Redsquare Studios’ Vaping Simulator stars a very obvious Pepe The Frog, a cartoon meme that has been deemed as a symbol of “hate” by the Anti-Defamation League, as he runs around avoiding cute animals and attempting to experience the pleasures of vaping.
RedSquare and bcInteractive were smart to change the lead character’s name to “Papi” instead of “Pepe”, but it’s all pretty obvious what they’re getting at. Besides, the game is littered with Pepe iconography, from the Steam achievements to every single update post made by the developers. It’s a living 4chan meme in the form of a Steam game.
So what exactly do you do? Nothing.
You can run around as Papi (Pepe) and ride in some vehicles, fly in some helicopters and pick up some stuff. You’ll also be chased by some cute kittens, as evidenced in the launch trailer below.
Beyond what was mentioned above, there’s nothing else to the game.
This obvious and stark lack of content has sent the Steam reviews into a tizzy, with many people giving the game a thumbs down since it’s little more than just a troll game. However, others are giving it a thumbs up because it stars Pepe. A few more are just angry that you can’t actually vape.
More than anything, this should work as a great indicator of the gaming community actively fighting back against the moral authority who works as censorship dictators over imagery and content both in pop-culture and the video game industry.
For those of you who don’t know, the ADL labeled Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol. It caused rare Pepe memes to trend for quite a lot of money on the Bitcoin index.
The creator of Pepe, Matt Furie, tried killing him off and bringing him back as a non-hate symbol. However, Furie forgot the one rule that rules all that is the internet: no single person wields power over the true nature of the internet hate machine.
Developers looking to get a few keks out of meme culture and possibly a few shrieks out of SJWs now have Pepe (or Papi) running around in a GTA-inspired world with Vaping Simulator. If word gets out about this game expect lots of triggering to take place, especially from the out of touch fake-stream news media.
If you want to learn more about Vaping Simulator, feel free to hit up the game’s Steam store page.