Emily is one of those girls you swear you met in college but can’t quite place. Smart enough, cute enough, a bit basic at first sight, then ten minutes later she’s torn between finishing her assignment and sending nudes to a guy she just met at a shitty bar. That’s basically the whole mood of this game: watching her pretend she has her shit together while you quietly push her toward being either the good girl her profs love or the slut the whole campus whispers about. You’re not some faceless god here, more like the nasty little voice in her head that tells her “eh, one more drink, what’s the worst that can happen?” and then suddenly she’s blowing a married teacher in a locked classroom with her panties stuffed in his pocket. The nice part is how small choices snowball. You tell her to “just flirt a bit” with the muscular black guy from her study group and later you’re sitting there like, okay, now she’s on her knees with mascara all over her face and a grin that basically screams ahegao thumbnail. And the game does not shy from showing you every messy angle of that.

What I liked is that it doesn’t scream “corruption route / pure route” at you in big neon text, but you feel it anyway. One night she’s crying in her room, hugging her phone, deciding if she should stay loyal to her sweet boring boyfriend, next night she’s in some shady hotel room doing live cam masturbation with a vibrator she bought with blackmail money. That jump feels wrong and hot at the same time. Stuff like voyeurism is slipped in almost casually: your choice to peek at someone in the dorm showers “just out of curiosity” suddenly turns into Emily realizing people are watching her too, and instead of freaking out she starts putting on a little stripper show, slow teasing, panties slid down just enough to get the viewer hooked. Then the game turns around and drops a soft romance scene where she’s half asleep, giving lazy oral to her guy in bed, nothing wild, just quiet and intimate, and you think maybe she can be normal. Ten minutes later she’s letting a milf neighbor “teach” her how to please older men and the whole thing feels like you scrolled too far on Pornhub and forgot to stop.

The school setting is used more like a pressure cooker than just a backdrop. You get those dumb normal scenes like group projects and cafeteria gossip, and then out of nowhere someone threatens to leak her nudes unless she “earns” their silence, and that opens the door to prostitution stuff that starts kinda tame and then gets dark. Not “torture porn” dark, more like “she smiles but you know she is owned now” dark. Some paths put Emily on top too, by the way. There is this one route where she figures out very fast that horny men are idiots and starts using female domination tricks on a nervous dilf teacher, making him pay for private “tutoring” while she toys with him using her mouth and then pulls back right before he finishes, total power trip. Sex toys show up in fun ways, not just “here is a dildo, click to use”. Like she goes from shy bedtime fingering to riding a buzzing plug during a serious class presentation, trying not to let the sound escape her lips while her classmates discuss something dumb like group theory. I’m still annoyed that one of the endings locked behind a really small choice about her outfit on the first day, I picked the sweater because I thought “ok, cozy” and then later figured out that the skimpy dress opens a whole extra blackmail chain I missed, but fine, that’s on me and my fake morals. The point is, Emily doesn’t just flip from saint to whore in one click. She slides, stumbles, laughs, cries, makes horrible decisions that you kind of pushed her into. And watching her cross those lines, one blowjob, one strip tease, one “accidental” creampie at a time, is where the entire thing really gets under your skin.

Strange Nights feels like someone grabbed Life is Strange, spilled horny fanfic all over it, then decided “yeah, this is fine” and kept going. You play as Mark Jefferson, the photography teacher, but here he’s not just that creepy guy in the background. He’s the main bastard. You get these weird powers that let you mess with time, memories, choices, all that, and the game leans fully into the fantasy of a teacher with too much control over his students. It’s not subtle. One minute you’re grading photos, the next you’re rewinding a scene because you picked the wrong line that would have pushed a shy student a little deeper into your orbit. There’s this one moment in class where you casually compliment a girl’s shot, then rewind, insult it, then rewind again and choose the “neutral but suggestive” answer, just to see which timeline makes her more flustered later when she’s on her knees in your office. That’s the kind of sick little loop the game wants you to play with every choice.

The tone really hits that “fake respectable teacher, actual predator” vibe. You walk around the school acting professional, checking your phone like you’re bored, but every dialogue option is a fork into something darker: do you slowly corrupt the top student until she begs to be your good girl, or do you push the tough lesbian who hates you into a twisted dom role where she ends up riding your face while you pretend you’re the one in charge? The game loves flipping roles like that. Sometimes Mark is clearly the one pulling strings, using his power to make a girl forget she said no, or to rewind that moment where she slapped him for touching her thigh, just to pick the “right” path that leads to her swallowing his cum like it was inevitable. Other times, you think you are manipulating her, and suddenly you find yourself tied to a chair in the darkroom, hands bound, camera flash popping while a student uses a crop on your chest and sits on your cock like it belongs to her. I had Spotify low in the background and it actually synced pretty well with one scene in the dorm hallway, where you’re pushing this nervous student into choosing between licking your cock or getting her ass fingered first. I swear the beat dropped right when she opened her mouth. Totally not planned, but it felt like some cursed DJ mix.

