Arabian Nights vibe but horny and kind of dumb in a good way. That is Exiles for me. You start as this broke orphan in Dumat al-Julfar, doing the servant grind, and the game just throws you into this messy mix of “save the world” and “oops I accidentally saw my mistress naked in the bathhouse” energy. It jumps from serious plot to lewd chaos so fast that at first I thought I misclicked a Ren’Py skip or something. One moment you’re getting lectured about loyalty and duty, next moment you’re pinned against a silk curtain while your patron’s spoiled daughter decides she’s tired of using her fingers and wants your tongue instead. It doesn’t ask if you’re ready for that shift, it just does it. And somehow it works. Kind of like the oldschool era when people played CoC on their school laptop during “homework” and pretended it was just text based RPG.

What I really like is how the scale slowly creeps up. You start cleaning floors and carrying trays in this rich merchant’s house and you think “ok harem sim in fake Arabia, I know this drill” and then suddenly the whole thing opens up into sea travel, cold lands, strange gods, and you’re still the same idiot who gets distracted by cleavage during a world ending prophecy. There was a scene on the ship where a storm is going crazy, crew is panicking, and your main love interest is like “if we die I want to feel you inside me at least once” and she drags you behind some cargo. Wind, rain, her trying to keep quiet while riding you, while the captain is shouting orders on the deck above. That one stuck in my brain. Then later, way north, you’re in some snow covered temple with a warrior priestess, and the dev just goes “yeah, sure, blowjob in front of a half frozen altar, why not”. It has that horny teenager energy but written by someone who actually reads books and still remembers how to be stupid.

The game doesn’t polish itself clean, which I respect. Some pacing is all over the place. You get this nice, slow teasing with your patron, all flirting and almost touching, and then the next girl you meet basically climbs you like a tree after two dialog choices and I was like “ok, calm down, at least pretend you know my name”. Some scenes feel like they were written after too much coffee and then never edited. There’s this bit where you’re talking about the fate of the world and it suddenly turns into a long rant about the price of dates in the market, and I still don’t know if that was supposed to be funny or just leftover draft. Also the UI for backtracking certain choices feels slightly annoying. Not broken, just that tiny itch, like the kind where you keep misclicking on mobile Pornhub because the banner jumps. But the characters carry the whole thing. The shy scholar girl who looks like she’d faint if you say “cock” out loud, then ends up riding your face in a dusty library while you’re supposed to study magic. The icy northern warrior who looks like she’ll gut you, then can’t stop shaking when you finally get her out of that armor and she begs you to go rougher. The game plays like a long term relationship with a very chaotic person: lots of fun sex, a few groan moments, sometimes you roll your eyes, and then it hits you with a scene so hot or so sweet you forgive everything without even trying.