The New Lagoon

The-New-Lagoon is a pretty innocuous name for a website. It could damn well be an educational site devoting to teaching children about barrier islands, reefs, and the complex and fragile ecosystems that inhabit them. Alternately, it could be a bulletin board about interactive porn games and 3D perversion. I have a feeling I know which you’d prefer, and I’ve got some damn good news for you.

The New Lagoon is a sex games forum originally created as a discussion place for The Shark’s Lagoon, an erotic game collection that’s been online since 2007. In fact, the outdated header image still says, “Welcome in The Shark’s Lagoon sexy games forum”. I’ve reviewed their website and offerings here at BestPornGames, and I’m happy to see that The-New-Lagoon.com has expanded its focus to include a wider selection of NSFW games and a hefty dose of CG sluts.

An Old-School Porn Games Bulletin Board

I’ve got to touch on the site’s header again. It’s the very first thing you see when you land on The New Lagoon, and it’s fucking hideous. First impressions count for a lot, but these guys didn’t even bother to change the clothes they’ve been wearing almost 15 years or wipe the drool off their faces. I know The Shark’s Lagoon is French, so I’ll cut them some slack for the bad English in the header, but they could at least update the graphic itself. It was clearly designed when the site was new, and has the ugly digital artifacts so common at the time.

I didn’t come here to jerk off to the design, but it’s hard not to notice how outdated it is. It’s running on old-school phpBB bulletin board software. I mean “old-school” in a double sense; boards around the Internet have been using the platform for twenty years now, but The-New-Lagoon hasn’t upgraded their copy since 2007 according to the copyright at the bottom. I didn’t need to see the date to know they haven’t updated in a while, because it’s immediately obvious from the site’s look.

The good news is that bulletin board software has remained more or less the same over the last couple of decades. These guys shouldn’t be missing any real functionality, but it’s hard to feel like they don’t give a fuck.

The forums on The-New-Lagoon.com are broken down into broad categories. There’s the Welcome section, where newbies are required to come to introduce themselves. Nobody new has signed up and said “Hi” for a couple of months now. The Games Creators boards, ostensibly aimed at the folks who make all the games I review here at BestPornGames, is mostly deserted, too; there’s a post or two a month about works-in-progress under Projects, but the other two subforums have been silent for years.

A few of the forums are devoted to the Shark’s Lagoon and the games hosted there. The only current thread I could find among them were people asking Shark when his next new game is coming out. His answer? “Still some work…”

So WTF Is There to Look at and Fap to?

You might already be thinking of passing on The-New-Lagoon, and I don’t blame you. Dead forums aren’t a draw anywhere on the Internet, but this site still manages to pull a couple of hundred visitors a day. How? It’s the three sub-forums (out of 13) that still have action in them.

The active forums are all under the Hot and Entertaining header: Sexy Girls, Free Sexy Games, and Other Sexy Games. The free games are very obviously the star of The New Lagoon, with over 45,000 posts. Sexy Girls, by contrast, has a mere 9,000.

Since the whole site is a spin-off of The Shark’s Lagoon, I’m not surprised that the forum about Shark’s Games also has a decent number of posts. There are 13,000 in there, but just looking at the post dates tells a story about the rise and fall of the site. Most of the posts are years old, from when the site was hot. The last couple of years have seen maybe half a dozen posts each, but so far this year, there’s only one active thread.

Let’s Look at Those Free, Sexy Games

I went straight to that hopping hive of free sex games, the main attraction on The-New-Lagoon. All things are relative on the Internet, so it’s worth noting that even though this is the most popular, active forum, there’s not much happening. A Reddit community like r/LewdGames gets dozens of porn-game posts a day, but you’ll see a dozen a month here if you’re lucky.

I guess this is a less lucky month, because there have only been 4 active game threads. I guess the good news is the archive isn’t too stale; the front page of posts only stretches back to 2018. The full archive stretches back 1600 topics all the way to 2007, where you’ll mostly find dead links.

All of the more recent links I tried worked, which is probably why the site is still floating. The basic format is the same for each thread. The first post has a synopsis, usually a screenshot or two, and then a link to download or play the game online. There’s a wide variety of shit here, from pornographic RPGs to erotic visual novels, furry minigames, and the most scandalous football games you could ever imagine.

While The New Lagoon looks more or less dead from an outsider’s point of view, it’s obvious they still have a longtime, loyal userbase who visits at least somewhat regularly and has a relationship with the site. Almost all of the people posting have been on the website for years, as evidenced by the Join dates beneath their usernames. Many of the people posting porn game links are the creators themselves.

After the introductory post, a thread becomes a discussion of the game. When a game developer writes the original post, there tends to be a lot of discussion on what tweaks the game needs to be perfect. Direct interaction between porn gamers and porn game designers is cool as hell, and I can understand why it was a big draw for the site, and still is for some people. It’s just not that great anymore, as they don’t have the userbase of porn game forums like F95Zone, PlanetSuzy, or the bigger Reddit subs.

Plus Some Sexy CG BBWs and Girls-Next-Door

Like the Free Sex Games board, the Sexy Girls forum on The-New-Lagoon is also really hopping. So far this month, they’ve had a whopping four active threads. The newest post is a CG pic of Ellie from The Last of Us. She was only 14 in the first game, but she’s legal in the soon-to-be-released sequel. Her face is cute, for sure, but the picture is a little too SFW for my tastes. Ellie’s got her top off, but she’s facing the other way! There’s a link to the trailer in case you want to jerk off to Ellie kissing another chick.

The only other Sexy Girls posts this month were 3D fetish comics about giantess growth and tickling. Scrolling through the collection, I see a lot of kinky CG dominatrixes, BBWs, and a few more typical girl-next-door types. Nothing really caught my eye and made me think this was better than any random porn comic site out there.

Again, looking at the Join dates of the people posting and commenting, it becomes clear that most of the users here have been around for a good, long time. If I had to guess, I’d say most of The-New-Lagoon’s users are old-timers who feel a genuine attachment to the community. I don’t see a single new user coming along and saying, “Hey, look at this gender-swapped Naruto orgy I put together!” In fact, the complete absence of the characters you usually see on CG porn sites (like Naruto) also gives a little insight into the demographics here. In short, they’re old.

At some point, The-New-Lagoon.com was a thriving hub of gamers, masturbators, those who do both at once, and those who encouraged it by creating new porn games. These days, it’s more or less a wasteland. Their biggest draw for new users is a free sex games section that really isn’t very good compared to other sites. As much as I appreciate how long they’ve managed to stick around, there’s really no reason for most porn gamers to check it out.