This Game Should Not Exist and Yet Here We Are

There are fighting games where you play as hardened warriors seeking revenge for dead fathers, and then there’s Panty Party, where you play as women’s underwear. Thongs. Slips. Panties flying through a 3D arena in the grand tradition of Tekken, beating the hell out of other panties. The premise alone should relegate this to the lowest tier of games that exist only to embarrass the medium—and yet.

The plot, as best I can follow it, involves locating the true lover of women’s underwear in order to save humanity from evil. Correct. The 3D world is a little rough, the kind of thing assembled with genuine affection on a modest budget. The music is electronic and propulsive, the colors are aggressively candy-bright, and the whole enterprise is accompanied by cheerful anime girls cheering on your underpants from the sidelines. Up to four players can fight each other, which is either the best or worst party game mechanic ever devised, depending entirely on who you’re playing with.

It’s on Steam and was released on Nintendo Switch in Japan, which feels exactly right—Nintendo’s home market has always had a higher tolerance for this kind of inspired absurdity than most. The longer you play it, the more you find yourself developing a genuine emotional attachment to a pair of pink panties with red ribbon trim, and at some point you have to accept that something in there is genuinely working on you. Is it the greatest game ever programmed? Probably not. But it’s closer than it has any right to be.