Braden’s towel slipped. Not in some slick, choreographed way, just a genuine fumble of terrycloth and damp skin right there in the dorm room doorway. And the game, this Straight!? thing, it just sits with that moment. Doesn't rush. Zack, the guy you're steering, he freezes like a deer in headlights made of awkward boners. I've played Coming Out On Top, right, and that one is all confidence and cheeky winks. This is the opposite. It's fumbling. The 3DCG models are rough, honestly. Braden's jawline sometimes looks like it was sculpted from a bar of soap, and the animations are stiff. But that jank kind of works? It feels like a real memory, not a fantasy. The dialogue is where it digs in. Long, meandering chats on the dorm room floor about nothing, about family, about why Zack’s heart hammers when Braden just cracks a stupid joke.

There's this one scene, second update I think, where they're studying and Braden just reaches over and corrects Zack's grip on a pencil. That's it. The whole screen just becomes that hand. The game spends an absurd amount of time on that hand. And Zack's internal monologue spirals into a full systems failure about the warmth of fingers. It's pure corruption of the self, a slow rot of a straight identity that's more compelling than any hardcore scene. The masturbation bit later, alone in the shower, is frantic and guilty and the sound design is just wet tile echoes and shaky breaths. It's not sexy. It's desperate.

Then, completely out of nowhere, a scene with a talking squirrel. I think? A mascot for the college. It's a bizarre, unfunny joke that goes on for three text boxes too long. The dev is clearly learning as they go, the quality whiplash is real. The oral and anal content, when it finally arrives, is explicit but almost clinical in its awkwardness. A fumbling of belts and too much teeth, a confession mumbled into a pillow. It captures that specific terror of first gay sex better than any polished yaoi game. The self exploration isn't a journey, it's a series of small, panicked betrayals of your own self image. One minute you're laughing at a bad 3D model, the next you're holding your breath because Zack finally, accidentally, let his gaze linger too long.

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.