Cartoon Hearts: School of Desire 0.1

The whole thing feels like someone’s half finished scrapbook page, you know? Like they got the base paper down, maybe a couple of stickers, then just... stopped. Raven’s there, looking all moody and perfect in that leotard, and my brain immediately went to the good stuff. The mind control, the dark energy tentacles, the way her cloak could just swallow you whole. But the game, this Cartoon Hearts thing, it’s a visual novel that’s more novel than visual. The art is rough, deliberately unpolished, which I kinda respect. It’s got that raw, fan art on a forgotten DeviantArt account energy. But then you click and click and it’s just talking. So much talking about sketchbooks and school teams. I wanted to see Violet Parr’s force fields used in ways that would make her mom blush, not hear about her homework. The narrative is a weird, horny soup. You’re just some dude, and Starfire is there, and she’s saying things in her broken English that should be a direct pipeline to a hardcore scene. She talks about the “clinch of joy” or something and I’m sitting there, hand not even near my pants, just confused. The Ren’py engine is doing the heavy lifting, clicking through dialogue trees that feel like they were written by someone who’s only ever described sex, never actually had it. There’s a moment where you can choose to “study” with Raven and I thought, finally, here we go. It’s just a fade to black. A literal fade to black. In an adult game. I wanted to throw my digital scrapbook across the room. I keep thinking about the potential, though. The idea of these characters, fully realized and getting absolutely railed, is a five alarm fire in my brain. But this game is just the smoke. It’s all setup, no payoff. The erotic tag is doing a lot of aspirational heavy lifting. It’s like someone described a porno to you over a bad phone connection. You get the gist, but none of the sticky details. I wish the game would just admit it’s a prologue and stop pretending the next click will finally show Violet using those stretching powers for something other than reaching a high shelf. It won’t. But I’ll probably click through the next update anyway, like a total degenerate, hoping for the scrapbook to get a lot messier.

• adult
• teen titans
• violet parr
• starfire
• raven