Riveroaks looks like one of those nice West Coast towns from Instagram, but this game keeps poking the dirty meat under the skin. You play this broke guy who gets kicked out of home and suddenly finds out his estranged dad is a porn mogul with a new gay studio that needs a handler. Not in the fun BDSM sense. In the “sign contracts and worry about profits while staring at six packs” sense. Half the time you are trying to pretend you are a professional businessman, the other half you are trying not to get a visible boner during casting. The fun part is how casual the world treats sex. Everyone already knows you are Leonard King’s kid. Baristas flirt with you like they want a role, gym bros stretch way too close, and every conversation has this small chance to slide into filth. One second someone is talking about lighting, the next they are describing exactly how they want to be fucked on camera, and the game just goes “yeah this is normal”. As a horror nerd I like when a city feels like it has a pulse, and Riveroaks kind of hums like something alive and wet. Every location feels like a different fetish altar. The arcade with sticky neon, the gym with its sweaty muscle cult, the cute café where the “nice guy” director talks about art and then asks if you are comfortable filming a three-way with a choke scene. None of this is subtle. Sometimes it is hilarious and awkward and horny at the same time, like when you are reviewing test footage and realize the actor is staring straight into the camera, dirty talking you of all people, and the dialogue actually acknowledges your flustered silence instead of pretending you are a blank self insert.

What surprised me is how much the management part and the romance keep stepping on each other’s toes. You choose what kind of scenes to produce, who to cast together, what kinks to push, and later you have to sit with the people you just turned into “content” and maybe flirt with them, or listen when they tell you about their trauma, or both. There is this one moment where you schedule a shoot with a cocky twink and a quiet older guy, thinking “ok, this will sell, simple power play vibe”, and by the time you watch the preview cut you realize they actually clicked emotionally in between all the deepthroating. Then the game asks you, softly but not really gently, if you want to push them harder next time for profit or let them have a slower, sweeter scene. Of course I picked the darker option because I am weak and also curious. The aftermath hit harder than I expected, but then the next scene is just a stupidly funny argument in a bistro over whose ass looks better on camera, so your feelings never get to settle. It is messy, like real life, only with a lot more cum. The main character is weirdly relatable too. Not some porn god, just this slightly lost young dude who keeps flipping between horny, bitter, and accidentally caring. One route has you teasing a muscular cameraman in the locker room, trading nasty jokes until he corners you in the shower and asks if you are just playing or if you want him to ruin you for real. Another has you sharing late night drinks with an actor who looks like he walked out of a yaoi doujin, talking about family while his hand sits a little too high on your thigh. The sex scenes commit. They use the dirty words, they linger on bodies, they let you taste that feeling of being looked at like fresh meat. Sometimes the pacing goes weird and you jump from intense emotional build up to “ok, we are sucking dick now” with almost no breath, but honestly that clumsy cut has its own charm. Porn is rarely tidy. In my head I almost read Riveroaks like a cult story, only the cult is gay porn, and instead of summoning Cthulhu you are summoning audience engagement with horny thumbnails. There is something quietly corrupting about how normal it feels after a while to treat desire as a spreadsheet thing. And then a cute guy smiles at you from across the studio, half naked, and you stop caring where exactly your soul went.

Esterium feels like somebody’s horny D&D notebook that accidentally grew into a browser game, and I kind of love that it’s still rough around the edges. You get tossed into this messy fantasy world with a body you pick yourself: big-dicked futa amazon, soft trans mage, stacked barbarian girl with tits that look like they’d knock her off balance, or just some unlucky dude who wandered way too far from home. It starts simple, mostly text and some 3D-ish character shots, but the way the game talks to you has this awkward charm. One moment you’re reading about rusty swords and trading junk, next moment the description suddenly spends three lines on how your cock twitches under your armor, or how your nipples brush the inside of your leather top when you climb over a ruined wall. It’s a bit inconsistent, but in a kind of “oh, a real person is writing this while horny and tired” way that feels weirdly honest.

There was this moment where my futa barbarian was barely strong enough to leave the starting area. I thought, fine, gonna grind skeletons like usual. Instead of a big hype combat, the game just quietly lets you bonk a skeleton to pieces with a rusty axe and then spends more time describing the sweat on your abs than the actual fight. I was like, ok priorities understood. Then later I rerolled as a female mage, wandered in the wrong direction, and ended up in a forest that felt way too empty. Just birds, vague paths, some herbs, nobody to fuck, no monster girl jumping out of the bushes. I actually got annoyed, left the tab open, went to scroll Twitter on my phone, came back, and only then noticed I had missed a clickable option in the text. Suddenly, bam, you meet this monster girl with claws and soft curves, and the game flips from “standard fantasy exploration” to “she pins you to a tree and smells your fear before deciding she’d rather smell your arousal instead.” There is no smooth transition. It’s like the writer forgot they were making an RPG and remembered “oh right, porn” halfway through the paragraph.

