Exiles - Chapter 3 v0.4.1

The first time the game had me bent over a merchant’s stall, pants around my ankles while a veiled woman from the 1001 Nights part of the world commented on my “enthusiasm,” I knew this wasn’t some grimdark fantasy slog. It’s a horny mess, and I mean that in the best way. The art, oh man. It’s deliberately unpolished. Lines wiggle where they should be straight, anatomy sometimes decides physics is a suggestion, but there’s a raw, urgent energy to it. Like a sketchbook full of fever dreams. The women especially have these eyes that are just slightly too large, glittering with a mischief that the stiff, clumsy dialogue can’t quite deliver. The erotic appeal isn’t in perfection, it’s in the feeling that someone drew this with one hand. And then you’re on a boat. There’s a cat-girl. Don’t ask me how, the story, which is supposed to be about a penniless orphan rising to be a hero, has the attention span of a gnat. It forgets it’s a fantasy epic and suddenly it’s a harem comedy in a frozen wasteland. The patron who takes you in? I think she’s a love interest. Or maybe she’s the villain. The dialogue options are all some variation of “yes,” “yes, enthusiastically,” or a grunt. It’s glorious. I complained about the sound, or lack thereof, to myself for a solid ten minutes. Just pure silence for a scene that was clearly supposed to be a moaning, creaking bedframe symphony. There’s this one scene with a sorceress in a tower. The text is pure purple prose, comparing her… assets… to twin moons over Dumat al-Julfar. I choked on my drink. It’s so earnest and cheesy, you can’t help but be charmed. The sex scenes are the main event, obviously. They’re explicit, wordy, and often hilariously descriptive, using words for body parts that feel like they were pulled from a thesaurus written by a horny alien. The game forgets it’s supposed to be a grand adventure and just becomes a slideshow of very sticky situations. I wish the maps made any sense. You click a direction and end up in a different climate zone. It won’t be fixed. The whole thing feels like a corrupted memory of a better game, but that’s its whole strange, sticky charm. A genuine, unfiltered id-vomit.