Edmund: A Not-Japanese Video Game About Rape

Though I mostly remain imprisoned in the dank, catacomb-like Net Insanity corporate office, my only sustenance coming from whatever scraps my faceless masters deem fit for my wretched excuse for a body, I occasionally get the chance to venture out to other sites on work release. One of those sites is Gamehead, to which I contribute a monthly highlight of the best browser games currently on the Web. Over the course of any given month, I play a wide variety of browser games searching for those that are actually entertaining, but in the process I come across some really horrible stuff, too. A lot of that ends up in Net Insanity's recurring Awful Flash Game Roundup, but every once in a while a game is so abhorrent that it deserves a more in-depth variety of ridicule. Today, that game is Paul Greasley's rape and murder simulator Edmund.

Edmund isn't actually a browser game, but a free downloadable EXE. It was supposedly designed in four weeks for the Adult Game Competition at Tigsource.com, which is to say the Adult and/or Educational Game Competition from Tigsource that was supposed to be an homage to the free-speech bastions of yesteryear like Leisure Suit Larry. Greasley misinterpreted this entirely reputable call for cheeky, pixelated libertines as an excuse to live out his rape fantasies in eight glorious bits.

Aside from being a disturbing chunk of code that puts players in the role of a violent jerk who beats and rapes vulnerable women, Edmund is barely a game at all. When not forcing sex on terrified sprites, either one of the two available characters run through a nearly featureless platforming world doing jack-all. Players either guide the rapist through the mine fields of Vietnam (after gunning down civilians from a helicopter) so he can shoot an enemy soldier at the end and rape one of that soldier's loved ones, or enact a revenge scenario with a different character running through a series of completely pointless screens.

The readme document that comes with Edmund explains that the game was built by one person over the course of four weeks. Judging by the gameplay, three of those weeks went into the mechanics and animations of street rape while the remaining days went into a half-assed attempt to justify the rape scenes with some of the laziest, least game-like level design possible.

I want to be clear that this isn't just a reactionary diatribe against an immoral game. Depictions of rape can still be artistically meaningful, however rare those instances are. But Edmund is not here to shock us, compel us or make a comment about the inherent brutality of society. It's an insultingly bad game that obviously exists for the sole purpose of simulating a vicious crime. Sure, there are scads of murder simulators out there, but the context is different. Shooting up a never-ending wave of Nazis or committing 500 hit-and-runs in a single day in a video game is very different than playing a game in which you stalk an individual, kidnap them, torture them for a day and then stab them to death. There is no safety net of absurdity in games like Edmund.