Womb World is a game environment without enemies, wins, or waypoints. Yet violence persists; it targets bodies, physical and digital alike, often encoded in “neutral” source code that smuggles ideology. I invert controller mappings so the player’s agency stutters and slips. The point is to inhabit, not to conquer.
The opening scene tethers you to a giant hand in a bloodied bathroom. You remove a tampon and drop it into a toilet that refuses to flush. Suction pulls you through a vaginal opening and into the first biome. Disorientation, not dominance, moves the experience forward.
You arrive in a village of womb figures watching a candle drip white wax into a pond. On closer inspection, a figure milks a condom of the same substance into the pool. When you approach the flame, you become a human-faced sperm, “smelling” for eggs, drawn toward two ovarian figures cradling a cave with a copper IUD. Contact kills you. Copper is poison to your kind.
You spill into a yeast feast of bread and wine. A figure gnaws at bread as your movement dilates outward into another party. It becomes a waterpark of cum where bodies dive and dance through viscous pools while a spinning vibrator churns the liquid. Elsewhere, Lysol is sprayed violently into another chamber of the womb. Figures dodge and scatter. Your vision is obscured under the chemical spray. You find an old-timey bottle that promises new and improved feminine hygiene. One teaspoon of Lysol to each quart of warm water, mixed and poured into a douche bag.
When you turn, another figure messily licks a birth control pill packet. Inspecting the discarded duplicate by their face pulls you into a tundra. A towering uncanny figure exhales snowflakes from its mouth. Nearby, someone’s tongue is frozen to a glowing, egg-like mass. As you lean in for a closer look, the world dilates again.
With each dilation, the womb reveals another layer. Stone huts and castles. Miners drilling into the uterine wall. Blood sheeting into a lake. You lift a tampon through the liquid mouth and return to the bathroom, blood pooling in the tub beside the teabag tampon. The cycle renews.
Syncing narrative to menstrual rhythm, the game asks you to navigate by being navigated, tugged, rebuffed, and redirected by a living system that refuses linear progress.