Sex-wise the game doesn’t pretend to be romantic. Blowjobs are sloppy and transactional, like “you want that higher grade, don’t you?” while she gags around you and tries to keep eye contact. There’s a great scene in the classroom after hours where you use your power to freeze a moment, walk behind a girl at her desk, pull her panties aside, and push in slowly while time crawls forward again, so she feels you at the same instant the world unpauses and she moans way too loud for an empty room. Handjobs show up a lot too, usually as a teasing step, like the dom student stroking you painfully slow and denying you, calling you “sir” in that mocking way while she talks about how she used to respect you. Anal hits harder when it comes after a long string of corruption choices, like when that straight A girl who was all about “boundaries” is now bent over your desk, taking you in her ass while crying and thanking you for “guiding” her. There’s mind control woven into this, not super sci-fi, more like you nudge their thoughts so the line between their will and your pressure gets blurry as hell. And yeah, lesbian scenes are there too, sometimes soft and experimental between students, other times you basically stage them as your private porn, rewinding until you get the perfect angle of one student buried between another girl’s thighs while you jerk off quietly in the shadows. The whole thing feels wrong in exactly the way it wants to, like a corrupted save file of Life is Strange someone found on a very dirty hard drive.

Elly shows up at Meridian Heights thinking she’s just a shy redhead with a scholarship and a big campus to get lost in, and the game kind of laughs at that idea from the first scene. It starts slow and chill, more like some slice of life VN than a porn sandbox, with her wandering around dorms and classrooms, doing little errands, bumping into weirdly friendly teachers and classmates who are just a bit too touchy for a normal school. The humor hits you in those early dialogues: her inner thoughts are half wholesome, half “oh shit did he really just stare at my ass,” and it’s fun watching her pretend she doesn’t notice while the text openly calls bullshit on her. There’s this moment in the cafeteria where a guy “accidentally” brushes her thigh under the table and she tells herself it was no big deal, but the game lets you pick whether she pulls away, ignores it, or kind of leans into it. That tiny scene, more than the big ones, sets the tone. You’re not just clicking for sex. You’re basically negotiating how fast she drops her limits, how much she enjoys being teased, how much she uses her body to get what she wants, while the world quietly keeps score.

The school layout feels like a proper sandbox, even when it annoys you. You go to campus, open the map, hop between the gym, dorms, lecture halls, random corridors that exist mostly so someone can try to grope Elly when nobody is watching. Sometimes it’s hot, like that bit in the library when a professor “helps” her study and his hand just stays on her lower back longer than it should, sliding down while she tries to focus on the book. Sometimes it’s just stupid, like walking back and forth three times because an NPC only shows up in the fucking afternoon and you forget, again. The corruption vibe creeps in scene by scene: the clothes choices get shorter, her reactions to being pinned against a locker shift from shocked to secretly turned on, and the dialogue changes in small ways. One day she calls some guy a pervert, later she just calls him “bold” and smirks. You feel it most when a harmless prank turns into her letting someone squeeze her tits in a dark classroom “as payment.” It’s funny, dirty, and a bit fucked up all at once. The game never really pretends she’s safe, but it also lets her own it if you push her that way. And when she cracks a joke about how many “extra credit” offers she’s getting, while you send her right back into that same corridor where everyone seems to grab her ass, it hits that specific porn game sweet spot: you know exactly what you’re doing to her and you still click the next option.

Campus during the day looks normal in this game, almost boring. Bunch of stressed students, coffee smell, lectures, cheap posters on the walls. But the whole thing is built like a calm mask over something really fucked up, and that part is what hooked me. You play this last year psych student, quiet guy, polite face, the type who always has notes in order and never raises his voice. But inside his head it’s just cold calculation. He watches people like lab rats. Friends, classmates, even his own family at home. He listens, gives them emotional support, nods like he really cares… while he is testing how far he can push them, twist them, get them to show the dirtiest parts of themselves. Half the time I forgot it’s supposed to be “romance” because it feels more like you are running social experiments in a horny asylum where nobody knows they are patients.

The voyeur stuff is not subtle. You are always checking who is alone in the shower, who left their door half open, who cries in the bathroom between classes. There is this one scene where your “sister” comes home late, pissed off and drunk, yelling about some asshole guy. You just sit there on the couch, acting like the caring brother, and the game lets you choose if you comfort her like normal, or if you start to lean in, touching her thigh a bit too long, asking very quiet questions about what he did to her. She is half broken, half horny from the drama, and the camera just crawls over her body slowly while she breathes all heavy, deciding if she wants to push you away or let you go further. It feels wrong in a hot way, because you know you are using her pain like a toy. That mix of guilt and arousal, the game is really good with that. And then sometimes it just throws a grinding fetch quest at you out of nowhere, like “go get 5 books from the library or you can’t continue this fucked up emotional incest situation”, which killed the mood so hard I alt-tabbed to check Telegram for no reason.

The sandbox part is weirdly relaxing. You wander around campus, talk to people, choose dialogues, peek at them behind doors, collect little mental notes on who is weak where. One girl freaks out if you talk about her parents, another melts the second someone praises her grades, another one clearly wants to be controlled and treated like a pet. The MC keeps all this in his head, and slowly you unlock more unhinged routes, where “comforting” turns into choking, comforting turns into fucking on a classroom desk after hours, comforting your relative turns into you making her call you something that definitely is not “bro” anymore. There is no bright line where it switches from sweet to abusive, it just slides there, and that makes the sex scenes feel extra dirty. Sometimes the pacing is awful, scenes end just when it gets spicy and you are pushed back to roaming around, but anyway. When the game lets you fully lean into the manipulative bastard role, using all that psychology crap to pull panties down and minds apart, it hits this rare mix of horny and cruel that most other porn games only pretend to have. And the worst part is, the more you break them, the more they cling to you like you are saving them. That shit stayed in my head way longer than the last cumshot.