Sylvara is fucked. Not in the poetic way. In the goblins-actually-run-the-place way, with their stink everywhere and those weird pheromone clouds that make everyone way too horny to think straight. You’re not some faceless hero here, you’re stuck in the skin of these three elf girls, Lea, Valya and Anneli, trying to pretend everything is “normal” while the city slowly turns into a green-skinned playground. The game leans hard into that tension between wanting to fight and wanting to just give in and get railed by the enemy. And because it’s a visual novel style thing, the pacing is slow on purpose: you wake up, decide what to do with the day, and every little choice pushes you closer to escape or closer to goblin breeding stock territory, sometimes both at the same time, which is honestly the main kink here.

What sold me isn’t even the sex at first, it’s the way the daily routine feels like it’s constantly humming in your ears. You’ve got tasks that are boring on paper, like helping in some supply room or going to “train”, but the game sneaks filth into it. One morning I sent Lea “just to gather information” in a tavern corner, and the sound layering there is wild. In the background, you have this sticky low murmur of goblin grunts, mugs slamming, chairs scraping on stone, and under that, some faint wet noise from a side room. Nothing on screen shows it, but your brain connects it instantly. That kind of sound hint is way hotter than showing every hole filled. Then when she accidentally brushes against a goblin guard, there’s this little sucking cloth sound as his hand grabs her ass, plus her tiny breath catching in the mic, just a half gasp, not some anime squeal. It feels dirty, like you’re listening from behind a door, not sitting in front of a PC with headphones.

Sex scenes themselves get pretty brutal, in a good way for this genre. There’s one where Valya gets cornered in a storage cellar after trying to steal some key item. The wood creaks when he pins her against the crates, you can hear little glass bottles rattling each time he slams into her. Her voice goes from stubborn, almost annoyed, to this broken, fucked-out stutter when the pheromones kick in. The goblin voices aren’t generic growls either; they’re nasal and taunting, with these wet lip smacks that made me actually pull one earcup off like, “ok that’s a bit too real.” I wish the footsteps on stone had more bass, that part feels weirdly light, but everything around the penetration is heavy and sticky and loud in that porn-audio way that’s hard to pull off without sounding fake. Here they ride the edge nicely. A few moans loop a bit too obvious after a while, you’ll start hearing the same “nhh!” in your sleep, but by the time you notice you’re already clicking “continue” just to hear how far they’ll humiliate her next time. There’s one quiet moment, after a long session, where Anneli just sits there breathing, no music, just a little trembling inhale and the gross slick sound of goblin cum dripping to the floor. That’s when I realized the game understands something most devs forget: silence is also a sound, and here it’s filthy as hell.

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.