The sound of a centrifuge whirring in the background, that low hum, it’s practically a bassline for bad decisions. I was curating this playlist, right, something for late night coding sessions, and I had this visual novel running on the side. Lab Rats. The audio design is aggressively functional, almost like a low budget ASMR track of a science building. The click of a mouse, the generic door swoosh. It’s not good. But it’s so perfectly, deliberately unpolished that it loops back around to being hypnotic. You’re this lab assistant, and the whole place is a petri dish of corruption, which is just a fancy way of saying everyone’s morally flexible and ready to fuck.

The seduction is less a dance and more of a blunt instrument. You just...