Review – Night Shift Nurses

In the game’s defense, I should have seen this coming. The blurb from Steam lets you know something weird is going to be going on with terms like “mad doctor” and “twisted hospital,” and the banner is just cute anime girls. I figured we’d get some kind of bizarre tale of corruption and backwards scientific method, and some kind of erotic undertone. And yeah, it’s being published by Shiravune, who does a bunch of visual novels that devolve into sex sessions when given the opportunity. Amazing Grace was charming and cheerful, with a surprisingly poignant storyline that also included a lot of boning. But without the R18 patch in place, you still had a fully versed game that allows for some good music and likeable characters, plus some serious weirdness with Groundhog Day meets Miracle on 34th Street.

But you quickly find out that Night Shift Nurses wildly undersold its premise from the very beginning. You’re a part time gynecologist, which…that’s not a thing. No one can attend medical school, become an OBGYN, do a literal decade of studies and understanding about the human body, especially the female form, and then just pick up a shift here and there throughout the week. That doesn’t make sense, and it’s very apparent this was shoehorned in as a reason why you want to take off every nurse’s pants. But it turns out that you got kicked out of medical school because you were experimenting on a fellow classmate and drugging her to see what the results would be. Is this where I tell you that Night Shift Nurses was originally published in the 90s, or do we just let the undercurrent of upcoming sexual assault tell that tale for me?

Oh right, I forgot that period of time where sexual servitude was legal. Wait, it NEVER was? Weird!

Believe it or not, things get worse from there. The student you experimented on is now running the hospital where you’re about to start work, and she wants you to use the experiment that you performed on her to break the wills and minds of a handful of nurses at this hospital. You see, she believes that nurses who are little more than sex puppets will be the best for rich clients, and so it’s up to you to make these four nurses your perfect projects. You didn’t miss anything: a woman who was drugged and controlled by the protagonist now wants to pay you to drug and control other women. It literally could not be more horrifying until you then hear the protagonists’ inner monologue.

Did you think Night Shift Nurses sounds a lot like an incel’s wet dream? Congratulations, the main character is ABSOLUTELY the biggest misogynist stereotype! Every single woman he encounters he is either thinking how he can’t wait to degrade and humiliate them OR that they’re stuck up bitches who desperately need to be degraded and humiliated. The nurse who is nice to a patient? Fair weather whore who needs to be brought to heel. The shy nurse who won’t take your hand? Disrespectful trollop who will bow down before you. The nurse who isn’t cool with you immediately rubbing her knee without introducing yourself? What a tease, someone (meaning you) needs to teach her a lesson! There isn’t one interaction that doesn’t result in you being excited about ruining these women’s lives in the name of your own insane science.

At this point, I had to take a step back and scratch my head, preferably until I bled and passed out so I wouldn’t have to play anymore. Why on earth is this game so hell bent on working on a sadomasochistic sexual angle? I’m not a prude: visual novels love raunch. Some are phenomenal works of art, some are fun but a bit odd and some are just plain good trash. But sex for the sake of sex is pornography. I kept waiting for the plot to start, but this main character is so one track minded that there doesn’t seem to be another way forward. Even Burrow of the Fallen Bear had a story outside of “gay sex,” it’s just that we kept getting distracted by the gay sex on the way to fight a bad guy or whatever was happening there.

Ren is kind, caring and sees the good in everyone. Naturally, we need to break her.

I had to break my own rules and do some searching, and what I discovered floored me. Night Shift Nurses is the English localization of Yakin Byoto, one of the most graphic and niche eroge’s that’s ever existed. The entire purpose of the game is, in fact, sex: specifically a lot of fetishes that are quite taboo and frankly illegal in many parts of the world. This is the first installment of the series, crafted to target Japanese businessmen with unspeakable kinks, which is why the writing and tone is hyper focused on demeaning the women of the game immediately and instilling a dominance factor. This is a game written specifically for players who want the most unhappy possible scenario for a sexual encounter, and the main character helps to bring that to life.

While this is so far from my cup of tea that it’s basically a pot of motor oil, I resolved to finish playing the game. Night Shift Nurses is still a visual novel, available on Steam, and clocks in at just south of 300 positive reviews. While I’m not interested in the sex to come (and was honestly dreading it), there could still be some respectable window dressing to the whole affair. The music was…well, pretty forgettable and bad (think forced 90s rock coupled with elevator music) and the voice acting was subpar, but there could be something here. The setting isn’t too typical, and potential exists. After all, Nurse Love Syndrome is very sex driven and bizarre, but it’s got some fascinating information that’s medically accurate, plus the characters are memorable. So, at twenty minutes in, I refocused and resumed my play of Night Shift Nurses.

