The first thing that hits you is how deliberately rough the edges are. Not in a broken way, more like someone took sandpaper to a glossy magazine cover. The 3DCG models have this uncanny valley thing going on where a character's cheekbone catches the light wrong and suddenly you're staring at a mannequin with superpowers. Michael Sharpe, the male protagonist you start with, looks like he hasn't slept since the Bush administration. It works though. The whole setup is this washed up photographer getting recruited by Anna Morgenstern, who runs a failing superhero PR firm called STALWART. She's got that ice queen thing down pat, all sharp angles and sharper dialogue, and the animated scenes when she's explaining the card game mechanics are... look, I got distracted.

The card game. Right. It's a strategy thing where you collect heroes and deploy them, but the real pull is what happens between matches. There's this one early scene with a female hero, can't remember her name, where she's doing a photoshoot and the masturbation trigger is tied to how well you played your hand. Miss a combo and she just poses awkwardly. Nail it and suddenly the camera lingers on her fingers drifting somewhere the modeling agency definitely didn't approve. The mobile game DNA is obvious, everything's built for short sessions, but disabling the card stuff turns it into a straight visual novel which honestly flows better. The multiple protagonist switches get jarring though. One minute you're Michael trying to figure out why Anna hired you, next you're some hero whose power is... actually I never figured out what her power was. She just kept taking her costume off.

The writing tries for Watchmen vibes but lands closer to a CW show that got cancelled after six episodes. There's a conspiracy about why the public hates superheroes now, something about trust being a weapon, but mostly it's an excuse to get these flawed beautiful people into increasingly compromising positions. The animated sequences during the strategy sections have this jerky quality that somehow makes the explicit stuff more intense, like catching a glimpse of something you weren't supposed to see. Anna's storyline in particular goes places I didn't expect, especially when Michael starts realizing his role is bigger than photography. Whatever that means. The game never really explains.