Okay so the first time I played From the Top I literally rolled my eyes at the setup. Oh wow another summer vacation mystery with a best friend who works in the film industry, how very Nancy Drew of you. But then the game hits you with a dead body and suddenly my jaded gay ass is sitting up straight. The whole thing has this weird unpolished charm like someone scanned their own pencil sketches directly into Ren'Py and said "yeah that's fine ship it." And honestly? It works. The jank becomes part of the vibe. You're not here for 4K ray traced dicks, you're here because the producer guy with the terrible goatee is giving you bedroom eyes at a wrap party and you need to know if he's a murderer or just emotionally unavailable.
The corruption tag is doing a lot of heavy lifting here but not in the way you'd think. It's less "demon lord claims your soul" and more "the entertainment industry will chew you up and you might discover you're into that." There's this one scene with a director who's clearly been in the business too long, the way he talks about "trading favors" while his hand creeps up your thigh, and the game doesn't moralize about it. You can lean in or pull back and the multiple endings actually fork hard enough that I replayed three times. The coming out stuff feels real too, messy and not wrapped in a neat little bow. Some characters accept you instantly, others get that tight lipped "I'm not homophobic but" energy that made my skin crawl.
What I don't get is why the inventory system exists. It's there, it does nothing, you collect like three items total and one is just a keycard you use immediately. I spent twenty minutes thinking I missed something. Also the translation has these beautiful moments where a character will say something like "I am feeling very suspicious about this situation" with the emotional range of a Google Translate output. And yet. The romance routes surprised me. One of the actors, the closeted one doing action films, his route got genuinely tender in ways I didn't expect from a game where the UI looks like a PowerPoint presentation. The sex scenes are explicit without being mechanical, you know? Like actual fumbling and hesitation and then that shift when someone decides to just go for it. Anyway I forgot where I was going with this. The sound design is three stock tracks on loop and I muted it after ten minutes. Still worth it for the producer's goatee alone.