Dreams of Desire is like one of those trashy hentai OVA you told yourself you’d watch just for the “plot”, then suddenly it’s three routes later and you know everyone’s bad habits, favorite underwear color, and exactly how far they’ll go if you whisper the right words into their ear. The setup is simple enough: guy doesn’t want to get shipped off to some dead boring military academy, stumbles over a creepy old book that basically says “hey, you can hack people’s brains if you’re horny and irresponsible enough,” and then everything around him turns into a playground of lust, lies, and a bit of morality yeeting itself out the window. What I like is how it goes from kinda normal slice of life to “ok, this household is one wrong decision away from a full-on corruption spiral” without making a big dramatic show. One minute you’re talking about chores and dinner, next minute you’re peeking through doors, catching somebody fingering themselves, and the game asks you if you just walk away or stand there like a degenerate and enjoy the view.

The corruption stuff is the real meat here. It’s not like, instant brainwash with glowing eyes and everyone turns into sex drones. It’s slower, messy, and sometimes awkward in that way only this genre really knows how to do. You try pushing someone a little too hard and they snap at you, or you say the “wrong” suggestion and instead of sexy obedience you get guilt, weird tension, and you sitting there thinking “ok, I kinda deserve that.” Then two scenes later that same character is giving you this shy little striptease, pretending they’re in control while clearly melting inside. Some of the best moments are small things, like when the “good girl” character starts swearing when she gets fucked rough for the first time, or when the dominant one suddenly blushes when you flip the power dynamic and tease her feet until she begs. The game really loves watching you turn hesitation into addiction: first a stolen glance in the shower, then mutual masturbation, then blowjob in a place that’s absolutely not safe, and then suddenly you’re sharing a bed with three women who should absolutely not all be okay with it, yet nobody is saying no anymore. And the worst part is how natural it feels inside this world, like the book didn’t just unlock manipulation, it pulled the mask off everyone’s hidden kinks and said “go on, you already wanted this.”

The house feels too quiet when Sterling walks in, the kind of silence that sticks to your skin. There’s that smell - old wood, perfume, something faintly sinful like memories that never left. You can almost hear the ghosts of laughter and moans tangled in the walls. Everyone looks at him differently now, not as the kid who ran off, but as the man who came back with a pulse full of tension. The women in this game, they don’t waste time pretending innocence. The so-called mourning period lasts about five seconds before somebody’s hand is somewhere it shouldn’t be. It’s messy, funny, uncomfortable, and hot in that way only forbidden things are. Sometimes you’ll laugh because the dialogue’s ridiculous, sometimes you’ll forget to breathe because a scene just hits that filthy sweet spot between lust and shame.

What I liked most was how it never feels clean. There’s domination that borders on cruelty, soft moments ruined by sudden gropes, a futa scene that goes way harder than expected, and those “oops-I-shouldn’t-watch-this” voyeur bits that make you squirm. Even the humor has teeth; it’s not wink-wink-nudge-nudge but more like someone laughing right in the middle of an orgasm. The harem thing isn’t just numbers - it’s chaos management, trying to juggle jealousy and desire while every woman (and not only women) seems one breath away from breaking the furniture. And then there’s that weird ache when corruption sneaks in, when seduction turns into ownership and you realize you kind of wanted it that way. The sound design helps too: low voices, wet noises that feel too real through headphones, that small gasp when a boundary gets crossed.

It’s not perfect - some pacing’s off, and a few scenes feel like they forgot their own setup - but maybe that’s why it works. Like old VHS hentai, rough edges make it human. It doesn’t pretend to be classy, it just drags you down into the mess and dares you to call it art while your pants are still around your ankles.

Raven wakes up in Lustein with the kind of hangover you get from reality itself, not from alcohol. She knows three things: her name, that she’s a witch, and that everyone around her is way too horny for a Tuesday that doesn’t even exist. The town looks like some fantasy RPG town you half remember from an old JRPG, but somebody replaced half the NPC dialogues with porn hub comments and cult propaganda. On one corner there’s a prim girl in a hood preaching purity, on the next there’s a slime girl casually jerking off a tentacle beast in an alley, and both scenes feel normal after about ten minutes. The game doesn’t even apologize for it. You walk Raven around, poke your nose into “investigations,” and every lead about the mysterious Order somehow slides into another sex scene, another shady deal, another monster with way too much cock for its own skeleton.

