About this game
Rael is a mess. Not the fun kind where you laugh at someone tripping over their own feet, but the kind where you sit in a dark room and wonder if breathing is worth the effort. Yakeshi Station is exactly the sort of place you end up when you've burned every bridge and the ashes are still smoldering. I clicked through the first few scenes half paying attention, my phone buzzing with Discord notifications, and then something about the way Zuberi talks just... stuck. He's not here to save you. He's got his own shit, his own ship, this deep space vessel that feels less like a crew and more like a collection of strays someone forgot to put down.
The furry tag is there but it's not in your face about it. Zuberi's a lion guy, I think? Or maybe a tiger. The art style is loose enough that sometimes I squinted and just went with it. There's a scene early on where you're in the mess hall and this one crewmate, I forget her name already, she's got these ears that twitch when she's annoyed and I spent like five minutes just clicking back and forth to watch them move. That's the kind of unpolished charm here. Deliberately rough around the edges, like the dev said fuck it to smoothing things out and honestly it works. The writing has typos. I noticed one where "your" should've been "you're" and I didn't even care.
Sex stuff doesn't jump you immediately. It's buried under conversations about regret and what the hell fringe space even means. When it does happen, it's messy. Not porn-perfect. There's a moment with Zuberi where the power dynamic shifts weirdly fast and I wasn't sure if I was into it or just curious where the story would go. The mystery elements creep in slow. Something about the darkness between stars being alive, or aware, or hungry. I dunno. I was half asleep scrolling through dialogue and then a line hit about how the void doesn't just watch you, it remembers. Made me put my phone down for a sec.
Wish there was more actual exploration. You're on a ship but mostly you're just talking. Which is fine. I guess. The interactive fiction tag is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Choices matter but sometimes they matter in ways that feel random, like picking what to eat leads to a crewmate trauma dumping on you. Not complaining. Just observing. The LGBTQIA stuff is woven in without fanfare, which I appreciate because nothing kills a boner faster than a game patting itself on the back for being inclusive. You just are who you are and fuck who you fuck and the galaxy keeps spinning.