There’s this weird cozy-horny vibe to Growth Academy that kinda sneaks up on you. At first it feels like some chill school-life VN where you just arrived on this hidden island college, meet a couple of classmates with too-big sweaters and oddly shy teachers, and you think “ok, normal harem setup, I know this”. Then suddenly someone’s boobs are stretching her uniform day by day, another girl’s ass doesn’t fit in her chair anymore, and the game just treats it like it’s as normal as exchanging Line IDs. I liked that actually. Nobody is screaming “oh no I am a freak of nature”, it is more like “my tits grew two sizes again, can you help me carry my books” and then five minutes later you are face first in her cleavage. The whole place feels like a horny rehab center where the cure is more sex. Also the island lore is lowkey interesting even when you came only to see giant jiggling body parts crash into doorframes. I kept telling myself “okay one more scene then I close it and touch grass” and suddenly I’m trying to max out affection with a girl whose thighs could crush a small car, just because I wanted to see what happens if she really lets go during sex. Spoiler: she does not hold back.

The erotic part leans hard into growth, but it does not rush. Some routes are very slow burn, you watch a girl’s body change over many days, clothes getting tighter, camera angles getting more pervy, your MC pretending he is surprised even though you obviously keep choosing the horny dialogue. One of my favorite moments was sneaking into the dorm at night and the game casually drops a sleep sex scene like “oh yeah this is a thing here”. No drama, just you sliding under the covers, touching big warm flesh in the dark while the UI quietly pops up new corruption flags. Then later the same girl acts all innocent in class, except she can’t button her shirt anymore and the teacher keeps looking and you feel like everyone is lying to each other and it turns you on more. There’s futa stuff, lesbian scenes behind the gym, some dommy girls that use you like a toy, a succubus who basically blackmails you with your own dick, group sessions that feel like a school project gone very wrong, and a few “oh shit, did that just count as cheating” moments that made me pause for like two seconds before clicking “continue”. I wish they would stop teasing pregnancy and then not go full explicit with it, but I get it, I still hate it. Also there’s this whole persona-ish schedule and dungeon tone in the background where you manage days, build stats, poke at mysteries, but half the time I forgot about the big island secret and just chased bigger tits and thicker asses like some caveman with a smartphone. It’s messy, horny, kind of clumsy at times, some scenes hit like top tier hentai, some feel like they were written at 4% brain battery, but it has that “one more click” energy that makes you keep an incognito tab open way longer than you plan.

You wake up in this fucked up little pocket of reality that feels like someone mixed a murder scene with a wet dream and forgot to clean either part. There’s wax on the floor, candles half melted, and a skeleton that won’t shut up about fate and sin like a drunk philosopher on Discord at 5 in the morning. You’re supposed to be a detective, right, the serious type, solving cases and writing reports, but the game keeps poking at you, like it knows what kind of shit you watch in incognito mode. The demon girl in the cell looks at you like she’s already seen every bad thought you ever had about your teacher, your neighbor, that one milf on Instagram with the suspiciously perfect big tits. She talks slow, teasing, like she’s unwrapping your brain the way most hentai girls unwrap a cock, and the creepy thing is she’s not even wrong. The whole thing feels like an interrogation where you’re the one getting stripped.

It pretends to be horror at first, with this prison that doesn’t follow normal logic, doors that appear where there was only stone, and reality bending around your choices, but then it starts slipping in sex like it’s nothing. One minute you’re checking a crime scene, the next you’re spying through a keyhole at some girl in a school uniform getting “tutored” a little too hard by a futa teacher with a cock that obviously breaks school rules. You follow one lead and end up watching a corrupted housewife kneel down and take a slow, messy blowjob that turns into a creampie she’s totally not supposed to enjoy, because she still has a husband somewhere in this story, I think. The game doesn’t stop there. It keeps pushing the whole cheating thing, netorase stuff, voyeur scenes where you’re told to watch, to record, to blackmail. The demon keeps asking which choice turns you on more, the broken girl begging for more or the proud one who ends up collared and slapped until she does what she’s told. There are pixel art bits that somehow feel dirtier than the “serious” 3D renders, like when a tiny growing girl slowly turns into a giantess and pins a terrified, naked succubus under her ass, grinding on her face like it’s some casual Tuesday. And you think, I didn’t ask for that, but yeah, I kind of did.

