the same.

Being a gay man myself, that was nice to hear, and got me to thinking about other games I’d played that have some kind of gay romance option. It shouldn’t be any great surprise that I couldn’t think of many. The ones that came to mind were Dream Daddy, Stardew Valley, Mass Effect, Hades. There are others out there if one goes looking, but these were the ones I had personal experience with.

To be fair, I’d never looked all that hard. Generally speaking, the games I’m most interested in playing tend to be action-focused titles like the Souls games, Monster Hunter, RE4; i.e., games that just aren’t all that focused on story generally—or romance specifically—to begin with. I’m primarily interested in compelling gameplay, and if a game does happen to have a good story as well—something like God of War Ragnarök or Persona 5 Royal—I tend to view it as more of bonus than as the thing I’m primarily playing the game for. Classic-style FF-esque JRPGs are about the most story-focused games that I regularly engage with. Anyway, it’s fair to say that “gameplay-light” genres like visual novels, dating sims, and “walking simulators” generally just aren’t my bag, with a few rare exceptions (e.g., The Stanley Parable).

But in addition to the four games I’ve just named, one other came to mind: Camp Buddy. First released in 2018, if memory serves it was in late 2019 or early 2020 before it came to my attention (on Twitter, IIRC, where it was getting some positive buzz). It was a Patreon-funded dating sim/erogame developed by a Filipino guy who had previously worked for a group that did fan localizations of Japanese yaoi eroge. It had been developed in English for a western audience (including voicework), while maintaining a fairly Japanese aesthetic (not to mention mostly Japanese character names).

I was somewhat intrigued. After Dream Daddy had snuck onto GB’s top ten list in 2017—amidst much drama and acrimony (sigh)—I had picked it up out of… I dunno… LGBT solidarity, I guess, even though it’s not the type of game I normally go for. I played it, and liked it a bit more than I expected, though it still didn’t blow me away. But it made me think: hmm, maybe the reason I’ve never been much into romance in games is simply that the vast majority of those romances are hetero and, hence, not really for me. So in the end, I thought, “Fuck it, sure, I’ll try the kickstarted pervy gay visual novel. Maybe the second time is the charm for gay visual novels.”

The audio problem

It’s probably worth noting that my very first experience with the game was colored by a fairly serious QA problem: the sound levels were all over the place.

The volume on the music vs the effects vs the voice of character A vs the voice of character B were often drastically different. It drove home the fact that this was an amateur team putting out their first game. The problem was obvious enough that I remember doing a search on whether there was some sort of fix for it, and came across some post or other noting that it was a known issue and that the devs were working on it. At that point, I put the game down and waited for a fix.

I had to go searching to find it for this blog, but it appears that the issue was fixed in a major May 2020 patch:

Audio Normalization

After much hard work, the Audio Normalization of Camp Buddy has been fully completed and implemented into game! Thanks to our Audio Engineer, Kevpho, and his work, all scenes in Camp Buddy, along with sprite voice cues, background music, and sound effects, have been remastered for the best listening experience while playing!

I distinctly remember that I actually started to seriously make my way through the game shortly after this patch hit. So apparently it’s been almost exactly five years.

Game mechanics

I have so little experience with the visual novel-type format that I really don’t know what’s standard and what isn’t. So I suppose I’ll start with an explanation of how the “gameplay”, such as it is, works on this thing.

First, let’s take a look at the actual controls. See the below screenshot.

From left, the first button toggles “Autoplay”, which advances automatically with spoken dialogue. It’s nice to be able to just sit back and let the story happen without needing to manually advance. It’s not a toggle option I’m used to having, but I remember appreciating it for Persona 5.

The second button hides the dialogue window so you can see the whole drawing.

The third button fast-forwards. Importantly, there are options you can toggle on/off that let this button apply only to scenes you haven’t yet viewed before. That really matters if you decide to play alternative “routes”, since it will automatically stop for genuinely new scenes while speeding past the stuff you’ve already seen.

The fourth button is your standard chat log, so that you can revisit dialogue you accidentally sped past.

Finally, the fifth button saves (there are exactly 48 save slots), and the sixth button leads to a host of settings options.

With controls sorted, let’s move on to basic game flow.

The premise is that you’re playing a guy named Keitaro, who’s attending a summer camp for the first time with his best friend, Hiro. The game started out with four possible love interests, and, by the time I played it, had been expanded to include a fifth.

There are a total of 32 in-game “days”, and the first 8 are spent determining who your love interest will be. This is done via a series of often-innocuous-seeming choices, each of which awards a point toward one love interest or another.

At the end of the first 8 days, whichever love interest has amassed the most “points” determines the “route” you’re on for the remainder of the game. To quickly introduce the possible choices:

Hiro Akiba, as previously mentioned, is Keitaro’s canonical best friend. His defining qualities are his high energy and his obsession with food and cooking.

Hunter Springfield is quiet, withdrawn, shy, with a passion for art and reading.

Yoichi Yukimura is the stereotypical “bad boy”, somewhat of a delinquent and a bully.

Natsumi Hamasaki might be called a goody-two-shoes, a rule-follower who aspires to be a dependable camp leader.

