Special Harem Class feels like someone mashed a horny dating sim with a lazy summer in a city you only visit in dreams, then sprinkled in a bunch of “yeah this is totally an educational program” lies on top. You’re the guy who didn’t get into any normal college and somehow lands in this weird pre-college thing where every girl looks like she escaped from an anime convention and a porn studio at the same time. The teacher, Claire, is supposed to help you “prepare for higher education”, but she’s way more invested in helping you get inside every girl in the class. And herself. A lot. She’s kind of your pervert handler and it’s hilarious. One moment she’s telling you to study, next moment she’s jerking you off in the office while explaining how to “evaluate interpersonal relationships”. It’s stupid and hot and you just roll with it.

The city map is where the roguelike part of my brain woke up a little. You just wander. Click around. Go to the café at the wrong time of day and suddenly you walk in on one of the girls doing lewd cosplay in the backroom for some extra cash. Go to the park “just to farm affection” and you end up getting a blowjob behind a tree after picking the dialogue option that sounded like a joke. The game loves those small chains. Like you talk to a side girl once at the bus stop, forget about her, then twenty in-game days later she shows up at the mall with a completely different outfit and drags you to the bathroom for a quick, sloppy fuck because “you looked lonely”. The scenes are not just copy-paste either. There are these moments where the camera stays way too long on a girl’s face while she’s moaning and drooling on your cock, and it feels uncomfortably intimate, in the good porn way. Animation loops are everywhere, so every thrust is shown, every little twitch, tits bouncing in this hypnotic, slightly janky rhythm.

What I really liked is how the affection grind tricks you. At first you’re just chasing numbers like a min-max goblin, then suddenly you hit a sex scene that feels way more personal than expected. One of the main girls starts as the “tsundere” cliché, you know, all attitude, but her later scenes are basically her losing control on top of you, begging for your cum and admitting she checks her phone every night waiting for your messages. And you’re sitting there pants around your ankles going “wow ok feelings now, cool”. Then five minutes later you’re raw-dogging a random side chick in a stairwell, zero romance, just sweat and spit and hurried thrusts because someone might come in. It swings between sweet and filthy without warning. There’s a ton of content already, and the dev clearly has a fetish for variety in positions. Titjobs with cum dripping down, anal scenes where the girl’s expression goes from “no way” to “harder” in one loop, public stuff in the city where she’s trying to keep quiet and absolutely failing. Also there’s that one Claire scene in the classroom with the desk, you’ll know when you get it, where she’s riding you slowly while still acting like a serious teacher, glasses and all, and then breaks character mid-sentence when you grab her ass and pull her down harder. I replayed that like, too many times. Only thing that annoyed me is sometimes I’d click through a day trying to trigger a new event and end up with nothing, just empty routine, but then the next week the game drops two new sex scenes on me back to back and I forget I was annoyed at all.

Nate is that type of guy you see behind the counter in a tiny comic shop and instantly forget five minutes later, and honestly that is kind of the charm here. The story starts really calm, almost too slow, like one of those cozy slice-of-life anime where nothing happens, except this time the nothing is a nerdy dude watching a streamer he jerks off to. PixelEllie looks like every gamer crush you ever had on Twitch and Instagram at the same time, all soft colors and fake “oops my shirt slipped” moments, and then you realize in this VN that she is way filthier than she pretends on stream. There is a weird tension between how cute everything looks and how raw the sex gets later. It feels like your Pinterest board of pastel gamer girls suddenly got corrupted by a Pornhub playlist, which for me is exactly the vibe.

What I liked is how the erotic scenes build up from really basic stuff. First you just watch Ellie online, like any simp with a phone. A bit of voyeurism, some teasing, the classic “I’m not touching myself, you’re touching yourself” thing. Then Nate finds her browser history and the game quietly turns up the heat. Suddenly she is into threesomes, sharing, hotwife stuff, and he is caught between “this is hot” and “am I actually okay with my girl getting fucked by someone else while I watch.” They do a lot of chatting, sexting, sending pictures, little masturbating scenes alone in bed that feel more honest than the big group sex moments. The first time Nate sees her with someone else feels kind of sick in the stomach and horny at the same time. You get that awful netorare taste, like your brain says no but your dick says absolutely yes, keep watching. There is anal, oral, regular vaginal fucking, sometimes pretty romantic, then suddenly she is moaning for another guy harder than for you and you realize this VN kind of hates you and loves you at the same time.

Lana, the roommate, is a mess in the best way. She is a cam girl with that “I know exactly how to break your brain” attitude, and the game does not pretend she is some secret angel. She is trouble. One scene she is helping Ellie pick outfits for stream and it is all giggles and shorts that barely cover her ass, next scene she is grinding on Nate like she owns him. The group sex and swinging parts feel dirty but not like a porn script, more like those real couples you accidentally find on Chaturbate at work and then pretend you never did. I wish we had more quiet romance moments in between all the sharing and corruption, like actual dates that are not just the setup for public teasing or another open-relationship experiment, but I also know I would skip half of them to reach the next scene where Nate is forced to watch while Ellie rides someone else with that fucked up smile. It is sweet and kind of heartbreaking and also makes you want to jerk off twice in a row. The whole thing feels like scrolling through TikTok thirst traps and then suddenly dropping into a hardcore swinger subreddit by accident, except you keep scrolling anyway.

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.