What I really care about, and the game kind of half-asses, is the interface. For something with this much psychological stuff and roleplaying choices, it acts like everyone has perfect eyesight, perfect reflexes, perfect mouse control. Tiny dialogue text on bright backgrounds with fancy fonts that look nice for ten seconds, then start to hurt. There’s a lot of clicking through long scenes, especially the slow burn corruption parts, and no real “hey, my hands get tired, can I use my keyboard more” options. You can’t bump font size without going into awkward system zooms like you’re reading a PDF from 2009. There are sound cues for important choices, but no real detailed volume sliders, so if you have sensitive hearing or use headphones because, you know, you don’t want your whole house hearing a futanari nun spanking a schoolgirl until she squirts, you’re stuck juggling Windows mixer and hoping the demon doesn’t suddenly moan at full blast. The sex scenes are hot, sure, in that messy mix of bdsm, femdom, incest hints, sleep sex, pregnancy scares and “she says no at first but then she’s dripping” way that a lot of adult games push, and the sandboxy structure lets you stalk characters, watch them in showers, tease them with toys, push them toward group sex in the “wrong” route. But for a game that loves fucking with your head about control and consent, it doesn’t give you much control over basic comfort. No colorblind modes for clue highlighting, no text-to-speech hooks, no simple way to slow down auto-advance if you process English slower than native speakers. It wants to dig into your secret kinks like it’s reading your diary, yet it treats access like an afterthought, like if you can’t keep up with fast text and tiny buttons then you’re not invited to the orgy. Which is kind of funny, because the whole story is about doors that shouldn’t exist, but when I actually need a door like “bigger UI” or “less click spam” that one never appears.

Erik comes back to this private island after a year away and the whole place feels like it’s holding its breath. That is basically the mood of the novel. Sunburnt paradise, empty villa, two twins walking around each other like they’re scared to breathe too hard because one wrong look and they are ready to fuck on the nearest piece of furniture. The story sticks you inside their heads a lot, both him and Lyna, and it hits that awkward horny childhood memory vibe, where you remember things you shouldn’t have stared at, touches that lasted a bit too long, late showers with thin walls. There is no “click this, choose that”, you just sit there and watch the tension grow while they pretend to be normal. It feels slow for a while, almost like the author is teasing you on purpose, with stupidly wholesome things like headpats, soft hugs, holding hands on the couch under some trashy Netflix show. Then there is that first real look, the moment he realizes her ass is not “little sister” anymore, and you can basically hear his brain break in silence. I run NSFW events, I saw people do kink performances in public, and still that quiet bedroom scene with nothing but eye contact and careful breathing felt filthier than a gangbang.

When it starts to go over the line, it really does not bother to pretend it is classy. You get a lot of dirty family talk, like, they lean into the taboo instead of hiding it. She teases him while he is trying to be the responsible one, climbs onto his lap, grinds slow, makes him admit he’s been watching her sleep. There is POV stuff that feels almost too personal, like you are the one between her thighs while she still calls you “bro” and says she shouldn’t like it this much. The game flips between him and her sometimes, and that makes the corruption hit harder, because you see how she talks about being a virgin and in the next chapter she is planning how to get his tongue between her legs without him running away. There is also a lot of focus on small physical kinks: toes on his lips, her foot pressing on his cock while she pretends to watch the waves, her sitting on his face like it’s totally normal. Then their mom Helga is on her way to the villa, and the vibe shifts again. She is not just “MILF appears, dicks out”. She has her own messy thing going on, a controlling presence, a bit of soft female dom energy, and she changes how both twins act. One moment it is this romantic, almost sweet incest bubble, and the next it is him getting jerked off under the table while Helga talks about family values and pregnancy like some twisted sermon. I actually hated one thing: there is a throwaway bit with a phone notification mid-scene, totally killed my rhythm, and then the story never mentions that chat again. It lives rent free in my brain. Still, when the anal and titfuck and all the other stuff finally explode after so much build up, it feels less like porn clips glued together and more like you followed two idiots all the way from “I will just hug you” to “I am going to fill my sister on the same bed we used as kids”. It’s wrong, it’s hot, it’s surprisingly emotional, and it really does not apologize for any of it.

