Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme is a game for PC available on Steam for the cost of $25. The game is a Visual Novel, which means that it replaces traditional gameplay with a choose-your-own-adventure with art of the characters based on choices you made. The basic premise is that there’s an explosion at a pharmaceutical company that turns every guy inside into a girl. I’ve clicked through the entire game up until this point, and there were no crashes.

Having said everything that could be considered positive, it’s time to begin the review. The game’s art is awful, with no regard for anatomy, and it has really badly-drawn fur. Each character is unrealistic- which doesn’t fit the down-to-earth story. The characters have absurd hair colors without the use of dye, over-the-top clothing and inhuman breast sizes.

One issue with the art that’s emblematic of the low quality and effort put into it is the layering of the eyes. Eyes are on top of hair, but below glasses- but glasses are above hair. The resulting chaos resembles what would happen if M.C. Escher drew anime.

One might think that because this is an indie game, the art shouldn’t be the focus, it’s the story that matters! However, the writing is awful. The characters are one-dimensional, with the worst being Dina, a psychopath who only cares about her own fun without caring about the massive collateral damage she causes- and she’s treated as comic relief.

When it comes to the choices you have, the effect they have are almost nil. For the majority, there’s no effect other than some dialogue being different in the scene right afterwards. This is doubly insulting after I tallied up the choices in the game’s script, and there are seven choices  on average per route, one having five choices total.

But games with a bad story and art can still have merit- perhaps it has an awesome composer attached to it! What’s the music like? The music is awful. It’s generic techno, generic violin strings, or generic acoustic guitar music and they use those three songs on loop for the six to eight hours the game currently lasts. I’m okay with a game using stock music, but three songs for six-eight hours? After a certain point I muted the game and put on my own music.

This should be clear by this point, but if you want something with good transgendered or female characters, you should play something else. The characters seem to have some magical spell placed on them that removes feelings of being in the wrong body or gender after about twenty seconds, with the single character who can even choose to turn back having that choice to be non-canon, as shown by the routes taking place afterwards.

As for the quality of the female characters, Bayonetta, a game focusing on witches who wear skintight suits, summon demons with their hair, and punch God’s soul into the sun, has deeper and less sexualized female characters than this game. The characters are as cookie-cutter and amateurish as the art.

The worst part? This game turned a profit. According to SteamDB, this game has never gone on sale, so the money it’s made is easy to calculate. Approximately 3,830 people own the game. Multiply that by 25, and it’s made the creators $95,750- give or take a couple thousand dollars. On top of that, it was crowdfunded, so the costs of development are nil.

If the game was free or cost a pittance, I’d be less critical, but this game is $25 and that price is unacceptable. You can buy so many better games with a narrative and/or female protagonist focus for the cost of $25: Portal or Portal 2, This War of Mine, BioShock, Transistor, Mirror’s Edge, Max Payne 1 and 2, Fallout: New Vegas: Ultimate Edition, Bastion, Never Alone, To The Moon, Deadly Premonition, and countless others that aren’t offensively awful.

I couldn’t recommend this to anyone for any cost, including free. It lasts six to eight hours you could spend either being productive or playing better games. As a lifelong game, this game is the only work of fiction that’s made me genuinely nauseated, and it’s from nothing other than the sheer awfulness of it.