Moonlust: The first-ever sting

The whole thing feels like a lost Flash game from 2007 that someone found on a dusty hard drive and just... uploaded. Lesson of Passion, right? That name alone. You know exactly the kind of jank you're signing up for. The art is this weird, unpolished vector style where the blonde's hair looks like a solid yellow helmet and her boobs have their own gravitational field. It's not good, but it's a specific kind of not good that hits a nostalgia nerve I didn't ask to have hit. Mark is a vampire. A handsome new one, apparently, though he looks like a default character model who forgot to put on a shirt. The whole plot is his first hunt at a night club. A vampire night club. Which is just a purple room with a bar. The game is a series of choices, the classic pickup structure. You click, you pick a line, she reacts. I spent way too long on the first screen just staring at the weirdly long fingers on the character model. Why are his fingers so long? He's a vampire, not a pianist. The dialogue options are pure cheese. One was something like "Your beauty outshines the moon" and she actually went for it. I laughed out loud, genuinely. The writing is so earnest it circles back to being charming. The seduction minigame, if you can call it that, is just a memory test of clicking the right sequence of compliments. Fail and she gets bored. Succeed and you get a bite scene that's about as explicit as a scrambled cable channel in the 90s. The animation is stiff, like two mannequins being pushed together. But there's a specific frame where her neck is exposed and the fangs go in that's drawn with slightly more care than everything else. Someone on the team had a thing, clearly. I wish the club had more than one room. It won't. The whole thing is a ten minute loop of trial and error to see all the CGs. It's not a good game. I've played it three times now. The music is a ten second loop that will haunt me. Don't play it with sound.

• night club
• pickup
• blonde
• vampire
• choice