I got this game, "Strip Blackjack in the Park," from a itch.io bundle, the one with like 47 games for five bucks, you know the type. The whole thing runs in browser, no download, which is good because my hard drive is a mess. The real model is this skinny girl in shorts, standing outside, and she's got this dead look in her eyes, like she's thinking about her taxes or something. The art is, uh, it's photos, actual photos, but they're so compressed it looks like a jpeg from 2003, which honestly adds to the whole weird vibe.

The blackjack itself. The dealer AI is a cheater, I swear. I had 19, the bubble popped and she's pulling 21 out of nowhere, four times in a row. The arcade part is just you clicking on floating bubbles to reveal your cards, and sometimes the bubble catcher thing just doesn't register, you click and nothing happens, the bubble floats off screen and you lose your turn. It's infuriating. But then she loses a hand and the strip part kicks in, and it's just a new photo, same pose, same park background, but now the shorts are gone. The numbers on the cards are tiny, I had to squint. My favorite moment was when I got a blackjack and the game froze for a solid ten seconds, I thought my browser crashed, and then her top just vanished, no animation, just gone. It's so clunky it's almost charming, like a broken animatronic.

The sound is... there's no sound. Completely silent. I had to put on a lo-fi playlist from YouTube just to fill the void, and now I can't listen to that one track without thinking of this girl's thousand-yard stare. The striptease isn't a tease, it's just a slideshow of five increasingly nude images. The last one, she's not even looking at the camera, she's looking at something off to the left, a squirrel maybe. I don't know why I kept playing for an hour, but I did.