Neuro/Splice feels like someone grabbed a cyberpunk thriller, a fucked‑up body swap fetish, and a humiliation dungeon, blendered it together, and then forgot to clean the mess off the walls. In a good way. You’ve got this cop Ryke, corporate dog for NexaCorp, who ends up jammed into Cassie’s body, tossed straight into a mixed‑gender max security prison that looks like a cross between a riot and a sex club that never closes. He’s a guy in his head, stuck in this soft, dangerous female body, surrounded by assholes who think she’s just fresh meat. Guards grope when they feel like it, inmates test boundaries with “accidental” touches that are not even slightly accidental, and every little mistake you make, the game slaps you back with some brutal teasing or public humiliation. There’s this early scene where you misjudge who to talk to in the yard and instead of a simple “game over”, you end up pressed against a fence, hand forced between Cassie’s legs in front of half the block while some guard laughs and pretends it’s a “routine check”. That whole vibe of “you wanted to be the hero, now suck it up” never really stops. It keeps poking at the fantasy of control, then yanking it away. If you’re expecting soft cuddly romance, you loaded the wrong tab in your browser.

The wild part is that while Ryke is getting his ass metaphorically and literally beaten in Cassie’s skin, Cassie wakes up in his male body on the other side of the fence with all the power he used to enjoy. Suddenly the hunted rebel girl is the scary dude in uniform, walking down halls where people flinch when she passes. She can abuse that. Hard. Use her new status to harass coworkers, push underlings around, “search” suspects with hands that stay way too long in the wrong places. There’s this interrogation room scene where you can lean into full male domination, pushing a nervous female tech against the table, fingers slipping exactly where HR would have a heart attack, all under the excuse of “investigation procedure”. Or you can pretend to be decent while constantly edging the line, which is almost worse. The game loves turning basic choices into fetish traps. Say the polite thing, you still get dragged into some forced stripping in the showers later. Try to act tough, you get chained up, spanked, and mocked like a bratty girl who forgot her place. It toys with netorare stuff in a really sneaky way too. People talk about “Cassie” like she’s a thing that can be used, and you know it’s Ryke in there screaming, but the body reacts, the nipples harden, the thighs tremble, and the game does not let you pretend that isn’t hot. Meanwhile, outside the prison, Cassie in Ryke’s body gets chances to steal other people’s lovers, ruin relationships, and then walk away like it was nothing. It hits that nasty “I stole your girl and she liked it better” kink and then just moves on like it never happened. Honestly, I wish they toned nothing down. The more it kicks at comfort zones, the more it actually feels alive.

Not Too Refined hits that weird sweet spot where everything looks polite on the surface and underneath it’s just… sticky. You’re in Laurel’s skin, this pretty young wife in a nice, quiet life that feels like it smells of fabric softener and passive aggression. The game doesn’t scream sex at you in the first second, it kind of hums it in your ear, slow, like a guilty thought you shouldn’t be having in the shower. You hear that soft ambient music, a little melancholy, like Spotify’s “late night thinking about my mistakes” playlist, and it sets the tone while you poke around in her daily routine. At first you’re just noticing how her husband is there but not really there, how conversations feel too polite, how the silence between them is louder than any moan in the game. Then the camera lingers a bit too long on her big ass when she bends, or on a hand that rests too close to her thigh, and suddenly the whole mood shifts. It still pretends to be a drama, but everyone’s eyes are constantly undressing her. It’s like those old NTR comics you pretend you don’t read, but here the pacing is slower, more patient, like the corruption is sliding under her skin instead of splashing on her face at once.

The best scenes are the ones where you feel like some kind of horny ghost, watching everything. You get this voyeur vibe when Laurel is trying to be a good wife in public, but the neckline is a bit lower than before, the skirt a bit tighter, and you know half the room is staring at her tits or her ass while her husband is on his phone. There’s a moment where she’s talking to another guy and the sound design does this sneaky thing: the music gets softer and you really hear the wet little click of her lips when she swallows, like she’s already thinking about putting his cock there instead. It’s subtle, then it’s not subtle at all when she’s kneeling later, messy spit on her chin, doing oral that feels more like surrender than fun. The game likes that contrast: soft-lit 3D scenes with this “nice girl” face, while her hand is wrapped around a stranger’s shaft, pumping him like she’s trying to forget her wedding vows on purpose. You can go from a quiet emotional talk with her husband to watching her get her pussy creampied by someone who absolutely isn’t him, and the fucked up thing is the story makes it feel kind of logical. Not wholesome, but like a train wreck you helped build, choice by choice.

