Furry Hentai Tangram is a puzzle game where players must slot shapes into a grid to reveal lewd anime pictures underneath. It’s also available on the Nintendo Switch eShop priced £2.39 (currently reduced from £2.99).
The fact this game, which launched last Friday, is available on the notoriously family-friendly Nintendo Switch has raised eyebrows among users uncomfortable with their kids finding its store page on the Nintendo eShop.
“Seriously Nintendo… this is my eight year old cousin’s account,” wrote one fan on reddit, sharing a screenshot of the game – visible from Furry Hentai Tangram’s store page – depicting a mostly-undressed character with cat ears.
“Kids should be supervised when on the shop at the very least – that’s why I was with him,” they continued. “But it’s not my kid, not my Switch and not my house so I can’t vouch for the rest of the time. I did however enable Parental Controls for the future.”
But while it is possible to set playtime limits and block games of a particular rating (as well as posting content to social networks, and limiting communication with others), there’s no Parental Control option for accessing the eShop itself.
The above user said they had seen Furry Hentai Tangram on the front page of the eShop under its New Releases section. Here’s hoping they didn’t have to explain what hentai was, or why the person in cat ears wasn’t wearing many clothes.
What might a user see if they did manage to download the game? And what exactly is Nintendo allowing on its store these days? Eurogamer contacted PEGI, the European ratings board, for more information.
Furry Hentai Tangram currently sits on the eShop listed with a PEGI 16 rating for “nudity”, but after consulting with PEGI I heard this was inaccurate.
The initial PEGI 16 rating comes from the game’s initial IARC rating – a self-assigned initial certification available to digital-only games which can speed up their route to being published, before a formal PEGI rating is applied.
In other words, the PEGI 16 rating – and promise of nudity – comes from the developer, rather than PEGI itself.
PEGI has now provided Eurogamer with its own formal assessment, which is not yet public. This will actually see the game’s rating lowered to a PEGI 12 for “scenes of a sexual nature” – though no actual (or drawn) nudity is present.