House Party is a pornographic Steam game that aims to recreate the rowdy depravity of '90s comedies like American Pie by setting you loose in a houseful of deranged partiers, most of whom will have sex with you so long as you say and do the exact right thing. Until last week, these characters were purely fictional stereotypes—the macho guy, the obnoxious bro, or the jealous younger sister—but several weeks ago, House Party's developers added a new guest voiced by and modelled after a real person.

Her name is Lety, and on YouTube she has over 63,000 subscribers who watch her play games, or model swimsuits, or review TV shows. Over on Patreon, though, subscribers pay a cumulative total of $10,000 a month to access Lety's nude photoshoots and her community Discord, and she also writes adult comics. While she's no stranger to taking her clothes off on camera, Lety is one of the first people to loan her likeness to a pornographic videogame where her in-game character does a whole lot more than that. "It's one for the history books," Lety tells me. "Some super, super weird history book."

Heads-up: This story talks a lot about sex, in case that wasn't obvious. 

Open House

Back in November, the developers of House Party held a contest players could enter to be added to the game and win $1,000. Considering House Party owes much of its success to a horde of YouTubers who introduced it to their audiences, it only made sense that the front-running contestants were people like Lety and Arin Hanson and Dan Avidan, the duo behind Game Grumps (who will be added in a later update) whose 17-part video series on House Party has been watched over 20 million times.

For Lety, though, it wasn't just a good marketing opportunity but a chance to become a permanent fixture in a game she'd been a fan of since it was a janky, crass one-man project shared around on image boards like 4Chan. Since then, House Party has grown to become an immensely popular porn game selling more than 500,000 copies.

To be clear, though, House Party is still janky and crass. It launched on Steam Early Access in 2017 before Valve overhauled its restrictions on adult content. Though porn games weren't supposed to be on Steam, House Party somehow fell through the cracks and gained notoriety when Valve threatened to remove it unless it censored all the sex. In 2018, however, Valve reversed its position on explicit adult content and House Party players could go back to playing its uncensored version.

Today House Party remains an Early Access game—and not a particularly great one. The idea is that you're invited to a house party with a dozen other guests who each have distinct personalities and stories. It's like a point-and-click adventure set in a sandbox sim. You talk to each guest to learn about them and, if you choose, what you need to do to get their clothes off and have sex with them—or you can just start masturbating on people without consent.

Completing character quests typically devolves into brainless, trial-and-error puzzle solving that I find annoying, and some of the tasks are extremely sleazy. You can help Ashley get revenge on her older sister by stealing her phone and sharing her nude photos with other guests, for example, or you can secretly follow phone-obsessed Katherine around with a signal jammer to coax her into a private room so you can get her to take topless pictures. Though the people at the party are all awful in their own ways (one owns an amateur porn website that frequently hosts revenge porn), the worst guest is you—a cruel asshole who will say or do anything if it means getting laid.

But thousands of people, like Lety, love that House Party is janky, weird, and sordid. During its early development, Lety became one of the bigger faces in the House Party fanbase, so when she first heard of the contest, she knew she had to enter.

Winning meant that Lety not only got to be in the game (and win a thousand dollars) but also determine her character's personality, dialogue, and overall story. Unlike the extreme stereotypes the other guests are based on, Lety says she wanted to make her character more authentic to her actual persona. "That was a major challenge for me," Lety says. "I'm really introverted and anxious. Like, even in college, I'd get invited places and I'd always turn it down. I had no idea what I would even do at a party or what it would be like, and eventually I was like, okay, that's going to be it. That's going to be my character. I'll be the super awkward girl that fucks everything up."

Digitizing Lety 

Writing and voicing her dialogue in an improvised home studio was just half of the challenge. Lety also had to take high-resolution photos of her face from "20 different angles" so the third-party animation studio developer Eek! Games used could properly model her face and body.

"As an adult model everyone knows what my naked body looks like," Lety says. "So it was super important to me to get that right. So, in making the model, I took HD photos of my skin to be mapped onto the character. I even added the weird birthmark thing that I have on my back."

"I think the whole design process from taking like the first photo of my face to the finalized model took about half a year," Lety explains. "I remember when we were like five months into the process, I decided to show off some photos with my patrons on Discord, to show them what my model was going to look like. And a bunch of people called out that it was missing this little beauty mark I had, literally, between my butt cheeks, and it's smaller than a grain of rice. And everyone was like, it's missing the beauty mark on your butt, man!"

Unlike the other guests, Lety isn't invited to the party until you break into Ashley's laptop and trick her into coming by pretending you need an "emergency Spanish tutoring session." A few minutes later, Lety awkwardly arrives with a bag full of Mexican-themed trinkets like a bottle of mezcal, spicy peppers, and a wall-mounted talking fish wearing a sombrero. Her story involves the player helping or sabotaging her awkward and bumbling attempts to socialize at the party—with the obligatory sex if you manage to say and do the right things.

Lety's character background might seem like a thin punchline to a joke, but she says she wanted to use it as a platform to show off another part of herself: her Mexican heritage. "What a lot of people don't know is that I'm actually Mexican," Lety tells me. "But growing up in Hispanic neighborhoods here in [Los Angeles], I got bullied a lot for looking different and not being a 'real Mexican' because I'm a lighter-skinned Hispanic. But yeah, when I was presented with an opportunity to create a character that would potentially be seen by millions I just had to have my character speak Spanish. It's very important for me to kind of show people and have people see that like, hey, lighter-skinned Mexicans do exist."

That Lety poured so much of her personal identity into her in-game character surprised me, if only because pornography is often so fabricated, with actresses and actors using psueodonyms or playing specific characters in unlikely situations. Lety says even her photoshoots are often bizarre works of fiction. "Recently I did a photoshoot where my entire body was Thanos' face, and then I sat on all the Avengers before Ant-Man crawled inside my ass and expanded and killed me," Lety says.

