This one hits like a fucked up Valentine’s card somebody dipped in blood and spit on. Oridelle is not a “heroine,” she is a girl who died, got dragged back, and now thinks the only reason she exists is to suck off the guy who saved her. That’s the whole emotional center of the game: her on her knees, him on the throne, and you sitting there clicking through that sick loop of “thank you for saving me, please use me again.” It feels almost too intimate sometimes, like reading someone’s horny therapy diary that got infected by a horror manga. The tone flips a lot. One minute she is this soft, almost cute corpse-girl whispering how grateful she is, and three lines later she is giggling like a brain-poisoned bimbo about how her mouth is “perfect for him” and nothing else matters. It is erotic, yeah, but there is this rotten taste under it, like you bit into candy and it was raw meat.

The horror wraps itself around the sex instead of fighting it. Every time she drags herself back to that coffin, body resetting, clothes fixing, face going back to the “normal” Oridelle, it feels like watching a save file overwrite a human being. She goes out, gets broken a little more, comes back, looks the same. Inside she is not the same. You can feel the split getting wider, her real self trapped under this shiny, porn-brain alter ego that thinks being his perfect cocksleeve is holy work. Some scenes are almost boring in how focused they are on his dick and her mouth, and then suddenly one line pops where she begs him to call her by a name he gave her, not her own, and it hits harder than the actual blowjob. The game keeps telling you, quietly, that she is already dead, just not all at once. And still you keep clicking, because the pacing is like a slow, dripping faucet you kind of hate but keep staring at. Sometimes the writing leans too hard into “bimbo talk” and loses that fragile, tragic vibe I liked at the start, but then there is a moment where she hesitates before opening her lips and it all comes back. I wish there was a way to pull her out, to give her a route where she looks at him and says “no,” but the whole point is that she will not. She crawls back, every time, happy to be used, proud of how empty she can become for him, and that is what makes the whole thing stay in your head after you close the tab and pretend you are just going to check Twitter.

You know that awful feeling when your phone buzzes, you open the chat, and you’re not sure if you even want to scroll up because you already feel something’s wrong? This game lives inside that feeling. You play as Eddie, normal guy, married, kind of worn out by life, stuck in this shitty loop of work, stress, debt, and a dick that just refuses to cooperate when you actually need it. The whole thing plays out mostly through chats and phone stuff, so you’re basically spying on your own life. Messages, pictures, little bits of “hey babe, miss you” turning into “hey, I’m working late” and then into things you really don’t want to see your wife sending to someone else. And still you keep tapping, because of course you do.

Rachel starts as that sweet, supportive wife who just wants to help, who wants her man back, wants sex that isn’t awkward and half-hearted. The game doesn’t jump straight into filth. It teases you. She takes small jobs, chats with new people, gets “friendly” with that one guy who compliments her more in two texts than Eddie managed in a whole week. You see her selfies get a bit bolder. At first it’s cute. She’s shy, a bit embarrassed, but she sends that “accidental” cleavage pic and you feel both proud and a bit sick. Then the pictures get dirtier. The emojis change. The typing pauses get longer. The game really likes to make you stare at the screen waiting for three dots, wondering if she’s going to send something soft or something that will make you want to punch the wall and jerk off at the same time.

Sex scenes here are mostly in your head and on the phone screen, twisted together. When she’s playing with herself, you don’t just see her; you see the messages that pushed her there. Some random guy hyping her up, telling her how wet she must be, asking for “proof”, and she actually sends it. You get AI-style images that look like those edited photos you see on Telegram porn channels, slightly too clean, but the situation around them is messy as fuck. There’s cheating, voyeurism, corruption, all that good painful stuff. You read how she describes your failures in bed while you’re the one stuck watching and masturbating like some pathetic cuck who can’t even look away. The worst part is how normal it all feels. No magic, no mind control. Just money problems, stress, one dude with a working dick and another with a nice salary and a smooth tongue, and a woman who gets tired of waiting. The story doesn’t need big twists. It just pokes at those ugly relationship fears until they get horny, then keeps going a bit too far. You know it’s going to hurt. You still open the next chat. And the next picture. And the next.

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.

This thing feels like getting locked inside your own lingerie closet with a guy who knows every bra you ever bought and why. The game throws you right into this late winter street, cold air, nasty yellow streetlight, and then he’s just there. Not some shiny anime prince, more like that quiet dude from the back of the bus who suddenly stares straight into you and says your name too softly. As a designer I kept imagining what I’d put on the main character, like a thin white slip with lace cups that really shows the curve of the nipples when she breathes hard, but honestly it almost doesn’t matter, because he’s stripping you in his head from line one. The whole thing is basically him wrapping himself around you with words, like a silk ribbon that looks cute but tightens more every time you try to pull away. He talks like you already belong to him, body, thoughts, all your tiny stupid habits, the way you bite your lip, what color panties you wore that one day you thought no one noticed. It’s creepy as hell and also stupidly hot in that way you don’t want to admit when you close your laptop and pretend you were just “testing” a game.

What I liked a lot, and then hated, and then liked again, is how the story keeps making you second-guess yourself. You pick a choice that feels strong, like “back off, I don’t know you,” and he twists it into proof you’re scared of losing him. Then you pick something gentler and suddenly you’re deep in his little fantasy nest, where he’s watching you sleep and talking about how your body twitches when you dream. There’s one moment where he describes how he “rescued” you, and it honestly reads like undressing a mannequin in a store window: precise, slow, obsessive. He remembers the fabric of your coat, the way your thighs looked under it, like he’s fitting you for a custom bondage set made only for being tied to his bed. I kept wanting more description of the actual surroundings, but he keeps dragging the focus back to you, like your skin is the background, your heartbeat is the soundtrack. It’s annoying, in a very good way, if that makes sense. And the game doesn’t baby you about consent either; it really plays in that dirty, fucked up space where “no” and “yes” almost melt and you have to watch yourself not to slip too far into his logic. It kind of feels like a lace thong that’s slightly too small: pretty, cutting into your hips, and you keep wearing it anyway because of how it makes your ass look in the mirror.