The redhead. Always the redhead. In Lovecraft, red hair meant something wrong in the bloodline, a touch of the deep ones maybe, a sign you’d be drawn to the sea and to things with too many teeth. Here, it’s just a pixelated sprite of a girl with her tits out, falling down the screen like a doomed star. I’m supposed to catch her. Catch the pictures. The catcher mechanic is a basket sliding left and right, and my brain, rotten from years of actual cosmic horror, starts seeing the falling hentai pics as non-euclidean angles of desire. A tentacle pic misses the basket. I feel a genuine, stupid pang of loss. That one goes into the void, not my personal collection.

The arcade challenges are a lie. There’s no challenge. It’s a slot machine wearing a game’s skin. You catch enough smut, a bar fills up, and you unlock a bonus video. I kept playing, not because it was fun, but because the rhythm of it, the repetitive slide and catch, became a kind of ritual. Like chanting a summoning spell. The erotic tag is doing all the heavy lifting here, the art is the kind of generic hentai you’d find on a pop-up ad in 2006, but that’s almost the point. It’s so aggressively unpolished it loops back around to being a fascinating artifact. I was using a fidget spinner with my other hand, and the two sensations merged into one profoundly weird meditation.

My collection grew. A gallery of static images, poorly cropped. The game promises you can look at them later, and you can. It’s a feature. It exists. The whole thing feels like a cursed file you’d find on a forgotten corner of Newgrounds, something that would give your computer a virus that whispers to you at night. The redhead pic fell again and I missed it on purpose, just to see if the game would react. It didn’t. The indifference was the most eldritch part of the whole experience. A complete, silent, mechanical uncaring from the universe. I never even got to the bonus video. The basket just kept sliding.