record scratch, freeze-frame

Yeah, that's me reviewing the pornographic furry visual novel. You're probably wondering how I got into this mess. Well, it all started when my friend, an erotic hypnotist, decided to troll me. Actually I guess it started when I was a genderqueer furry with weird fetishes but the trolling is more interesting as a premise.

Because you see I'm kind of a huge picky bitch and was a little 'eh' on the demo for this one, plus it generally had the vibe of being 'wholesome' which is both unpleasant as hell and also I like them fucked up. But she bought me the game as a present so I'm now like, oh for sure I'll just give it a shot. I play through two of the four routes and I'm having a good time.

Now, this is a visual novel about magically turning into shit and doing BDSM shit, so you feel however you feel about that. There are very few conflicts in this thing that aren't resolved within a scene, and the biggest attempt at having one is shockingly ill-advised and unmotivated. Most scenarios eventually turn into just a series of disconnected scenes happening months apart. Multiple routes have long scenes of just explaining what furries are and how great they are if you somehow got into this thing without already knowing-- which I think you could do! Everyone abides by the actual sensible rules of safety in kink relationships which makes sense in a story where it's supposed to be regular people actually doing that stuff as real people would aside from the magic powers that turn you into a lactating cow girl etc etc. There's also a suspicious lack of any real like, homophobia or anything in this world. They come close to a character being transphobic at once point and again the person in question just chills out immediately. What I'm saying is that this is low stakes cheesecake (mouse joke) aimed at specific kinks and I had a great time and that's my review. Back to the story of me being owned.

The third route I did was the one involving hypnotism, and like I said I'm talking to an actual hypno practitioner so I'm joking with her like "haha this will be just like your job." Apparently it's decently accurate according to her but I wouldn't know. But THEN. THEN it turns out that the actual story is about having an alt persona incepted into the protagonist's brain and them making a deal and now she's just plural in a somewhat cartoon way. And as I've written on my website recently, my ass just recently figured out I'm plural. I've been had. This gift game was a landmine set to own me. I've been owned.

The story of that route isn't actually about being a real-life system in any way, but it's got enough details that I think the writer didn't do it without research, at least. And then a bunch of other things in it have a lot of eerie parallels to things happening in my life that could not have even been predicted by my friend! Infinite damage is dealt to my psyche. She rolled a natural 20 on me. I was entirely defeated by this gesture and have no choice but to accept my fate.

Also, I made fun of the game a little on social media and the writer liked the post. That was bad but it's like the third person to hoist me like that after game designer Yoshiro Kimura and science fiction writer Matthew Stover so I guess I wasn't as devastated as I could have been. Zoe seems very nice I hope the next game's development is going well.