The first alien you meet has three tits and no concept of personal space. I mean that literally, she just walks up and starts poking at your suit seals like she's trying to figure out where the zipper is. The animation is janky as hell, her hand clips right through your chestplate, but honestly? That almost makes it hotter. Something about the unpolishedness, the way the frames stutter when she finally gets the helmet off and her weird bioluminescent tongue does that thing. You know the thing. The spiral thing.

The colony management stuff is whatever. Pick a planet, build a hab, try not to run out of oxygen. Standard. But every time you send a scout to make contact with the locals, it turns into this whole production. There's a scene with a diplomat from the methane ocean world who communicates entirely through pheromones and what I can only describe as aggressive tentacle massage. The voice acting is absent, just text boxes and these looping animation cycles that sometimes desync so the moaning continues for a solid ten seconds after the dialogue moves on. It's broken in a way that loops back around to being art.

My favorite moment, and I'm still not sure if it was intentional or a bug, happened during the first contact with the silicon based lifeforms. The game glitched and spawned three of them instead of one. The dialogue didn't change, but the animations stacked. Just this pile of crystalline limbs and the protagonist's face doing the same surprised expression on repeat. I screenshotted it. Sent it to the group chat. Nobody responded. They don't get it. The game's got this whole interracial thing going on across every planet, humans and aliens figuring out compatibility in ways that would make a xenobiologist quit their job. The hentai influence is obvious in the proportions and the, uh, creative anatomy. One species doesn't even have a recognizable face, just a smooth head and a mouth that opens in four directions. The scene where they negotiate trade agreements while that mouth is doing something unspeakable under the conference table lives rent free in my brain. I can't look at diplomatic summits the same way anymore.