Guard uniform, shitty fluorescent lights, that stink of sweat and bleach that almost comes through the screen, and then this guy shows up in your block. Artemis. Wrong kind of pretty for a place like that. Soft face, sharp eyes, mouth that looks like it was made to talk back and suck cock, both. The game just throws you into that fucked up mix of power and attraction without a slow intro, which I liked. You’re already in the role, already the one with the keys, but somehow he feels scarier than the whole cell block. Not scary like monster, scary like "I know exactly what you want and I’m going to make you admit it." The flirting starts way too early to be healthy, way too late to stop, and every line he drops has that vibe where you can’t tell if he’s actually scared or just acting weak so you’ll push harder. And yeah, it’s mostly reading and choosing, but it doesn’t feel dry, because half the time I was alt-tabbing out of sheer secondhand shame, then going right back in like a horny idiot.

The thing that got me is how the game keeps playing chicken with your morals. You get these choices like "do the professional thing" or "maybe just touch him a bit" and it sounds simple, but the writing keeps nudging you, poking at your curiosity, making the “nice” options feel kind of fake. At some point I realised I was picking the worse path just to see how far the dev will go, and it does go pretty far into fucked territory. There is that whole predator vs prey dance, but it flips. You start as the guard, the big man with the baton, but Artemis knows how to tilt his head just a little, sit on the bunk in that half-feminine pose, open his legs too wide, make you aware how easy it would be to hurt him and how much he kind of wants you to. Or pretends to. Hard to tell. That tension is the hot part, not even the actual explicit bits, though those are written with enough dirty detail that I had to stop reading on my phone in public transport after one very specific line about making him kneel on the cold floor of the cell. The world is cruel, the prison is worse, but the horny brain prevails.

It’s pretty dark without the game patting you on the head about it. No big speech about trauma, just little details: the way he flinches when you move too fast, the way other guards talk about inmates like meat, offhand comments about what happens in the showers. It’s messy, morally and sexually, like one of those old yaoi fanfics on LiveJournal that half of us cut our teeth on, only a bit more grown up and kinda meaner. Artemis is that type: slight, almost fragile, but with enough lip to make you want to shut him up by grabbing his neck. He’ll tease you, call you "officer" with this tiny smirk, then suddenly there is this one line where he sounds genuinely terrified and it punches you right in the gut while you still have a hard-on. The choices make you complicit. You can try to be the good guy, but the text never lets you feel clean, and honestly that’s why it sticks. Sex here is power, manipulation, pity, and actual lust all tangled together, not separated into nice categories. If you like your gay prison fantasies soft and wholesome, this is not that. If you always wondered how far a bored, lonely guard might go with a dangerous little femboy inmate who knows exactly what card to play, this thing crawls under your skin, rubs up against every bad impulse, and waits to see which button you press next.

They say everyone who flies fringe space is running from something.

And burn it all, you are.

You are Rael. Freshly removed from events that have shattered your life, you’re left adrift and alone. Stranded on the backwater Yakeshi Station at the fringe of galactic society, all that you are is staked on one last chance to make amends and set your life back on course. One opportunity, with everything on the line. Through Zuberi, captain of the Astrogation Guild deep-space exploration vessel Void Dreamer, you have that chance. Board his ship, join an eclectic crew all there for various reasons of their own, and explore the mysterious outer edges of the galaxy as you try to put yourself back together.

Just be careful. Fringe space is far from safe, and the darkness between distant stars holds secrets more deadly and more powerful than you can possibly imagine.