Visual Novel by Noura Tafeche & Tobia Paolo Bettoni
2025
A dating-sim parody where weapon systems become cute yet disturbing characters.
Borrowing the shiny style of early 2000s galge, the game exposes the emotional and political entanglement of global military power by letting players date – or refuse – anthropomorphized weapons.
Gijinka ComplexDEMO delves into how desire and institutionalized violence intersect, and how large-scale systems shape our perception through the visual codes of contemporary media culture.
This project reinvents this complex as a biting parody of a Japanese dating sim, where weapon systems become seductive, unsettling, intensely eroticized characters.
The player encounters anthropomorphized figures of military technologies—gijinkas, as they are known in otaku culture—whose attraction, ambiguity, or rejection become ways of experiencing the relationship to these power infrastructures.
Through the gaming experience, we seek to make visible the networks of complicity that fuel the military-industrial complex, both in “Israel” and globally, and to provide a tangible and emotional experience of the usually abstract systemic mechanics.
Gijinka Complex is conceived to be released on itch.io, a popular online gaming platform.
Its NSFW content is deliberately used as a form of bait, attracting unaware users and functioning as a Trojan horse: a seductive entry point that subverts expectations and exposes players to genocide, its violations, leading to horrific reflection on desire, power, and militarized visual culture.
Play Gijinka Complex DEMO
Game Direction – Noura Tafeche & Tobia Paolo Bettoni
Game Illustrations – Silvia Anna Gnocchi
Character Design – Tobia Paolo Bettoni, Noura Tafeche & Silvia Anna Gnocchi
Logo Design – Pierfrancesco Asuni
Ph Sandra Pointet
Gijinka Complex is originally commissioned for the 2025 edition of the Art, Jeu & Société BiennaleSide Quest for the Real by For The Win, curated by Christian Bili and Samuel Wagen-Magnon.
On show 2 – 21 December 2025, Le Commun, Geneva.
Featured at the 7th edition of the Wrong Biennale as part of The Chatroom & The Dollhouse, curated by Sarah Khadra Hasni and Joshua Esser.
Hybrid pavillion (Online/SomoS Berlin 3 – 14 March 2026).
Please note that this is an EARLY demo developed between the second half of October and November 2025.
The game resolution (800:600) was chosen for technical AND artistic reasons.
While in its "installation version" the game cannot be displayed in full-screen mode—because the desktop also contributes to the artwork by containing interactive elements— this web port has the afromentioned option enabled for enhanced accessibility.
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