Riveroaks looks like one of those nice West Coast towns from Instagram, but this game keeps poking the dirty meat under the skin. You play this broke guy who gets kicked out of home and suddenly finds out his estranged dad is a porn mogul with a new gay studio that needs a handler. Not in the fun BDSM sense. In the “sign contracts and worry about profits while staring at six packs” sense. Half the time you are trying to pretend you are a professional businessman, the other half you are trying not to get a visible boner during casting. The fun part is how casual the world treats sex. Everyone already knows you are Leonard King’s kid. Baristas flirt with you like they want a role, gym bros stretch way too close, and every conversation has this small chance to slide into filth. One second someone is talking about lighting, the next they are describing exactly how they want to be fucked on camera, and the game just goes “yeah this is normal”. As a horror nerd I like when a city feels like it has a pulse, and Riveroaks kind of hums like something alive and wet. Every location feels like a different fetish altar. The arcade with sticky neon, the gym with its sweaty muscle cult, the cute café where the “nice guy” director talks about art and then asks if you are comfortable filming a three-way with a choke scene. None of this is subtle. Sometimes it is hilarious and awkward and horny at the same time, like when you are reviewing test footage and realize the actor is staring straight into the camera, dirty talking you of all people, and the dialogue actually acknowledges your flustered silence instead of pretending you are a blank self insert.

What surprised me is how much the management part and the romance keep stepping on each other’s toes. You choose what kind of scenes to produce, who to cast together, what kinks to push, and later you have to sit with the people you just turned into “content” and maybe flirt with them, or listen when they tell you about their trauma, or both. There is this one moment where you schedule a shoot with a cocky twink and a quiet older guy, thinking “ok, this will sell, simple power play vibe”, and by the time you watch the preview cut you realize they actually clicked emotionally in between all the deepthroating. Then the game asks you, softly but not really gently, if you want to push them harder next time for profit or let them have a slower, sweeter scene. Of course I picked the darker option because I am weak and also curious. The aftermath hit harder than I expected, but then the next scene is just a stupidly funny argument in a bistro over whose ass looks better on camera, so your feelings never get to settle. It is messy, like real life, only with a lot more cum. The main character is weirdly relatable too. Not some porn god, just this slightly lost young dude who keeps flipping between horny, bitter, and accidentally caring. One route has you teasing a muscular cameraman in the locker room, trading nasty jokes until he corners you in the shower and asks if you are just playing or if you want him to ruin you for real. Another has you sharing late night drinks with an actor who looks like he walked out of a yaoi doujin, talking about family while his hand sits a little too high on your thigh. The sex scenes commit. They use the dirty words, they linger on bodies, they let you taste that feeling of being looked at like fresh meat. Sometimes the pacing goes weird and you jump from intense emotional build up to “ok, we are sucking dick now” with almost no breath, but honestly that clumsy cut has its own charm. Porn is rarely tidy. In my head I almost read Riveroaks like a cult story, only the cult is gay porn, and instead of summoning Cthulhu you are summoning audience engagement with horny thumbnails. There is something quietly corrupting about how normal it feels after a while to treat desire as a spreadsheet thing. And then a cute guy smiles at you from across the studio, half naked, and you stop caring where exactly your soul went.

There is this trashy little tropical resort game that feels like somebody mashed a sleazy dating sim with a lazy idle tycoon and then asked, “how far can we push the horny?” and just never stopped. You show up on this sunny island because daddy died and left you a resort, and instead of grief you get a UI and a to-do list that’s basically: hire busty women, pretend to care, squeeze both their labor and their bodies. It’s not subtle. The first time you promise a girl “a real career” while the dialogue clearly nudges her toward stripping down for “special client service”, it feels like a hentai parody of every fake inspirational LinkedIn coach. One moment you’re adjusting room prices and assigning shifts, next moment you’re in a Ren’Py scene where she’s bent over a desk, tits bouncing, you clicking through lines about “team building”. Very professional, yes. Totally HR compliant.

The part that actually got me is how fast your brain switches between numbers brain and degenerate brain. You’re checking profit margins, then a new horny event pops up: that island cutie you put at the front desk is complaining she can’t pay rent, and suddenly the “solution” is you fucking her brains out as “staff housing benefit”. The game pretends it’s comedic, and to be fair, some lines are actually funny in that dark, mean way: jokes about selling “emotional security” while your dick is literally inside her, side comments about your dead father probably doing the same shit before you. Sometimes the humor hits, sometimes it’s like your uncle discovered hentai memes and tried to write them himself. The girls are written like classic eroge archetypes, just with the morality slider ripped off: the shy one that folds under pressure with a wet moan, the ambitious one you bribe with promises of promotion if she swallows, the island girl who “owes the resort” and works off her debt on her knees. Ren’Py makes it all feel familiar: click, fork a choice, watch an H-scene, open another menu to make more money off the same girl you just creampied. It is trash, but that kind of trash where you catch yourself min-maxing your harem and thinking, “ok, but if I make this one my personal assistant, does that unlock more office sex or just better income?” and then you realize you don’t care, because she’s already moaning your name in another event window. Tropical capitalism, but with cum everywhere.

Kazuma finally gets to be the horny dirtbag the anime kept teasing, and honestly, it feels right. Adventurer Trainer throws you into Axel again, but instead of just watching Aqua be useless, you actually get to manage your days, grind a bit, talk shit to people, then end the day buried in some poor girl's pussy if you play your cards right. It runs in Ren’py, but it doesn’t feel like one of those lazy click-next-and-fap games, because half the time you’re juggling quests, gold, and figuring out how to not die to frogs while also trying to get Megumin to stop exploding everything and actually sit still long enough for you to undress her. The game is kind of ugly on purpose sometimes, like the UI just exists and doesn't care if you like it, and somehow that fits. It’s like those scuffed uploads you watch on Pornhub in incognito: rough around the edges, but you keep watching anyway because it pushes the right buttons. One moment you’re laughing at Aqua crying again, the next you’re balls deep in a fully animated scene with her squirming and whining and you’re thinking “yeah, this is exactly how this should go.”

