Alright, here are 2of the many differences between this and murdering people in games like Gears of War. I could go on and on but I really think it's pretty obvious to anyone who actually wants to think about this for a minute so I don't want to spend too much time on this.
1) Intention
In most games where violence is used as a gameplay mechanics, it's used as a way to reach your main character's goals which most of the time happens to be: Save the world. Sometimes there are variations. Sometimes you have to get revenge on a bad person. Sometimes the motivations are less refined. But in 99% of these games your acts of violence serve a "greater good". If you agree with this violence being a good way to reach that greater good or not is irrelevant for this point, since the violence isn't self-contained and a target in and on itself. The characters use violence and murder to reach a goal and, most of the time, to make the world a better place (Call of Duty, Tom Clancy Games, Gears of War, Half-Life, Halo, etc. etc.)
If that's not the case, the violence you act upon other people can be a theme in and on itself: God of War or Spec Ops: The Line would be two examples for games that make the violent outbursts of their main characters part of their story (to two very different ends).
A third intention: Parody. Games like Mortal Kombat portray violence in such an over-the-top way that any resemblance to real world killing and violence get's thrown out the window. The Fatalities in MK have absolutely nothing to do with real-world killing.
Compare that to this case: You have no end goal here. You don't save the world by sexually assaulting someone. You don't have to do something you don't like to do because it's part of a deeper story. It's not pushed to such an absurd extreme that it comes off as a completely unrealistic parody. You just molest a teenager in a swimsuit and that's it.
2) Realism
Taking a chainsaw and cutting someone in two halves is not a regular occurence other people are afraid of. Sexual assault, on the other hand, is a regular everyday occurence. According to this survey, 99% of women have experienced harassment on the street, 57% of which " reported being touched or grabbed in a sexual way by a stranger in public." I cannot stress this enough: Sexual harrasment isn't murder in that it is a big, special occurence. It happens to pretty much every woman in some form or other and to more than half of them in almost the exact way it gets portrayed in this game. It's not some abstract way, glorified, unrealistic way to save the world like violence regularly is in video games, it's an everyday occurence that almost every woman in the world has experienced.
And just as a small PS:
This "But what about..."-stuff is a terrible, awful argument even if it were accurate. Because you guys are trying to defend the simulation of sexual assault but you aren’t doing it by defending it on its own merit, but by simply comparing it to other, awful stuff. You are not saying “This is fine!” but you are saying “Well, this is awful too!” How does that help your argument? All it does is out other people as hypocrites (again, if the argument would be valid) but it doesn’t actually defend the simulation of sexual assault that is happening here. No one seems to be going “No, this isn't terrible!" but instead "Yeah, but this is terrible, too!".
thanks for the reply.