The first render of Braden’s dorm room looks like absolute ass. Flat lighting, weird proportions, that distinct RPG Maker uncanny valley where everyone stands like a mannequin with a spine made of rebar. And somehow, it works. Not in an ironic way. The jank matches Zack’s headspace, this kid who shows up to college with a suitcase full of repression and a brain that short circuits the second his roommate stretches and a sliver of stomach shows above his waistband.

The game takes forever to get to anything explicit. Like, genuinely forever. Hours of dialogue trees and cafeteria conversations and late night study sessions where nothing happens except tension coiling tighter and tighter. There’s this one scene where Braden falls asleep on his bed, shirt riding up, and Zack just stands there. That’s it. The whole thing is just internal monologue and the cursor hovering over options that all feel wrong. My screen time app called me out for staring at a static image for eleven minutes.

But when the sexual content finally hits, it’s not the usual visual novel whiplash where everyone’s suddenly a porn star. The oral scenes are awkward and fumbling in a way that feels deliberate. The anal stuff, when it comes, is treated like an actual event rather than a checkbox. There’s corruption here but it’s the slow kind, the kind where a character doesn’t realize they’ve changed until they’re already different. The masturbation sequences are scattered throughout, these little moments of self exploration that the game handles with more care than most full sex scenes I’ve seen in other titles.

The dev clearly had no idea what they were doing at the start. The early renders are rough enough to use as sandpaper. But watching the quality creep upward update by update becomes part of the appeal, like following a webcomic artist who’s figuring out anatomy in real time. The dialogue carries it though. Braden’s banter feels like actual college bullshitting, and Zack’s internal spirals hit that specific flavor of overthinking where you’re screaming at the screen just kiss him already you absolute disaster.