The Sex Medic 8: 3 ways

The mouse click feels heavier than it should. That little plastic sound, then Natalia's face fills the screen, her real face, not some drawn character. She's got this look, you know the one, where someone's about to tell you something that'll make your stomach drop but they're trying to smile through it. The video quality isn't great, grainy like an old webcam, and that's what gets me. It feels like I'm actually sitting in Jim's shitty apartment, the one with the weird yellow lighting that makes everyone look slightly sick. I keep clicking through dialog choices and my finger actually hesitates. Not because the writing is brilliant or anything, it's fine, sometimes clunky like translated subtitles on those European films, but because Natalia's eyes keep darting to the side when she talks about the hotel. The hotel where Abi apparently does things Jim doesn't know about. There's this one moment where she reaches for a glass of water and her fingers tremble just slightly, and I'm sitting there thinking about how dry my own mouth feels. The cake sits on the table between them, untouched, and I can almost feel the frosting getting warm and soft in that stuffy room. Nobody eats the cake. That bothers me more than it should. What's the point of having cake in a scene if nobody touches it? The crumbs, the texture of buttercream, the way a fork would leave little tracks, all of it just sitting there while they talk about infidelity. The sex therapist angle comes in weird. Natalia isn't actually a therapist but she's playing one in this conversation, doling out relationship advice while clearly having her own agenda. The marriage tag is misleading, they're not married, which I kept waiting to be addressed and it never was. The farm from previous episodes gets mentioned once, a throwaway line about "remember when things were simpler" and then it's gone. I wanted more of that, the contrast between open fields and this claustrophobic room. But the videoquest format means you're locked into this one conversation, this one room, this one tension that builds and builds. My palm got sweaty on the mouse. That's not a metaphor. The plastic felt slick and I had to wipe it on my pants before clicking the next choice.

• dialog choice
• cake
• sex therapist
• relationships
• marriage