A Girl on a Train

Effy doesn't waste time. That book you're reading, some fantasy doorstopper, she's already got you pegged as a mark before the train leaves the station. Her setup is clumsy, honestly. Glances over the top of the page, a little too deliberate. The blackmail trigger is something stupid, a photo she angles just right to look compromising. And the whole thing hinges on you being too flustered to just delete an image from a phone. It's thin. But that's not the point. The unreal engine part of my brain keeps getting distracted by how this whole thing is put together. The shaders on her clothes are basic, like someone dropped a marketplace asset into a scene and called it a day. Her skin has this weird subsurface scattering that looks waxy in the train's overhead lighting. The corruption arc they're going for, this fantasy of a manipulative hentai succubus in a commuter rail car, it trips over its own feet because the environment is so sterile. You'd expect a train car to have more grime, more reflections on the metal poles, some volumetric light from the window. Nope. Flat lighting makes every sexual escalation feel like it's happening in a doctor's waiting room. Drove me nuts. In the middle of a sequence where she's coercing another passenger into something incestuous, the animation just... loops. A three second cycle of a hand moving. It's jarring enough that I started thinking about blend spaces and state machines instead of the whole corruption fantasy. The dialogue is this oddly translated mess where a character will say something filthy and then follow it with a line that sounds like a terms of service agreement. There's a moment where she's describing her hedonistic family fantasies and I swear a typo calls her brother by the wrong name. It's like the game wants to be this dark, manipulative VN but the lack of polish, the kind of stuff you'd fix first pass in a blueprint, makes it more of a comedy. A weirdly compelling comedy, but still.

• corruption
• fantasy
• train
• visual novel
• cg hentai