About this game
The first thing that hits you isn't the cyberpunk cityscape or the neural implant lore dump. It's the way the detective's hand trembles slightly when he picks up his coffee cup. This tiny, almost missable animation in a 3DCG scene. Spent way too long just watching that loop, the slight jitter of the fingers, the way the cheap synth-coffee sloshes. The game's unpolished, sure, character models sometimes have that dead-eyed doll look, especially during the investigation segments where you're just clicking through dialogue trees. But then a scene with the main milf character, a widow tangled in the conspiracy, starts and suddenly the animation budget went somewhere specific. The way her skirt rides up during a seemingly innocent conversation, the deliberate, slow tease before any actual sex scene triggers. It's a handjob scene that starts almost clinically, her explaining the dehumanizing effects of the body-piloting AI app while her hand works mechanically, and the juxtaposition is genuinely unsettling and hot.
The leveling system, if you can call it that, is tied to your corruption or maybe your empathy. It's never explained. You just notice dialogue options graying out or new, crueler ones appearing during interrogations. There's a point where you can use a suspect's neural implant to force a dopamine spike during oral sex, essentially date-raping a confession out of her with pleasure. The game doesn't judge you, doesn't even really acknowledge the shift, but the next romance scene with a different character becomes noticeably colder, more transactional. Forgot to mention the graphic violence tag. It's not constant, but when it hits, it's jarring. A flashback to a body mod gone wrong that's less gore and more body horror, wires fused with flesh. It clashes weirdly with the otherwise smooth, almost plastic skin textures of the sex scenes.
The mystery itself is a tangled mess of future-corporate speak and personal vendettas. Got lost in a subplot about a rogue AI that was supposed to be a red herring but ended up being more interesting than the main murder. The detective's dead wife haunts the narrative through fragmented memory sequences that interrupt the lewd scenes at the worst possible moments. You're about to finish and the screen glitches into a static-filled memory of a dinner date. It's a deliberate, frustrating choice that I kind of respect. The animated scenes are short loops, nothing groundbreaking, but the sound design during the vaginal sex scene with the detective's informant, all wet sounds and the low hum of the city outside her apartment, does more heavy lifting than the visuals. Wish the dystopian setting felt more lived-in outside of the sex and crime scenes. The world feels like a series of themed rooms. But that hand tremor. Still thinking about it.