I keep thinking about the shower scene. Not because it’s hot, exactly, though the 3D models do their job well enough with water effects that look like someone smeared vaseline on the lens. It’s because the game spends twenty minutes building up to it with text messages and stolen glances across the library, then the actual moment arrives and Trevor just stands there with his psychology textbook face while the girl monologues about her childhood. Classic Hearts in the Shadows move. You’re playing this final year psych student who’s supposedly some master manipulator, but half the time you’re just picking dialogue options that amount to “tell me more about your father” while the game’s voyeur camera pans around like a security guard who forgot his coffee.

The sandbox structure is weirdly addictive in a way that makes me hate myself. You wander the university between classes, clicking on lockers and water fountains, and sometimes you stumble into a scene where you can peek through a door crack at someone changing. The incest stuff creeps in through the story, Trevor’s stepsister shows up in the second chapter and suddenly all that psychology training goes out the window. There’s this one moment where you can choose to leave her room or stay, and the game holds on the doorknob for an uncomfortable ten seconds while the music does this low drone thing. I picked stay, obviously, because I’m reviewing this, and the scene that followed made me close my browser tab then reopen it three times. The writing is actually decent when it stops trying to be profound, there’s a line about how silence in a childhood home teaches you to hear things that aren’t there, which hit harder than any of the sex scenes.

The 3DCG character models have this dead eyed quality that somehow works for the school setting, everyone looks like they haven’t slept since orientation week. Wish the sandbox elements actually mattered more, you collect all these items and notes but they mostly just unlock more voyeur opportunities rather than changing how the manipulation plays out. One minute you’re analyzing someone’s attachment style, the next you’re watching them through a window and the game doesn’t seem to know if it wants to be taken seriously or just be porn. The character creator lets you rename Trevor which is pointless because everyone still treats you like a creep named Trevor.