That moment when the strip poker minigame kicks in and you realize the animation work is actually better than some paid VNs I've played on itch.io. Not saying much, I know, but the way the clothes come off has this deliberate weight to it, you know? Like someone actually thought about fabric physics instead of just making tits magically teleport out of a bra. The rest of the game looks like it was rendered on a potato from 2014 though. Weird contrast.
The protagonist is this edgy fucker with a dark past who rolls into Solace City and immediately starts poking around missing girls cases because he's got nothing better to do apparently. The writing tries so hard to be noir but ends up somewhere between a philosophy major's livejournal and a hardboiled detective parody that doesn't know it's a parody. I actually snorted when a character dropped "God is dead; morality is a lie" completely unironically in a scene about campus corruption. But here's where it gets strange, I kept clicking. The mystery hooks are genuinely decent once you accept the cringe. Something about a university with secrets and this whole web of lies that actually made me want to see the next thread unravel. The romance options are whatever, standard visual novel fare, but there's this one scene with a character I won't spoil where the stripping game transitions into something more animated and suddenly I forgot all about the janky 3D models.
The minigames are hit or miss. Strip poker is the highlight obviously, but there's other stuff that just feels like padding. I got stuck on some bullshit puzzle for ten minutes wondering why I wasn't just clicking through dialogue like a normal degenerate. The violence tag is earned though, some choices lead to genuinely nasty outcomes and the game doesn't shy away from showing consequences. Male protag makes some fucked up decisions if you go full merciless route. Which I did, obviously, because being a virtuous savior is for cowards. What was I talking about? Right, the animation. For a game that looks this rough around the edges, the lewd scenes have no business being that smooth. Life's mysteries.