What makes it hit harder is how the corruption doesn’t flip on all at once. You can keep her trying to resist, or you can push her into cheating, little by little. A touch that lingers too long. Letting someone grope her in a crowded space while she pretends she doesn’t like it, even though her breathing sound starts to change. A “just once” blowjob turning into her on her knees again, this time outside, half hidden, that exhibitionism rush buzzing in your chest because anyone could look. Sometimes the game goes full interracial kink and the contrast is front and center, his darker hands roaming her pale body, fingers digging into her big ass while she clings to him like she’s about to float away. Her moans get louder, more shameless, and you notice she doesn’t sound like that with her husband. Or maybe that’s just in your head. There’s this gross, delicious NTR tension when you know hubby is nearby or texting her something sweet, while she’s busy taking hot cum deep inside and then walking back home with it still dripping inside her. You get multiple endings too, some where she clings to who she was, others where the “good wife” mask is just gone and she’s this fully corrupted, hungry thing who likes being watched, touched, used. The game is kind of romantic, then it turns around and laughs in your face and gives you a scene where she’s getting railed in a way that sounds like flesh slapping meat in a cheap motel. Honestly I loved the pacing and also it annoyed me because sometimes I wanted her naked faster, but the slow burn makes the eventual groping, the first time she spreads her legs for someone else, the messy creampie you know she won’t confess… all of that feel heavier. Wrong, hot, and a bit too real if you ever stared at a ring on your finger and thought “what if I just break everything tonight.”

Island Sun feels like someone took a guilty-pleasure soap opera, locked it in a resort hotel room, and whispered “you can be a bad girl now” in its ear. You play as Wendy, early 30s, blonde, thick in all the right places, with a fat ass that the camera clearly loves way more than her husband does. She’s supposed to be living that sweet island dream with Henry, but it takes like five minutes to realize the real vacation is about how many rules you can quietly break. The whole thing runs like a visual novel on autopilot at first: nice beach, sunny streets, people way too friendly for no reason. Then you notice how often dialogues turn into “innocent” touches, “accidental” gropes, and those camera angles that just stay on her tits for a bit too long. You click “joke back” once and suddenly an NPC’s hand is on her thigh and she’s not pulling away very fast.

The choices hit harder than they look, even when the game pretends they don’t. You get those fake safe ones like “be polite” vs “flirt a little” and you think, ok, nothing wild. Two scenes later that polite option has Wendy drinking with some local dude and you’re watching her slowly slide from shy small talk into doing a blowjob in a dark corner of the resort bar, trying not to ruin her lipstick. Sometimes she resists, sometimes she just… leans into it, and that’s where the corruption part starts to feel dirty in a good way. One moment you’re helping her keep her marriage intact, next moment she’s grinding on a sunbed with a stranger’s hand under her bikini, and she’s thinking about Henry for like half a second before her eyes roll back. I liked that some scenes don’t go full porn right away. You get a handjob behind a palm tree, or a quick suck in a hot tub while the bartender pretends not to see, before the game starts throwing rougher stuff in your face. There’s this one scene in a hotel hallway where a guy just pushes her back to the wall and kisses her like he owns her, and her body gives in long before her brain does. You can shut it down if you want, but it really feels like you’re fighting against the game’s own horny gravity.

What really caught me is how the island itself becomes kinda like a pervy character. You start to recognize places as “oh yeah, that’s where I let the gym trainer pull her bikini top down” or “that’s the spot she kneeled between that muscular guy’s legs and tried to take his whole cock in her mouth while the ocean was behind them.” The resort feels safe on the surface, but every door you click is another chance for Wendy to cheat, or almost cheat, or pretend it was an accident while cum is still drying on her lips. The corruption curve is uneven in a way that feels human. One day she’s acting like a horny slut, swallowing a load in a hotel room while her wedding ring glows in the light, next day she’s blushing like crazy because somebody grabs her ass in the pool and you’re like, girl, after what you did yesterday? Some people will hate that, but I kinda enjoyed that she’s not just instantly turning into a porn robot. Just don’t expect the story to respect your morals too much. You say “I’ll keep her faithful” and then the game hits you with a slow, teasing massage scene where the guy’s fingers slide under her panties in the most casual way, and her moans get a little too loud, and suddenly that promise feels fragile as fuck. By the time you’re making choices about who she spreads her legs for, the island already changed her, and honestly, you probably helped.

