About this game
Bro, I fired this up expecting some basic corruption VN and instead I'm stuck on this minigame where you literally strip clues out of a suspect. No joke. You're in this interrogation room, 3dcg chick is sweating, and you have to pick the right dialogue options while her clothes come off piece by piece if you nail the timing. Miss it and she clams up, bra stays on, you get nothing. It's the most absurdly on-brand mechanic for a game that's already screaming criminal romance with a side of violence. The male protag is this edgy mystery man with a past, which is whatever, but the stripping thing? I can't decide if it's genius or the dumbest shit I've ever seen. Probably both.
The city is called Solace which is hilarious because nothing about it is solacing. Missing girls, campus secrets, the usual dark visual novel stew. But then you get these animated scenes that are actually pretty smooth for what's clearly a budget title. The 3dcg isn't winning awards, characters move like they've got a stick up their ass sometimes, but when the clothes come off during those minigames it's like the devs suddenly remembered what we're all here for. There's this one scene with a girl from the campus, I won't spoil, but the tension before the violence kicks in had me genuinely leaning forward. Then the game crashes. Just freezes. Had to reload. Didn't fix it, just happened again later. Small thing but it broke the mood completely.
The whole morality system feels like it's pretending to be deeper than it is. You can be a merciless hunter or a virtuous savior, sure, but the choices mostly boil down to "do the obviously bad thing" or "do the slightly less bad thing." Still, the mystery hooks you. Something about pulling threads in a city that doesn't want to be questioned. The writing has these moments where it forgets it's a porn game and tries to be a real noir thriller, then snaps back with a stripping minigame. Honestly I wish the animations were longer. You get like three seconds of payoff and then it's back to brooding dialogue. For a game with stripping and animated tags, it's weirdly stingy with the goods. But when it hits, it hits. I don't know, man. I'm still thinking about that interrogation scene two days later. The criminal undertones mixed with the romance options create this greasy feeling that's either exactly what you want or will make you close the tab. No middle ground.