What I liked is that Raven isn’t written like some clueless virgin protagonist who “accidentally” falls on dick every five steps. At first she’s confused, guarded, trying to treat every encounter like a real case file. You’re choosing dialogue options, digging for clues, following rumors about disappearances and strange symbols, but half the clue-givers are masturbating behind curtains or peeping through keyholes when you arrive. The voyeur stuff sneaks up on you: you accept a “stakeout quest,” thinking you’ll watch a corrupt priest meet his contact, and suddenly you’re crouched behind a crate, watching him get absolutely flooded by his own acolytes in a holy-bukkake ritual that looks like a blasphemous version of a Klimt painting. You can stay hidden, stroke yourself with Raven’s gloved hand while the scene unfolds, or reveal yourself and twist the ritual to your own kind of magic. The game pretends it is about an investigation, but it is actually about how far you push her corruption, how much you let Lustein leak into her soul and underwear. There’s turn based combat, sure, but it’s the kind of combat that laughs at normal balance. You’re casting spells that bind tentacles, seduce bosses, or literally masturbate mid-battle to charge a corruption bar that works like mana and moral decay at the same time. An early battle with a raven-headed knight is still stuck in my head: the fight starts like normal, you exploit his weak point, suddenly his armor snaps away and what’s under it could never fit in that plate mail. You can finish him “properly” with fire and hexes, or stun him using a seduction stance that turns the screen into a slow striptease, then ride him until he swears fealty with a mouth full of your magic. There is this absurd tension between “I am saving this world” and “I am absolutely getting railed by it.”

The outfits are not just costumes; they feel like alternate timelines for Raven. You change from a modest witch dress into a shredded leather top and thigh-high boots, and the game quietly adjusts how people react. That prim Order nun earlier suddenly stops seeing you as possible recruit and starts looking at you like potential prey, cornering you later in a side chapel and suggesting “purification” that involves ropes, candles, and her tongue taking a pilgrimage between your legs. Another time I put Raven into a delicate, almost scholarly robe, and went to a monster-infested forest. Bad idea. The tentacle plants there literally respond differently, coiling around her as if they’ve found a rare flower and need to pollinate it from every angle. You’re given choices, but a lot of them feel like you’re only choosing how filthy things get, not if. One quest has you investigating rumors about a masked witch corrupting villagers. Plot twist: that witch is basically you from the future if you dive too far into the hentai logic of Lustein. Fighting her in turn-based battle is weirdly arousing and tragic: magic circles, mirrored incantations, her taunting you with what you will become, then pinning you down with living chains while she pours her “knowledge” into your mouth. The best part is I hated some tiny UI things, like how the log sometimes hides a line you want to reread during a particularly heavy lesbian ritual, and I will complain about this in my head forever, but at the same time, when Raven kneels in a ruined library, covered in monster cum, reading sigils from a soaked grimoire while fingering herself to unlock a new spell, I forget everything else. It feels like those old fantasy paperbacks where the margins are full of notes from some horny reader before you, except now you’re the one writing them on Raven’s skin.

It’s messy in a way that feels uncomfortably real, like watching someone make the worst decisions possible and still finding yourself leaning forward, curious where her next excuse will lead. Yumi moves through the story with this almost painful self-awareness - she knows she’s being watched, both by the player and the game’s world, but she never really stops preening for it. The first time she opens her blouse just slightly too far during that office scene, there’s no sound cue, no dramatic pause - just the soft rustle of fabric and that flicker of doubt on her face. I swear, that moment hit harder than any of the explicit stuff later. The game tries to sell corruption as gradual, but honestly, it’s more about how easily she adjusts to attention. Maybe that’s what makes it so believable.

Then again, sometimes it overplays its hand. There’s this one animation loop during a handjob scene where her eyes cross weirdly, and it pulled me straight out of it; felt more comedic than erotic - like a reaction meme frozen mid-spasm. But that’s part of its charm, right? It’s too earnest to be slick. Even the blackmail thread with Thompson manages to feel less like some grand scheme and more like the world’s creepiest HR problem spiraling out of control. Which, depending on your mood, could be hot or just exhausting. And yet, when Yumi whispers something half-hearted before giving in, it lands. Maybe because the voice acting doesn’t try to sound sultry - it sounds confused, nervous, real.

The lighting deserves attention though. Somebody clearly obsessed over skin tone gradients because every sweat bead looks deliberate. The husband scenes are quieter, tender even, though they carry that slow dread of knowing he’s already losing her. I found myself irrationally annoyed by his tie color - gray, always gray - as if that dull choice symbolized everything wrong with him. Maybe that’s reading too much into it. Or maybe the game wanted that reaction. Anyway, it lingers. You finish a session and keep thinking about those tiny hesitations, how desire can look like guilt when the camera holds just a second too long.