At 22 minutes, the game was over.

I was stunned. So far, I had exactly one choice in the game: go to work or daydream. I had chosen daydream, so naturally that had to have been a mistake. I must have ended up pissing off the wrong people by spending the extra couple of seconds in bed (though I read nothing to indicate as such), and the result was a bad ending (I got arrested by the police for a laundry list of crimes I committed prior to the game’s beginning). Undaunted, I started the game anew, went back to the one choice and made sure to get my ass out of bed and head to work. I had to sit through the same wretched dialogue again. Dealing with the same unjustified anger and hatred of women. I finished meeting the characters and braced myself.

She could have just said “We stopped serving breakfast for the morning.”

At 14 minutes, the game was over. Again.

That’s when Night Shift Nurses finally let me in on the big secret. It’s no surprise to anyone that R18 patches exist for visual novels, particularly ones on Steam. To let players have a choice in the matter when they aren’t getting something explicitly sexual, you can download modifications to games from 3rd party websites and then drop in all the genitals and breasts you could possibly want. Amazing Grace was the same, but there was still a game there without the patch. You could still have a story and a plot and develop something over the course of time. Most visual novels do.

Night Shift Nurses does not. The main character is such a contemptible, one dimensional piece of crap that you have no game without adding in the sex scenes. If you say to the game “I’d rather not find out why this game is flagged for necrophilia,” then you don’t get to play. Night Shift Nurses is such a poorly cut affair that the only ending you’re allowed to see without the inclusion of sex is the main character receiving life in prison for all the sex crimes he did before he even embarked on this mission. It’s like going to Thailand for vacation, signing a paper that says “I’m not here for sex tourism,” and then being told to wait in the airport lounge until you can fly home. Also, you’re paying for both plane tickets, because screw you: why even travel if you’re not willing to commit multiple felonies?

The insult was “I don’t know who you are, so I’ll stand on my own instead of taking your hand.”

Night Shift Nurses is twenty goddamn dollars. I don’t know if that’s expensive or cheap for a long form eroge, and it doesn’t matter because that’s not what I downloaded. Steam is now so relaxed with sexual titles that you can play Sex With Hitler, and, if you like it, there’s at least one sequel. There are games that explore every single facet of fetishes and fantasies, some that aren’t even physically possible, and they’re all for sale, unashamed, if you’re willing to check the box and dive into the unknown. There’s nothing preventing Night Shift Nurses from being bald as hell and broadcasting everything it provides to players with no barrier of entry. Shiravune made a decision here, and it’s one of the most pathetic, spineless ones they could make.

If someone took Debbie Does Dallas and cut out all the sex scenes to string together a single film, it wouldn’t be particularly good because it’s meant to be pornography, but it would still be cohesive. There’s probably a market for it somewhere, on some oddball YouTube channel where we all laugh at adult films’ acting and set design. But you wouldn’t think someone would then take it to Netflix and insist they air it, in its entirety, while saying “It’s fine, there’s no sex, people can find the sex later if they want.” Yet that’s what has happened here with Night Shift Nurses. You get a subpar, crazy short, utterly detestable experience for the price of a significantly better adventure, and it sits on a decent score in the Steam storefront because no one is willing to be honest about how the game plays.

Seriously, you don’t know this woman, and you’re a gynocologist. Don’t just grab her knee to “examine” her.

There’s only two ways this works. The first and most obvious is that you buy Night Shift Nurses and then download the massive patch, which is, I’m not exaggerating, five times as big as the base game. The other is that you come up with a narrative in your mind where you get to see a craven criminal think he’s got the perfect setup, anticipate his future crimes, and then nothing happens because sometimes there’s a little cosmic balance in the universe. But the final indignity comes from this singular, potentially uplifting ending. It’s not like the main character is caught by the police and arrested. No, the woman who runs the hospital (the one who wants him to drug and abuse the nurses), is dissatisfied he didn’t drug and abuse anyone, so she fires him and calls the cops. Even the right ending happens for the wrong reason.

There is not a single positive thing about Night Shift Nurses as it exists. It’s a horrific concept with the execution of someone diving into an empty pool. The graphics are fine because you don’t have to see anything, the writing creates a desire for illiteracy and the moral of the story is that God is dead and visual novels killed Him (or Her!). I would rather spend twenty dollars to have someone fly a drone with a box cutter on it into my stomach, because it would hurt less and be a more interesting story. The best thing is that this is my first game of 2025, and it has to go up from here. The only way this can be topped is if a future game physically robs me and burns down my apartment. Even then, it would depend how much money I have at the time.

Night Shift Nurses is available now on Steam.

Reviewed on a computer who was spared humiliation.

A copy of Night Shift Nurses was provided by the publisher.

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