Finally, Taiga Akatora is the nominal antagonist, a bit of a dick who seems (at least at first) to delight in causing Keitaro trouble. He also has a gang of hangers-on who defer to his every word.

So who did I pick on my first play? No contest, really. I’ll take the shy, quiet guy sitting in corner reading a book or doing a drawing every time. So it was Hunter by a mile.

At this point, you might be wondering what the “gameplay” consists of after you’re locked into one route or another. And the answer is: not much.

First, there continue to be dialogue choices with hidden point values assigned to them. Besides your love interest’s immediate reactions to those dialogue choices, there are few consequences except for fairly extreme circumstances.

If you really, really fuck it up, and continually choose dialogue options that your love interest hates, then there will be a scene midway through the game in which they “cheat” on you and have sex with one of the other characters. On the other hand, if you continually pick the best possible option, you unlock an extra scene at the very end of the game which suggests that your relationship has lasted beyond your month at summer camp. Either of these outcomes, to my estimation, is unlikely without following a guide.

Second, there is a “Journal writing minigame” between story beats that essentially has you moving scrabble letters around to answer quiz questions about the plot. This is skippable, and the only reward you get is tokens toward unlocking pics/scenes in the game’s “gallery”. It’s a fairly brain-dead minigame and mostly asks you to remember character names.

Finally, there is a “Foreplay minigame” prior to some of the sex scenes which is not skippable. Frankly, it’s just not all that interesting. You’re able to do five actions (pinch, kiss, lick, rub, bite) on five parts of the body (nipples, neck, abs, crotch, butt). Each character has pre-assigned values of stuff they like and don’t like, and once you figure it out, it’s play-by-numbers. The character avatars lose clothes and get more aroused as it goes on, until the actual animated sex scene starts.

Finally, a few more structural things about the story. As previously mentioned, the first 8 days are the same every time, though you can make different dialogue choices (good thing you can speed past it in subsequent plays). While I did not fully play through all the other routes, I did enough to discover that the middle portions after day 8 are the most different, as they focus the most heavily on your love interest's individual story. The latter days of all of them seem to end with the same overarching events: the camp is about to go broke, everyone works to fund-raise for it, and eventually a parent of one of the campers, Mr. money bags, shows up and saves the day. There are also other events (like a trip to the beach) that happen on all routes, but the details change depending on who you're with.

General thoughts on the story, visuals, music

Generally speaking, I liked the story. Perhaps I am just a bit starved for light and bubbly LGBT-themed stories that aren’t infused with tragedy.

Rather than going into blow-by-blow specifics about the story, let's try this. There’s a bit in an interview of Armie Hammer about Call Me by Your Name that’s stuck with me since that movie came out (let’s forget Hammer’s subsequently revealed shortcomings, for the moment):

Films that have gay characters or gay oriented themes, there’s often a tragedy element to them.

Yeah . . .

Often, someone’s dying, or has a fatal illness, or they can’t come out. But this film is mainly just a romance between these two characters. Was that something that appealed to you?

I loved that about the story. I loved that the only antagonist in this film is time. Because their time will end and they know it, and that’s it. No one gets sick; no one gets beaten up by rednecks. No one gets rejected by their family; no one gets rejected by their friends; no one has to come out and then suffer the consequences. It’s a beautiful story of two people who fall in love and that’s it. And I think that’s why a broad spectrum of people really can relate to it, because everybody’s felt feelings of infatuation for somebody else—like, “Oh my God, their leg just touched mine, holy ****.” Everyone can recognize that and the fact that we—[director] Luca [Guadagnino]—packaged it in a way that makes it incredibly accessible for anybody to show people that love is love is love is love.

(Source)

I think that’s a good summation of the strength of Camp Buddy, too. Ultimately it is a story largely devoid of gay tragedy tropes that sets you loose in a summer camp in which pretty much everyone is queer and that fact is simply taken for granted. And one of the mostly-unspoken truths about being gay is that it’s just a little harder to meet that special someone, because 90% of the prospective dating pool just doesn’t lean that way. It is what it is, and has to be accepted, and yet that doesn’t make it suck any less. So it’s inherently a relief to be set loose in a playground in which you don’t even have to think about that.

And boy is the game ever self-aware about what it’s doing and what it is. My favorite example of this is a female camp counselor named Yuri (ironic name, right? Right?) who is constantly fangirling out about all the cute boys being all gay for each other. It’s ridiculous and makes me smile.

Beyond that, I’d say all the art is pretty good. I’ve posted plenty of screenshots, so you can judge for yourself. And the music, while not spectacular, does its job in contributing to a light and upbeat mood through most of its runtime. The voice acting is also perfectly serviceable. It does the thing that a lot of games do, which is to fully voice a selection of the more important scenes, while recycling one-word answers and affirmative or negative grunts for some of the more mundane ones. And while there are serious moments in it (insecurity, thy name is adolescent male), this is largely an escapist romantic fantasy and not a game seeking to be “gritty” and/or “realistic”.

It's been five years, so I honestly can’t tell you for sure if I ever actually cried in the middle of all this. Probably I at least got a little misty-eyed. I’m not much of a crier for videogame stories, but it did have its moments.

