Can’t really comment on this because i can’t even find any mention or listing of HC category of games on this very website. Much less things like their pepper ratings. Which i guess in a way shows how much of apparent afterthought this label is for its own publisher.
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That’s my thought as well. It actually had a lot of word-of-mouth across the internet. I’m pretty sure For Their Majesties Pleasure is also one of the more explicit Heart’s Choice titles and did well. (Though I found it rather tame in the erotica department.)
I get the same feeling when I see the pepper ratings. Like the person rating them has never delved very deep into the erotica genre. For Their Majesty’s Pleasure is rated 4 out of 5, and it’s been a while, but I seem to remember the spicy material was explicit missionary, cuddling while nude, and a possible threesome. It’s what I would consider the baseline for a HC title, yet it’s rated as one of the most spicy.
It’s a good Choicescript title, but I do find it amusing for it to be considered 4 out of 5 peppers for spice. The rater is definitely coming from a different background from myself, and I fear, from a different starting point from the audience that seeks out explicit text erotica.
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They do though, I guess they’re just struggling to find authors who want to write that kind of content? When I applied to HC they gave me a list of things they are looking for and erotica was definitely on the list.
I prefer writing 1 pepper kinda content and was basically told that they might accept something like that if the pitch was good enough, but it just doesn’t sell as well so they prioritise spicier pitches.
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This definitely seems like just a different expectations/approach when it comes to what scale is being used, than anything else? To me “1 pepper” would be something like fade to black, with 5 being fully explicit porn featuring focus on genitals and such, and the rest of the scale covering the in-betweens. So i don’t feel like “explicit missionary” would be inherently less “spicy” (by the nature of being missionary or whatnot, i’m guessing?) than equally explicit sex in another position, and i don’t think you’d need to bring hardcore bdsm and gang bangs to get to 4-5 on such scale. (seeing how a threesome apparently doesn’t cut it to get a 4 in your eyes)
That said, a clarification of the scale on HC own website would be pretty handy to clear up such confusion over what it is that the player is actually buying.
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I guess that’s my point with the pepper scale. It’s entirely subjective.
To you, explicit missionary with mention of genitals and a threesome is plenty enough to rank as a 4 out of 5 peppers.
But to someone who has say, read Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty books? Or some of the current top-sellers in romance on Kindle? It doesn’t come close. There is a whole genre called “dark romance” that is, well, extreme, dark, and very erotic to a point far exceeding anything we see in Heart’s Choice titles. But there is a whole span of content and levels in the middle too.
I think the best thing would probably be to abandon the “pepper scale” and focus on content tags like much of the online erotica community uses - so you aren’t reliant on what one person or rater finds spicy or sexy and instead can see what the type of content is for yourself. For instance, For Their Majesties Pleasure might list “vanilla sex with explicit descriptions, nudity with romantic interests, possible threesomes” and then the reader can decide if they want to make that purchase or not.
Because there are Hosted Games like Blood Moon that I felt had every bit as explicit sex in them as that Heart Choice title and you know, it gets no spicy peppers. Because it’s a Hosted Game.
That is interesting that you’re the second person to talk about that - so the CoG team is definitely aware of what the strength of Heart’s Choice titles is supposed to be.
It would be interesting to know if they’ve reached out to erotica authors to see if they are interested in matching a pitch for a title, if the normal crop of Choicescript writers aren’t really into going as spicy as the company is looking for.
Or maybe just advertising that fact more openly on the forums, like “Hey, potential authors out there, we want to publish more Heart’s Choice titles, but we need the content to be extra spicy to sell well. Anyone interested in writing erotica, we’d be interested to hear your pitches. Here’s what we’re looking for when we say spicy -” Etc.
No judgement on that front from me. I actually tend towards the much milder 1 pepper style of content myself when writing. I’m more focused on the emotional content of the relationship with a romantic interest than the physical side when I write my stories.
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To reiterate because we apparently still have a misunderstanding: to me the sole aspect which would drive the scale is how explicit is the description of the content. Not nature of that content.
So yes, on such scale a fully explicit description of sex is a 5, no matter what particular position or number of partners or how “dark” the context of that scene is. Because it simply can’t get any more explicit.
The “dark content” is imo what trigger warnings might be for, not “spiciness scale”.
Now, if your personal belief is that fully explicit descriptions are the baseline (so, effectively, a 1) then indeed this is completely different kind of a scale, but also one that’s far more subjective and thus, imo, far less useful.
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I guess we do have a difference of opinion then. Because to me, description should have no bearing on scale - only the actual content.