What really hooked me was how often the game lets you be an asshole. You can play Kazuma as a semi-decent human, sure, but why would you, when the dialog clearly wants you to be a bit of a creep? There’s this event where you push Darkness into this heavy BDSM-flavored training and she pretends to be offended while literally shaking in place, begging for more abuse in that classic masochist paladin way. The writing feels like someone who actually watched Konosuba and then went “ok, but make it horny as fuck.” And then went too far. In a good way. I never thought I’d care about picking stats in a porn game, but here I am min-maxing luck so I can get better loot and also unlock just slightly more humiliating outcomes in some scenes. The romance part is funny because it's romantic only if your idea of romance is bullying girls you like until they moan your name; still, the banter is nice, sometimes even sweet when you’re alone with Rem and the tone suddenly softens and you’re like “wait, when did this stop being just porn.” It doesn’t, of course, because a few lines later you’re pounding her from behind and she’s whimpering into a pillow. The best part is how your daily choices end up stacking into little surprises. Like, I spent way too long working the guild counter, sending random adventurers to die, mostly for the money, then suddenly a chain unlocked and I’m getting thanked in a private room by a very grateful girl in a very unholy way. I could complain that the grind gets a bit annoying, or that the tavern background music loop made me mute the tab in Chrome out of spite and never turn it back on, but then I hit another animated H-scene where Megumin’s thighs are shaking and her voice is cracking and my brain kinda forgot I was annoyed at anything at all.

Three words first: awkward, horny, bittersweet. That is kind of the whole mood here. You’re the straight guy who finally gets confessed to by the cute “girl” from school, the one with the soft voice, stupidly pretty face, nice legs, shy smile, all of that. You panic, you say yes, your brain is screaming “I did it!” and then right after that the world slaps you with “oh yeah, she’s actually a guy.” The game pretty much lives inside that moment of confusion. It milks it. It stretches it. It keeps poking that same bruise: “you said you’re straight, so what the hell are you feeling right now?” And the answer is usually “hard.” The story plays it as romance and comedy at first, but there is this slow, sneaky sadness in there, like the way he keeps calling himself a “replacement girl” and laughs it off. That line stuck in my brain way more than the cumshots, which is kinda annoying because I came for the horny stuff and stayed for emotional damage like an idiot.

What I really liked is how cheap and petty the breakup plan is. You and your best friend literally sit down and go “ok, let’s make you the worst boyfriend ever so he dumps you.” You try to be late on purpose, you act cold, you ignore his texts, you pretend to be gross with your habits, and he still shows up in that cute outfit, blushing, trying so hard to be a good girlfriend even though he knows some people would just call him a trap and walk away. There is one scene where you drag him to a love hotel “by accident,” thinking he will freak out and run, but instead he just looks terrified and still says “if it makes you happy…” and undoes his skirt with shaky hands. That part hit me weird. It is hot, like really explicit, he is nervous and hard and trying to keep his voice from cracking while you touch him, and the game doesn’t fade to black or shy away from the details. At the same time you can feel he is afraid you might finally see “too much” and reject him. The sex is not soft-focus. There is messy blowjob, the kind where he tries to go deep and fails, chokes a little, tears in the corner of his eyes. There is anal where he clenches so hard you feel guilty even as you push inside. No censor bars, nothing. Just skin and precum and that annoying little whimper he does when you pull his hair. It is lewd as hell, but it never fully lets you relax, because the whole time he keeps thanking you for “not giving up on me yet” and it stings in the back of your mind that you are literally planning to throw him away. And yeah, the comedy bits are hit or miss. Sometimes the best friend is funny, sometimes he sounds like a Twitter thread. One of the texts about “straight guys speedrunning bi awakening any%” made me cringe and laugh at same time and I’m still mad about it.

But the game really shines when it goes quiet. There is this park scene, late date, just the two of you on a bench, and he asks if you would still like him if he stopped crossdressing. No sex in that moment, just his bare legs sticking out of that skirt, swinging nervously, and your choice box pops up. You can answer in such a cruel, detached way that it almost feels like you are kicking a puppy, or you can start slipping, saying things a “straight” guy shouldn’t say to a boy with lip gloss. If you keep going for the selfish breakup route, the way the story twists is actually mean. There is a “good” bad ending where you succeed and he dumps you, but you get this scene of him walking away in normal boy clothes, trying to smile, saying he is glad he could “practice being someone’s girlfriend at least once.” Then the game lets you sit there with that. No comforting speech, no heroic redemption on that branch, you just scroll through your phone alone, reading old messages where he spammed you cute selfies and little “good morning” lines. Felt kind of cold in my chest after that. And then on another route, if you let yourself fall for him, the sex scenes change tone. Same body, same dick, same panties, but your inner monologue shifts from “I’m not into guys” to counting the moles on his chest and thinking how nice he looks when he’s flushed and messy and calling your name. The romance is still awkward, the jokes still sometimes land sideways, the art has those weird small inconsistencies that only show up when he’s naked and you stare too close, but in a way I like that. It feels like a horny little VN made by someone who really loves femboys and also secretly enjoys stomping on the reader’s heart a bit. I finished one of the sadder routes, closed the tab, opened it again on another browser like a clown just to see him smile at me from the title screen and pretend I hadn’t already ruined his life once.