Imagine this: A dating sim with an enormous woman. An enormous woman who, if she so chooses, will crush or eat you just for the thrill of it. Pretty terrifying, huh? Or exciting, depending on your proclivities. Anyway, welcome to the wonderful world of SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim, a Japanese visual novel that just received its release date.
Meet your new tormentor, a giantess named Saeko
Developed by Safe Havn Studio with publisher Hyper Real, SAEKO stars players as a blond feminine boy named Rin who suddenly finds himself shrunken down to miniature size. A college student named Saeko offers to take him in, promising to help him grow back to his normal height.
In reality, Saeko stores miniature people inside her desk, doing as she pleases with them for her own personal amusement. The game opens with her literally eating someone because she’s hungry, followed by her crushing the manager for her tiny desk prisoners. From there, the player takes on the role of the new supervisor for Saeko’s tinies. Explore your surroundings, talk to your fellow shrunken humans, and order your fellow prisoners to nourish themselves. As they eat snacks left around the desk drawer, they’ll build their Appeal, or how delicious they look to Saeko. Just don’t become too appealing yourself. If your Appeal grows too high, Saeko will devour you instead.
Along the way, expect to spend time with Saeko, comforting her and answering her various questions about life. Don’t expect an ordinary dating sim experience, however. Saeko holds all the power over you. Your job is to answer her correctly and keep her happy. Otherwise, she may choose to get rid of you. The game’s premise is a fantastic subversion of the dating sim genre, one where you’re surrounded by constant reminders that a giant woman controls your fate. At its core, SAEKO is a metaphor about power, control, and abuse.
Interested? Well, good news. You can play the full version of SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim on May 29th. The release date was just announced yesterday, along with a new trailer drop celebrating the news. Just a few more weeks from now, and you’ll get your chance to try (and more often than not, fail) to survive Saeko’s world.
Is ‘SAEKO’ a dating sim for giantess kinksters?
Now, all this certainly begins the question: Is SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim a giantess fetish game? It’s a fair question to ask. Many aspects of the game line up with common tropes seen in the macrophilia community. A shrunken person captured by a giant woman. Small people trapped and tortured inside her desk. A giant woman crushing someone with her hand. There’s even a segment from the game’s opening where Saeko swallows another girl whole and talks about feeling her squirming in her belly. If that wasn’t enough, the dev team shared a segment shown on the game’s Twitter where the main character is playing a flip phone mobile game where a tiny person is crushed by a woman’s massive boot. The tweet reads, “Now we are a proper fetish game.”
There’s another clue that SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim is a giantess kink game: “Fueti Shizue.” According to SAEKO’s Steam page, the giantess dating sim features “a world filled with brutal allure inspired by many strange tales, beginning with Fueti Shizue’s work.” I’ve often seen Shizue cited in gaming journalism stories about SAEKO, but with no real context provided from other reporters. Even on macrophilia forum Giantess City, Saeko fans were left scratching their heads about Shizue. There just isn’t much out there about the writer on the English-speaking internet. When I did an independent search for giantess work about a woman named Saeko, my research drew me to the same conclusion as another Giantess City user: A 1999 Japanese movie named Oyayubihime, where a high school girl named Saeko Machida uses a magical liquid to shrink and kidnap a classmate she has feelings for.
At first, I presumed this was the end of my search. But then, I found a post from the SAEKO development team that answered my question for me. According to a tweet from 2023, SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim is based on a novel written two decades ago by Shizue about a high school student named Saeko who kidnaps shrunken classmates. The story is undeniably a work of giantess fetishism: Shizue’s work is hosted on a Japanese giantess kink site called G-Fork, which Shizue came up with the name for. The author even published a series of essays on his website unpacking his personal theories behind the giantess kink, titled “What is GTS Fetishism?”
“This game is based on a novel by Fueti Shizue,” the SAEKO development team wrote, noting Fueti Shizeu’s giantess story is explicit. “But we must say that our intention is not to depict her cruelty and rampage, rather we want to show her cares and beauty within cruelty.”
Giantess kinkster or not, should you still play ‘SAEKO’?
So, is SAEKO a kink game? I mean, it’s very clearly inspired by the Japanese size community’s work. But as someone who creates giantess content herself, I think it’s a bit pointless to obsess over the game’s connection to the giantess fetish community. It’s obvious to me that SAEKO is not purely fetish fuel. It’s trying to tell a terrifying story about a giant woman who kidnaps, abuses, and eats people. The game’s wider appeal is obvious, hence why it’s consumed (heh) the interest of many in the gaming community. Not because it may be a giantess kink game, but because its premise is so horrifically alluring. Or alluringly horrific.
So yes, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure the giantess kink community is an intended audience for SAEKO. But there’s clearly more to this game than a size fetish. Just as The Story of O is about more than BDSM, and Bound isn’t only for leatherdyke fans, there’s deeper stuff under SAEKO’s surface.
SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim has a demo live now on Steam. Try the game for yourself and see what you think. Otherwise, you’ll get the chance to play the full game when it launches on May 29th.
The post This Giantess Dating Sim Has Consumed My Interest. It Finally Has a Release Date appeared first on VICE.