Because I think to most people, erotica is about the content - the situation, circumstances, subject matter, etc. are what makes it erotic to them or not - not the exact language used or how detailed the writer describes body parts.
Explicit sex description to me, of vanilla sex, is a big old shrug. Like describing a character performing any other action, and it’s the actual context that makes it more or less erotic, like the relationship between the characters, situation, etc.
But again, I think this points to the fact that the “spicy pepper” scale is flawed, and content descriptions would be better for everyone, regardless of views on what makes something spicy or not.
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I think i have to disagree with this not because of my personal views, but because to a lot of people how things are written evidently also can be important factor: some prefer fade to black and leaving things to their imagination, some like more or less veiled descriptions and some like to have it all laid bare. If this had no impact on people perception, then they wouldn’t have preferences in this regard. Or, to put it differently, presentation is also content (even when that content is “a lack of content”, if it’s left up to the reader)
I think that, like i said, the main flaw is that we are left in the dark of what that scale is supposed to mean at all. That said i’m certainly not against supplementing that with a more specific description of what content can be expected.
Although, if we go with what you say, that it is all about the context i.e circumstances, relationship between characters etc then i’m not sure just how detailed these descriptions would have to be, in order to be of any use to you in terms of signaling how “spicy” things get.
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But I think our conversation here is an exact demonstration of why any scale will never work. On something as subjective as sex and erotica, experience, comfort-level, personal preference, etc. will always be wildly different and shape what people expect.
Content description is the only way to achieve any kind of parity. It’s how erotica is handled everywhere else - what you call trigger warnings are given so a reader can judge whether they want to read the story or not, or if it appeals to their idea of erotic.
Because, just from our conversation, you can see that not only would you and I disagree on what would rate a certain level on a spiciness scale, we would also most likely disagree on what the scope or breadth of that scale would have to encompass.
I mean, there is a list of content descriptors that have been in use in the erotica writing community for decades that cover all those bases. Paired with a story description they do a lot of work.
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For me, and many other people whom I shared HC games with, the biggest issue is not the lack of erotica: it’s the lack of romance. The vast majority of those so-called romance games are entirely plot motivated, to such a degree you could remove the romance entirely and the game plays largely the same. The romance is a subplot, you take a break from the main plot at some hub, spend time with the RO of your choice and avoid discussing anything that happened before or will happen after except in the most vague of terms. This is similar to the way romance is in other video games, for coding reasons - the BG3 writers know you might trigger the romance scene at different points of the plot, so they best avoid referencing it. But most other games will still include small flavor text to the romance, like comments from your party member during plot relevant dialogue, or mini scenes during the main action (the party runs into a cave to hide but your RO will wait for you and hold you close, for example). Most HC romance is self contained to those “break” scenes, and generally is irrelevant to the rest of the game too - maybe at the climax your chosen RO will say a line to you, but they won’t offer a whole other plan of action or reveal exclusive information to the player. This, combined with a lower wordcount on average, makes the romance feels entirely shallow. The games that sell well or are more popular usually integrate the romance too closely (at least for one RO) and often focus more on relationship than the MC going through a checklist of problem solving.
I know some HC authors have experience writing romance fiction, so I am baffled by how consistent this problem is. It’s an obvious rule that if your romance novel is about renovating a hotel, the heroine will actually spend maybe 15% of her on-page time balancing the budget or picking the wallpaper, and the rest will be having sexual tension with the technician or flirting with the floor manager. But Haunted Hearts Hotel essentially has you play a management sim with a couple of dates sprinkled in (no offense to anyone who liked the game).
By contrast, Devil on your Shoulder has the whole game essentially run on a push-and-pull dynamic with one of the ROs, so the romance works because the stardom and devil contract aspect is simply a vehicle for that dynamic. It does make the other ROs a little superfluous, but I think one excellent RO is better than 4 average ones.
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The spice level/spice rating system is probably the only thing about Heart’s Choice I don’t have any disagreements with. It’s entirely in-line with what I’ve seen and expect from romance novels. Romance isn’t the same thing as erotica, and there’s a gaping chasm between the median traditionally published romance novel and a self-published Kindle Unlimited erotica/Itch.io eroge game. Bringing the expectations of the latter to the former is bringing AAA expectations to the Atari 2600.
For comparison, this is the spice scale romance.io uses:
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Glimpses and kisses - Meaningful glances and perhaps a kiss, but no sex on and off page
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Behind closed doors - At least one intimate scene occurs, but without the reader present.