The age problem

But while I would say that I enjoyed my time with this story and characters overall, there is a major Problem with it that is too obvious to ignore: this is an erogame about characters who don’t actually appear to be adults, most of the time (I’ll get to that). There is a fundamental tension between the stories about young love that the creator(s) actually want to tell versus the pervy demands of making an erogame, which demands adults. It’s a tension that is baked into the game at a fundamental level and cannot truly be resolved, such that the whole thing ends up feeling incongruous on multiple levels. But how to begin even talking about this?

Maybe it’s best to start with the disclaimer that pops up when you first start the game:

The interesting thing about this warning is that it not only demands that players be 18 years of age, but also insists that all characters depicted in the game are 18.

It’s worth mentioning here that, until quite recently, Japan’s age of consent was only 13, and that this game, while developed for an English-speaking audience, grew out of a Japanese tradition of erotic games, which are way more of a thing there than they are in the US. Japan also has a tradition of loli and shota (and if you don’t know what those terms refer to, maybe don’t Google them) which are, ahem, somewhat ethically fraught. This isn’t really the place to unpack all of that, but the bottom line is: Camp Buddy clearly seems to want to have its cake and eat it too, in terms of having its characters appear to be younger than its official character profiles claim them to be.

The push and pull of the age problem might be summarized in the following points:

• The game’s disclaimer and official character profiles assert that all characters portrayed are 18 years of age or above.

• In the explicit sex scenes, all characters appear to be 18 years of age or above.

On the other hand:

• The story takes place at a fucking summer camp. How many 18-year-olds do you know who attend summer camp, unless they’re paid staff?

• In the non-sex scenes, the main and romanceable characters often/usually appear to be below 18 years of age.

• Three of the six main characters (1 main character + 5 romanceable characters) do not have any pubic hair. I mean, sure, maybe they’re shaving it, but really?

Here’s where it’s actually important for me to show you a (censored!) screencap of Hunter at the start of one of the sex scenes versus what he looks like in most of the dialogue scenes.

As you can see, these two drawings are rather different. The top shot could easily be taken to be 18, and for the bottom one I wouldn’t blink if someone told me he was supposed to be 13.

It’s worth noting, as well, that the differences between most of the story versus the explicit sex scenes go beyond seeming physical/age differences. The whole tone of the dialogue and narration changes, from a light and happy romance to one of, if you’ll forgive the phrase, hardcore ass-pounding erotica, dirty as can be (I won't post examples, because that would not be Brand Safe®). And maybe I’m just more of a prude than I realize, but between the sudden tonal shift and the physical differences from drawing to drawing, the sex scenes just come off as weird, or, more fundamentally, incongruous with the rest of the light and cutesy story.

And that is the core problem of this game that I think cannot really be resolved. On the one hand, there is nothing wrong with a game telling a story about young gay love blossoming at a summer camp, absent the usual tragedy tropes. But it becomes a problem when you also want to make it porn, anime or not. I get that the porn aspect is part of the draw for at least some portion of the audience. But I found myself wishing for a version of the game that left that aspect out. I mean, I’m not sure if you guys know this, but there’s lots of porn on the internet. I don’t really need more of it in my video games, especially if it’s going to fundamentally clash with the story its creator(s) actually seem to want to tell.

Conclusion

So, after all of that, what the hell am I supposed to say as a “final verdict” on Camp Buddy? It is, as I already alluded to, kinda fraught.

Unfortunately, it is simply not a game that I can recommend without serious caveats. The ambiguous age of the characters is not an issue that can be casually waved aside. At times I felt like a pedophile while I was playing it (it didn’t help that I’d picked Hunter as my love interest based on his personality, who also happened to be physically the smallest and youngest-looking). Hell, the “summer camp” setting might even be considered particularly tone-deaf considering that somewhere in the realm of 100,000 sexual abuse claims have been filed against the Boy Scouts of America. And, not gonna lie, a game like this is not doing any favors for a minority which many conservatives already view as inherently pedophilic (worth noting: I have an aunt who thinks this way).

…

And yet. This is also not a gaming experience without merit, especially for LGBT players who are starved for non-misery-core LGBT stories. In general, society is a little too afraid of portrayals of young gay romance. I wish there were more games like this—sweet stories that are well-produced, well-drawn, well-acted—just without the porn. Porn is easy and plentiful. This game, on the other hand, obviously had a lot of love poured into it, and probably deserves a larger audience than the one it has restricted itself to with its XXX content. C’est la vie, I guess. Though, on the bright side, FWIW, there are, in fact, YouTube plays of Camp Buddy out there that cut out the sexy-time portions for all the obvious reasons.

Hmm, welp. That turned into a more “serious” blog than what I’d originally intended, which was more of a jokey sort of thing. Sorry?

Anyway, hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading. If nothing else, this is not the usual fare that appears on these forums; it might be the first time an 18+ gay erotic game has ever been discussed on Giant Bomb at any length (if at all). So at least it’s got novelty going for it. Feel free to ask questions, if you dare.

Finally, a fun and dumb side note: there is a Fandom wiki for this game. I guess it’s actually Brand Safe®?