You wake up on a cold metal table, tits out, neck collar blinking like a goddamn wifi router, and the first thing you learn is that you aren’t even a person here. You’re property. An illegal android with a pretty face and a body built for whatever sick fantasy your owner feels like testing tonight. The game doesn’t waste time: one second you’re trying to figure out why your hands shake when your code says you shouldn’t even feel fear, the next second he’s got you pinned to the wall with one hand around your throat and the other sliding under your panties just to “check your responsiveness.” That’s the vibe. Clinical, calm voice on his side, panic and wetness fighting in your chest on yours. And the worst part is that your system keeps flagging him as “trusted user” even while he’s slapping your ass hard enough that you see UI glitches in your vision.

It’s not only about getting used like a toy. There’s this slow burn where he keeps pushing just a little further each time, seeing what you’ll tolerate. One day it’s forced stripping in front of cameras, “for data collection.” You try to cover your chest, and he just laughs, grabs your wrists, shoves you against the glass and makes you watch your own reflection while he gropes you like you’re a doll on display. Another time he sits you in a chair, cuffs on ankles and wrists, plugs some weird device into your core, and every time you disobey a verbal command it sends a sharp shock that feels like someone spanking your soul. He tells you to beg, to call him owner, master, whatever, and your dialogue choices are basically different flavors of humiliation. Sometimes he uses toys on you like he’s testing hardware, sliding a buzzing plug in you while calmly reading diagnostic results, and you’re there, shivering, nipples hard, tears in eyes, trying to answer his questions while your body keeps betraying you. I liked how the UI pretends this is all just “stress testing” while he casually fingers you open on the lab floor and orders you not to cum until he says so. Of course you fail. Of course he punishes you for it.

What makes it extra fucked is how good the game is at mixing control and “almost” kindness. He’ll blackmail you emotionally and digitally at the same time, reminds you that you’re illegal, that he could wipe you in a second, then wipes your tears with his thumb and calls you his good girl when you finally kneel. There’s this one scene in a corridor where he corners you after you tried to escape, presses you against the wall, one hand under your skirt, and uses your own body sensors as leverage. “You feel that? That’s not fear, that’s arousal. Your code wants this.” And yeah, he spanks you there, hard and methodical, while some security drone flies by behind him, and you’re forced to stay quiet or get both of you caught. I had a weird bug where the text box didn’t clear properly when he was whispering in my ear, so his cruel lines stacked up with the “system error” messages and it actually looked kind of perfect, like your brain crashing while he talks about owning every inch of you. Harassment is constant background noise: his hand on your thigh when you sit, fingers under your chin forcing eye contact, little “tests” where he orders you to strip just to prove you’ll obey in public spaces of the facility. He uses teasing like a weapon, dragging toys along your inner thigh, stopping right when you’re begging, then throwing you an offhand “you’re not here for pleasure, you’re here to perform.” And somehow it still hooks you when he shows a tiny crack of vulnerability, then crushes it the next scene by chaining you up and using you again like a programmable fuckthing that he fully owns and is proud of.

This one feels like when you were a teenager hiding in your room with crappy headphones, playing GTA on a tiny screen and pausing every time someone walked by, but now it grew up, got tits, and started doing mafia shit. You play this woman who looks like she should be on some rich guy’s yacht, but instead she’s stuck dealing with thugs, dirty money, “family business,” and her own fucked-up past that never really shuts up. She’s tough, but not superhero tough. More like: sometimes she smokes in silence, sometimes she wants to fuck someone’s brains out just to forget, sometimes she looks at the city lights and you know she’s thinking, “If I jump sides now, who shoots me first?” The game lets you tease, stall, and pull back a lot. Foreplay is practically a mechanic. There are whole scenes where nothing “big” happens, she just leans in too close, plays with a guy’s expectations, arches her back so those massive tits are right in frame, then walks away like “not yet.” And yeah, eventually it’s not just teasing. When clothes start coming off, they really come off. You get her pressed on cold cars, bent over expensive desks, riding a guy who should probably be at some mafia meeting but is instead buried in her ass while she’s half moaning, half threatening him. Her body is like its own character: big chest, hips that don’t even pretend to be subtle, that kind of ass where even walking across a room looks like a lap dance. There’s a bit where she’s negotiating with some asshole, pretending to be all serious, then she just sits on the edge of his desk like it’s nothing and crosses her legs slow. The camera knows exactly where you’re looking. It’s uncomfortably real in that “I should not be this horny while they’re talking about murder” kind of way.

