About this game
The first world they land in is all wrong. The sky is the color of a fresh bruise and the trees whisper things that make your skin prickle. Joel and Abigail, they’re just standing there, her hand gripping his arm, and the game lets you feel that specific vertigo of being utterly lost. It’s a visual novel so the animations are stiff, like paper dolls being nudged, but somehow that adds to the uncanny valley of it all. You click through their bickering, the way fear makes her voice sharp and his too quiet, and then they find the first… other versions of themselves. The sharing tag isn’t a suggestion. It’s the core mechanic. Watching them watch themselves, the hesitation melting into a kind of fascinated hunger, is the whole point.
The sci-fi framing is just a flimsy excuse for a psychosexual road trip. One minute you’re in a fantasy realm with elves who have very specific fertility rituals, the next it’s a chrome-plated dystopia where public coupling is a tax write-off. The writing is weirdly poetic in spots, like someone fed a thesaurus to a horndog. A sex scene will be described with the clinical detachment of a lab report and then suddenly hit you with a metaphor about “a supernova swallowing its own light” that makes you snort and then think about it for a second too long. The swinging isn’t just partner swapping. It’s identity swapping. There’s a scene where Abigail is with a version of Joel from a world where he never met her, and the dialogue is all about the ghost of a life not lived, right before he bends her over a console covered in blinking, meaningless lights.
I got stuck for a solid ten minutes trying to figure out if a dialogue choice was bugged or if the game was just being deliberately obtuse. The UI is a mess, tiny buttons that feel like they’re running away from your cursor. The sound design is mostly just a low hum that made me think my laptop fan was dying. But then there’s a moment, a quiet one after a particularly messy group scene, where the two of them just sit in silence on a moonlit beach on a world that’s about to be swallowed by its sun. They don’t talk. You just click to breathe. And the whole messy, horny, unpolished thing suddenly feels like a genuine, sad little miracle about two people trying to fuck their way back to feeling normal. The adventure is just the space between the collapses of self.