The first time you click on your stepmother’s sleeping form, the game doesn’t ask if you’re sure. It just lets your cursor hover, then click, then drag. And her nightgown shifts. Just a little. Just enough. The animation is clunky, a 3DCG puppet with plastic skin and hair that doesn’t quite move right, but something about that stillness makes it worse. Better. I don’t know.

Thief of Hearts sells itself as a heist game. You plan robberies, pick a crew, do the whole Ocean’s Eleven thing but with more incest. The actual crime mechanics are barely there, a series of binary choices wrapped in text boxes. What you’re really stealing are glances. Moments. Your character lurks in doorways while his mother showers, the camera angled through a crack in the doorframe. You watch your classmate change after gym class, her bra strap leaving red marks on her shoulders. The voyeurism isn’t a side activity. It’s the whole point. The robberies are just something to do between these long, quiet stretches of watching.

There’s a scene in the school library where you can choose to help a girl reach a book on a high shelf. If you do, the camera locks onto her ass as she stretches. If you don’t, she struggles for a while and then leaves. That’s it. That’s the choice. The game is full of these moments, these tiny perversions that don’t lead anywhere except deeper into your own head. The group sex scenes unlock later, all tangled limbs and repetitive moans, but they feel almost clinical compared to the slow burn of the earlier groping sequences. The milf character, your stepmother, has these dead eyes that follow you across the room. I spent twenty minutes just circling her, testing the sightlines. She never blinks.

The corruption path is weirdly moralistic. You can be a “charming rogue” or give in to darker impulses, but the game judges you either way. I picked the charming options and still ended up jerking off in a closet while my stepsister did her homework in the next room. The handjob animations are stiff, the vaginal sex scenes clip through furniture, and the oral sex sounds like someone eating soup. But I kept playing. Not because it was good, but because it knew exactly what I was doing and refused to look away. Neither did I.

A thief takes what isn’t his. That’s the metaphor, I guess. The game hammers it home with every stolen touch, every quiet moment of trespass. By the end, I wasn’t sure if I was the one playing or the one being played. The final heist involves stealing a painting called “The Heart,” which is so on the nose it wraps back around to honest. I failed the mission on purpose just to see what would happen. The game let me. It always lets you.