The first route I cleared was Lucas, and I still can't decide if the devs hate him or understand something about male vulnerability that most otome games are too scared to touch. There's this scene in the library archives where he's explaining the university's founding charter, and the text just keeps going about municipal land grants while the sprite is doing this thing with his collar. You know the thing. Where the fabric pulls just slightly against his throat when he swallows. I had to put my phone down. Not because of the exposition dump about property law, but because I realized I was holding my breath waiting for the next swallow. The game doesn't even acknowledge this as a moment. It's buried under three paragraphs of worldbuilding about the city's original seven families.

The mystery plot is genuinely interesting when it remembers to exist. Something about the old observatory and a student who disappeared in the 70s. I think. Honestly I was too distracted by how the dialogue system works, where you can interrupt characters mid-sentence by tapping the screen, and different guys react differently. Marcus gets flustered and loses his train of thought. Professor Aldric gives you this look that made me actually apologize out loud to my phone. I'm not proud of that. The game doesn't tell you this mechanic exists by the way. I discovered it by accident when I dropped my phone during a scene and my thumb hit the screen. Suddenly I'm cutting off the dean mid-lecture and he's just staring at me with this expression that's equal parts annoyed and something else I can't name.

The sex scenes are weirdly paced. There's this one with Theo in the greenhouse that starts so abruptly I thought my game had glitched and skipped three dialogue trees. One minute we're discussing botany, the next his hand is somewhere that definitely isn't in the course syllabus. But then it keeps going. And going. The CGs don't cycle like you'd expect, they just hold on these single frames while the text gets increasingly specific about sounds and textures. I'm not complaining exactly. It's just that most games treat the climax as the endpoint, and this one treats it like a midpoint, and then you have to sit there afterward while the characters deal with what just happened. Theo cried. Not in a sexy way. In a way that made me feel like I'd walked in on something private, which is ridiculous because I'm the one who chose the dialogue option that led there.

I wish the game would stop pretending the stat-raising matters. You can completely ignore the investigation mechanics and the routes still progress fine. The game clearly knows this too, because sometimes it'll just auto-succeed a check with a message like "your intuition fills in the gaps" which feels passive-aggressive. Like yes, thank you, I know I've been choosing dialogue based on which response sounds hottest rather than which one advances the mystery. You don't have to rub it in.

The sound design deserves a mention. Not the music, which is fine, but the ambient stuff. Footsteps on different surfaces. The way the audio cuts out completely during certain revelations. There's a scene in the swimming pool at night where you can hear water lapping against tiles and nothing else, and it's the most erotic thing in the entire game despite nobody even touching. I had to close my laptop and just sit with that for a while. When I came back, I'd missed a timed choice and the scene had moved on without me. The game doesn't let you replay individual scenes either, which is either a bold artistic choice or just poor UI design. I'm leaning toward the latter but I can't stop thinking about it either way.