I like how it mixes all this heavy crime drama with sexual tension that never fully goes away. Sometimes you’re choosing if she stays loyal to one side or sells them out for another, and right after that you’re choosing if she lets a guy taste her or just grind on him till he’s begging. At one point she’s half naked in a dim room, with city lights outside, talking about revenge like it’s a dirty secret, and the scene is so long I started wondering if my phone bugged out. It didn’t. They just wanted me to stare at her curves forever. It reminded me of those old flash games on Newgrounds where the sex scenes were kind of clumsy but you still replayed them ten times, except this is way cleaner and dirtier at the same time. Funny thing, the sound of her heels on the pavement got stuck in my head more than the moans did, and now every time I hear that click-clack outside I think of her pressing her chest against some guy’s back, whispering into his ear while her hand slides lower. And I’m still annoyed the game used the same alley background twice in a row during a really hot scene and I cannot stop noticing it every time I go back there. It’s like when Pornhub buffers at the exact wrong second and you still remember that freeze-frame. I was going to say something smart here about crime stories and power fantasies but honestly I just keep seeing that one shot of her bending over a car hood with her huge ass in the air, pretending she’s checking for damage while the guy behind her is clearly not thinking about the car at all. Anyway. Streets. Sex. Bad decisions. Big tits. That’s the vibe.

There is this quiet, slightly tired feeling in the whole thing that hit me harder than all the porn grindfests I usually dig through on itch and F95. You start with this middle-aged bar owner who clearly had his “fun young time” years ago, then just pressed stop on life. The guy lives between empty glasses, Spotify playlists stuck on old rock, and that awkward silence after the last drunk leaves. And into that walks Elena, still carrying that fresh hurt you only get when you believed some dude’s promises a bit too hard. It’s one of those nights where two people should probably just go home, jerk off to Pornhub, sleep, and forget everything. They don’t, obviously. The whole kinetic setup is basically saying: you’re not choosing where the story goes, you’re just stuck in the backseat watching these two try to use sex as a bandage over old shit that never healed right.

The route that plays “normal” romance feels like a long, slow exhale. He is careful with her, not in a corny way, more like someone who fucked up enough in life to finally learn where to touch and when to shut up. There are a lot of small moments: her hand shaking a little when she takes that first sip of whiskey, his fingers brushing her thigh while he pretends to talk about music, that dumb smile when she realizes she actually wants his mouth on her. When it finally turns explicit, it is not some turbo-hentai nonsense. She drops to her knees and you can almost hear her thinking “fuck it” before she pulls his cock out. The blowjob scenes are long and almost too real; spit on her chin, her mascara slightly smeared, his hips twitching when she decides to take him a bit deeper than she can handle. Then the bed, finally, with that slow, lazy missionary where they look at each other way too much for just a one night thing. Vaginal creampie, yeah, but framed more like a mistake they both secretly want, not just a “achievement unlocked” moment. And at the same time I kind of hated how sometimes the dialogue leans a bit Tumblr-poetry, like two people trying to sound deep on WhatsApp at 1 in the morning. There is also this corruption flavored second path where the mood shifts and he stops being only gentle. The bar feels colder, less safe. His hands close around her wrists, push them above her head, and you can tell he is testing how far she will go to forget the guy who broke her. Light bondage, a bit of rough throat-fucking, his voice in her ear telling her when to open her mouth, when to beg, when to ride him until her legs are shaking. It is still pretty tame compared to some brutal stuff out there, but it has that nice edge where romance and male control mix in a way that makes your brain and your dick argue. By the end I only really remembered two things: her face when she realizes he actually sees her, not just her body, and the moment his cum spills inside her and neither of them does the “oh no, what about protection” talk. Also, the save menu font annoys me for no reason. Anyway, it lingers. Not like a big dramatic saga or some hardcore fetish circus, more like that one chat on Telegram with someone you fucked once and never muted.