Furry

Furry subculture (and a related subculture, 'Kemono', in Japan) broadly revolves around the fandom towards sapient, anthropomorphized animal characters. These creatures are typically bipedal and capable of human speech, if not entirely human-like in behavior. Alongside the subculture's propensity for roleplaying and fantasy theming, the furry community has developed a number of video games that revolve around these pseudo-human characters. Some games, following the scene's roleplaying roots, allow for the creation and exploration of a player's 'fursona', a personalized anthropomorphic character which is often used as an identifier for others within the community. These games are typically made by furries toward a furry audience, with a significant number of 'furry games' catering to the queer or sexuality-oriented sectors of the community.

The earliest furry games were often facilitators of online roleplay, with games like FurryMUCK (1990) and Furcadia (1996) both being MMOSGs with an emphasis on socializing and playing as a fursona. With the advent of increased accessibility to indie game development tools, many other game genres would be explored by the furry community. This avenue of self-expression, alongside the proportionally large amount of queer people within the fandom, allowed for LGBT themes to foster in the community's games. The visual novel genre became especially abundant in the furry community in the 2010s with the popularity of works such as Morenatsu. [漏れなつ。] (2010), Major\Minor (2015), and Nekojishi [家有大貓] (2017). The visual novel developers Echo Project would see similar celebration in the 2020s for their psychological and mature storytelling, spurred by Adastra (2020) and the titular Echo (2021). Outside of visual novels, some games take direct inspiration from furry pornography and fetish content in other modes of gameplay, such as Changed (2018) and Tribal Hunter (2022).

While various franchises featuring anthropomorphized characters inspired and are celebrated within the furry fandom, the idea of the 'furry game' within the community is often reserved only for games that are explicit in their marketing or execution to be created and made with the furry community in mind.