You know what gets me about Exiles? The absolute balls on this thing to go from dusty Arabian Nights streets to some frozen hellscape across an ocean and then maybe into fucking space, all while the game looks like it was rendered on a potato. Not a fancy potato either, like one of those sad ones at the bottom of the bag. And I'm weirdly into it.

The sex scenes hit different when your character is supposed to be this rags-to-riches orphan who stumbled into some rich patron's service. There's this power dynamic running through the whole thing that makes the explicit content feel less like random porn and more like, I don't know, actual character moments? One minute you're getting railed in a servant's quarters, the next you're supposedly saving the world. The game doesn't take itself seriously and thank fuck for that because the writing would collapse otherwise. The dialogue during intimate scenes has this self-aware quality, like the writer knows exactly how ridiculous this all is and just leans into it. Some of the love interests are genuinely funny, though one of them has this voice that reminds me of my old landlord and I can't unhear it.

The soundtrack though. What the hell happened there? It's like someone left a Casio keyboard in a damp basement and then recorded it through a sock. During one particularly intense scene with one of the primary supporting characters, this tinny flute melody kicked in and I laughed so hard I had to stop what I was doing. That's not a complaint exactly. It added something. Not something good, but something. The game's got this whole fate-of-the-world plot that I keep forgetting exists between all the fucking, and honestly that's probably the right ratio. Wish the patron character had more screen time but that ship's sailed. The whole thing feels like someone's horny D&D campaign that got wildly out of hand and honestly? Valid.