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Open door - At least one intimate scene with the reader present, euphemistic language for act and body parts
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Explicit open door - At least two intimate scenes, explicit language with a variety of sexual acts
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Explicit and plentiful - Several explicit scenes, a variety of adventurous acts, dotted throughout the book
I think that lines up pretty well with HC’s:
I never got the impression HC was meant to be a “exclusively erotica” line, so I find it a little strange to see it be criticized for that. I always saw it as COG’s attempt at making interactive romance novels – they’re literally advertised as games where you “become the main character of an interactive romance novel and choose your path to love”, so using a spice system anchored to romance novel expectations is entirely reasonable in my book.
Believe me, I have my issues with HC games[1], but spice scale is the one area I think they actually succeeded in feeling like romance novels.
More detailed content warnings on erotica games would be useful though. People looking for release material have a different use case than people looking for a romance story, and there’s a reason PornHub/sex games/etc use highly specific content tags.
I could write an extremely long analytical breakdown of why they fail (for me) at being interactive romance novels and I see them as easier COGs with slightly more resources allocated to the romance-as-fishing-minigame minigame, but that is well-trodden ground at this point ↩︎
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Ultimately I think a small point for HC but there’s a difference I haven’t seen mentioned, being it’s only omnibus for apps, no stand alone drops (beyond technically the website, and maybe they’re on steam standalone honestly I don’t remember since I don’t use steam). It may not play a huge role in the popularity one way or another but I know it impacts me personally, not really liking the omnibus apps for entirely arbitrary reasons so I tend to kinda skip them even if I may be a bit interested in the idea (which, admittedly, is unfortunate uncommon plus I’ve been kinda burned on them like I have official label games, so I’m already very hesitant).
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That they are on a separate website certainly doesn’t help eitber I think.
Does anyone actually know why that is? I can’t think of a reason
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I think it was something about separating because of the erotica side, if I recall. Been years of course, but I feel like that was what was said when it launched. Like has been discussed from other directions, it’s kind of a moot point by now where explicit sex isn’t too crazy anymore in HG and even the occasional CoG
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I imagine they would be reticent to publish any low pepper stuff now. The wrestling game did well. Very well. But almost every other HC title has done flat out poorly. At some point the company can’t keep throwing good money after bad.
Plus, tame erotica seems like a bit of an oxymoron. It’s like, write porn or just write a regular romance.
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The wrestling one was the 4th HC to come out ever (in 2019). I think if they were going to change the way the label publishes based on its success, they would have done so some time ago. In 2025 there were 3 low (1-2) pepper games.
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Isn’t erotica the very middle ground between romance and porn? As such, i find the idea that’s somehow an oxymoron or that there’s no audience for it rather odd, considering the sheer volume of all sorts of entertainment (that sells) which fall under this rather than go all in one way or the other.
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Well, that does line up. But I think the criticism (and maybe confusion, and maybe why the Heart’s Choice line hasn’t done as well as the other two publishing lines) is that a LOT of the Hosted Game titles cover Levels 1 - 3 now on that scale. EDIT: Actually, I can think of at least a couple I’ve played in the last two years that hit Level 4 on that scale.
So, if a Heart’s Choice title isn’t a 4 or 5 on that scale, that is, extra erotic compared to a standard Hosted Games title, there isn’t much to distinguish them except you are usually gender-locked or have fewer options and often less story than the Hosted Games titles that already contain the 1-3 spicy pepper content.
I was trying to figure out what everything I’ve been saying boils down to - but I think you nailed it. I feel like Heart’s Choice is occupying this weird room-temperature porridge spot right now.
We’ve got regular romance and non-romance covered by CoG titles. We’ve got all the mild spicy content and romance covered by Hosted Games. The only unique thing Heart’s Choice can offer IS the extreme spicy stuff.
I’ve always considered the term “erotica” just the classy way to talk about porn so the people consuming it and making it don’t feel like perverts. 
There’s a comic we had taped to the wall at art school that had a man looking at a naked woman from behind a bush, labeled ‘pervert’, then the same man and same woman with the bush replaced with a canvas and easel, labeled ‘artist’.
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Consent makes all the difference
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I think the confusion here could come from what seems like a presumption that because some HG titles exist with this sort of content, then it somehow renders obsolete a separate line of games where providing this kind of content is their primary goal…? But keep in mind that, since CoG exercises far less control over HG titles, someone going for them to find specifically games with romance content has, at least in theory, much less guarantee that this is what they will find in any random HG game. They won’t even get the benefit of that spiciness scale to guide them in their search.
In a way, it is like saying that there’s no point in e.g. exclusively vegan restaurant because if someone wants to eat that sort of stuff they can find themselves some in another venture that’s holding a Swedish buffet. Which, sure, to some extent they can, but with quite more effort involved.
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