Fucking around with the lesson of passion series is always a trip because you know exactly what you’re getting, a slideshow where you click and sometimes a titty pops out. Mark is this basketball captain, right, and the whole school setup is so aggressively 2007 newgrounds that my phone almost overheated from the cringe nostalgia. You got the blonde, the uniform, the weirdly shiny 3d models that look like they were rendered on a potato. I spent way too long just staring at the way his neck connects to his shoulders, it’s like a geometry problem gone wrong.

The main thing is Samantha, the girl with the slut rep, and the game doesn’t even pretend there’s a romance. It’s just a sequence of him being a horndog and her eventually giving in during some lesson. There’s a scene in a classroom where the dialogue is so flat it loops back around to being hilarious, like “oh mark your muscles are so big” and then the clothes just vanish. No animation really, just a model swap to a nude state. I wish the backgrounds weren’t so empty, feels like they forgot to put desks in half the rooms, but that’s never getting fixed.

Honestly the replayability for a roguelike sicko like me is zero, but that’s not the point. The point is you click through this power fantasy where being the captain means you can just bone whoever. The explicit parts are functional, you see the polygons clip together and it’s so unpolished it’s almost avant garde. Like, the dev knew we weren’t here for a coherent plot. I keep thinking about how the basketball court is just a texture on a flat plane, no hoops, nothing. That’s the real lesson of passion i guess. The game just ends and you’re like, okay, back to my spreadsheet.