But it feels like there's a distinction between someone passively looking at a nude photoshoot and actively having sex with a digital representation of a person. There's also the prevalence of online sexual harassment to consider, something that women content creators are often subject to. Despite those unknowns, Lety said she had "no reservations" about being a character players could have sex with. "I was immediately just like, let's fucking do it," she says. "This is fucking awesome."

Unlike how it tries to simulate social situations, having sex in House Party is more akin to an interactive cutscene. Players can choose from a variety of positions and acts like doggystyle or going down on certain characters, but all the movement and gyrating happens automatically. "I didn't have much input over the actual sex acts I could perform, that's actually all done by Take One," a motion capture and animation company that also worked on The Witcher 3, Lety points out. "The only real input I gave is that I wanted to be able to do everything, 'cause like, what's the point of being in a sex game otherwise?"

Doing the deed with in-game Lety is surreal—especially if you try to talk to her while she's giving you a blowjob because she even went so far as to make it sound like her mouth is full. But it's clear that the developers at Eek! Games have stumbled into a strange new frontier of pornography into which others will likely follow. Though its simulation of sex might be crude, that it's a conduit for a new and uncharted kind of connection between a creator like Lety and her audience is significant.

"I'm super excited that people have this opportunity to interact with me," she says. "Like, some parts of my character are exaggerated for comedy's sake, but I feel the core personality is super true to who I am, and now people have a chance to kind of get to know me beyond just watching me in a video or seeing me as a photo on their screens, so being able to have this kind of connection through a weird, goofy sex game is just really exciting to me."

Update: Developer Bobby Ricci responded to my question over exactly what was censored in the new Steam version of House Party, stating the following over email:

"The only thing that was changed, was that a censor bar was added to the sex scenes.  The censor bar was actually in the game already, but it was a player setting.  Now, it is forced on during the few sex scenes in the game."

So there you have it. The sex scenes are still there, just layered over with those iconic black bars. The 'censor removal patch' just removes them. 

Original story: Late last week House Party was removed from Steam amid complaints over ‘pornographic’ content. On sale for a month in Early Access, it depicted fully simulated sex scenes with uncanny physics-boobed women, enabling the player character to whip their dick out at will (and put it on a charcoal barbecue, for instance). But now House Party is back, albeit in an altered state. The changes are hinted at in a recent blog by the developers at Eek! Games:

“I’m happy to say that the entire story of the game is 100% in tact [sic], and there have been no changes made to the content of the game. The issue was specifically with the portrayal of sex acts.”

Whether that means the simulated sex is completely out or not, I’m not certain. I’ve reached out for clarification, and will update as necessary. The release of a "censor removal patch", also detailed in the blog, seems to imply they’re out or toned down somehow, but stating no changes were made to the content of the game confuses the message. I’m just hoping I can still put the penis on the barbecue. Either way, people can buy the game on Steam again and, as the drill has been for decades, make the eerie people nude by downloading a zipped folder from a sketchy hyperlink.

After one month of being on sale in Early Access, House Party has been removed from Steam pending a 'watered down' version of the game, as stated by the developers at Eek! Games in a blog post on the take down. 

The devs don't have beef with Steam though, shifting the blame to aggressive, targeted complaints from groups bothered by House Party from day one:

"House Party was temporarily removed as a result of a number of complaints that were sent to Steam about the game. The game has been a target for a certain group of people since the day it launched, and said people were posting very aggressive, distasteful and hateful comments directed toward the game and its community of players."

But without a clear idea of what the offending content is, Eek! Games aren't exactly sure what to cut and what to keep.

"I asked Valve for clarification on the offending content, and they haven’t replied yet, but they’ve been very nice up this point and simply told me that they would re-enable the game after testing the modifications requested (forcefully enabling an in-game censor during certain scenes regardless of the user’s preference setting) to ensure there is no more offending content. I know there are many games with nudity, and there are also games with sex scenes as well, including really popular titles, so it’s all rather confusing and I don’t know exactly where the line is or what in particular I should be censoring."

House Party's depiction of nudity and sex is far from tasteful, but the sudden removal after weeks of being on sale points to flaws in Steam's verification process. If Steam has a rule about explicit content, why wasn't the content flagged before House Party was allowed on the store in the first place? And does its sudden removal mean simulated sex is a no-go, period? 

The removal runs counter to what we saw earlier this year, when the "explicit visual novel" Ladykiller in a Bind was released on Steam "uncensored and unedited." And it too pulls no punches, promising players "six nights worth of explicit, consensual, kinky lesbian sex," plus four bonus sex scenes for people who like to "live dangerously." So why is one uncensored sex game acceptable, while another is not?   

Even though the reasons aren't clear, the studio said it "understands" Valve's position. "They are responding to an alarming societal perception of sex and nudity as something evil, even more so than murder, genocide, torture, and gore which is widely accepted and prevalent in most other video games that are offered up on Steam and many other gaming platforms," the post says. "I don’t agree with Steam’s decision, but I respect it." 

House Party remains available to anyone who bought it, and Eek! said that Valve is now testing a new version of the game, which will be put back online if it meets the necessary requirements—whatever they might be. We've reached out to Valve for more information about why the game was removed, and will update if and when I receive a reply. 

I played the first 20 minutes of House Party, and the overriding impression it left was one of horror rather than humor. Later, I learned you could get your dick out and put it on things, like a table or charcoal barbecue (don't do this). I won't miss it, but some consistency and clarification from Steam would be nice.  

And at the least, House Party does bring out the best in YouTube thumbnail faces.

Thanks, Eurogamer.