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.

Tokyo doesn’t feel like a hometown here, it feels like a hungry animal that wants to eat your time, your money, and your dick at the same time. You come back after Miami, all “fresh graduate, big dreams” and boom: dead dad, shitty boarding house, mountains of debt, and a bunch of hot women orbiting your life like they just smelled fresh meat. The game doesn’t pretend to be deep art. It’s straight up “live, grind, fuck, repeat” but somehow it hits that lonely horny brain spot, like scrolling Tinder and then opening Pornhub because no one replied. You run around the city, trying not to pass out from low energy while deciding if you want to be a responsible adult or just shove your face in every pair of tits that appears in a cutscene. Spoiler: I tried the responsible route for like ten minutes. Then a certain “landlady type” showed up with those soft moans and that fake innocent voice and suddenly I “forgot” to pay off debt and spent my last cash chasing a creampie scene.

What gets me is how normal it can feel at first. You’re just working shifts, checking status bars like Energy, Satiety, Hygiene, Fun, clicking stuff like a zombie, listening to the voiced lines and thinking “ok, it’s just a sim, chill.” Then a JAV looking pornstar model pops on screen in that censored style, moaning in Japanese while you make her choke on your cock, and your brain melts a bit. I had one run where I was trying to keep everyone sort of happy, like a fake wholesome harem, and next thing I know I’m groping someone on public transport, getting away with some very wrong shit, and that corruption curve just sneaks in. First she blushes. Then she starts grinding back. Then she’s begging to be filled and you’re checking if you have enough Hygiene to go another round. And yeah, there’s incest flavor here too, the kind that makes you stare at the monitor for a second and go “ah fuck it” and click anyway. Don’t pretend you won’t. One scene you’re just chatting, next scene there’s a handjob under the table, next it’s full-on oral, cum dripping, censored pixel bar wiggling like crazy, and you tell yourself “I’m only doing this route once” and then absolutely don’t.

It calls itself a dating thing but you know how dating apps are: technically about love, realistically about who you can fuck before your battery hits zero. Same vibe. You can chase career stuff, grind your position, build income, try to act like a grown-up, or you can just care about unlocking every filthy animated scene with every girl, stacking them like trophies. I had this moment where I was completely broke, hygiene in the gutter, fun bar empty, didn’t even have enough money to eat, but I still chose to stalk another cutscene because I knew it would end with her on her knees, drooling on my shaft. Quality priorities. Some of the harassment stuff is just pure trash behavior, like, if you saw that in real life you’d report the dude, but here you mash the button and watch her slowly turn from offended to addicted. Corruption done in that slow, dirty way, where “no” turns into “only the tip” and then you’re fucking her raw and dumping a creampie inside while she tries to keep her voice down. It’s messed up, but that’s kind of the point. And in between all that sex, you’re still brushing your teeth in-game, watching your Hygiene stat, like some weird responsible pervert. Makes sense somehow.

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.