The sex so far is short, but it hits specific buttons. There’s this focus on size, on how heavy your tits feel when you run, how your cock strains against your gear when a merchant leans over the counter and you get a hint of cleavage. It’s not super poetic, more like horny forum roleplay with slightly better grammar. Sometimes the pacing is just weird: a whole careful explanation of basic trading, then suddenly one sentence like “her tongue traces the vein along your shaft” and you’re like, wait, we’re doing this now? I like that you can be any of the three main body flavors and the world mostly reacts to your genitals instead of treating it like a big identity lecture. You’re a futa or trans type? Cool, here’s how your underwear feels when you walk, here’s how monsters grab you by the hips and test your “endurance” in a way that has nothing to do with hitpoints. I wish the combat and leveling were less prototype and more “I’m scared to fight that demon because she might absolutely break my back in the fun way”, but also, if they ever polish it too much, it might lose that sleepy, horny energy it has right now. It’s like catching a kink game at that stage where it’s still shy and a bit clumsy, but you can already see it wants to drag you into a dark alley and see how much your character can take before their legs stop working.

This time manipulation visual novel hits different when you realize the protagonist isn't some noble hero wrestling with moral dilemmas. Nah, he's basically a horny dude who stumbled into godlike powers and decides to use them for exactly what you'd expect. The whole "what would you do if you could stop time" premise gets real explicit real fast, and honestly? It's refreshing to see a game that doesn't pretend otherwise.

The yaoi elements blend surprisingly well with the fantasy setting - there's this whole magical academy backdrop that gives context to why time magic exists, but let's be real, nobody's here for the worldbuilding. When our MC discovers he can freeze moments and mess around with whoever catches his eye, things escalate quickly. The art style captures those frozen expressions perfectly, which adds this weird voyeuristic layer that works better than it should. Some scenes drag on too long though, like the developers got carried away with their own concept. The dialogue tries to be clever about the whole time paradox thing but mostly just serves as setup for the next steamy encounter.

What caught me off guard was how the game handles consequences - or rather, how it completely ignores them for most of the runtime. You'd think there'd be some cosmic punishment for abusing temporal powers, but the story seems more interested in exploring every possible scenario our time-stopping protagonist can get into. The fantasy elements feel almost secondary to the gay romance and explicit content, which isn't necessarily bad but makes the genre tags feel a bit misleading. By the end, you're left wondering if the whole time manipulation gimmick was just an excuse to create the ultimate power fantasy scenario. Works for what it is, I guess, but don't expect any deep philosophical questions about free will or temporal ethics.

Katy didn’t plan to end up surrounded by horny girls in tight uniforms, but that’s exactly where she lands - a pristine academy that looks innocent until you realize every hallway hides someone’s dirty secret. She’s supposed to blend in, keep her little “extra” part a secret, but the game doesn’t really let you stay quiet for long. You start with harmless stuff - chatting, exploring the dorms, helping classmates with “projects” - and before you know it, someone’s bending over a desk, and you’re wondering if you should stop or push a little further. The writing’s cheeky in that way: it teases you, then drops you into something filthy before you can think twice. It’s not subtle, but it doesn’t need to be.

What makes it weirdly addictive is how casual everything feels. You’re just living a day, checking your phone, picking what to do next, and suddenly you’re watching two girls making out behind the gym while pretending to study. There’s a voyeur vibe, but also this trainer-like loop where you shape Katy’s reputation - saint, slut, or both. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s just hot. The corruption part sneaks up on you; one moment she’s shy, the next she’s spanking her roommate for “discipline practice.” It’s messy, inconsistent, and that’s what makes it feel alive. The sandbox part gives you freedom, but it also means you’ll waste time doing dumb stuff like walking across campus just to peek through a window. Worth it though.

The art? Yeah, the girls look good - soft skin, big tits, that glossy anime sheen that makes you stare too long. But it’s the little things that stick: the sound of a zipper, the blush when someone realizes what Katy’s packing, the way control slips away during a scene. It’s horny, sure, but also kind of funny how everyone pretends it’s normal. Maybe it is, in this place. Maybe that’s the point.