The cards feel wrong. Not the rules, those are standard blackjack, but the texture. They have this glossy sheen like a cheap magazine cover, and when you win a hand the model on screen does this little shuffle step backwards. Her name is Eva, I think. Blonde. The kind of blonde that comes from a bottle and a very specific lighting setup. She looks at the camera like she's reading a teleprompter behind it.

I lost three hands in a row because I kept hitting on 17. Not because I don't know basic strategy, I do, but because I wanted to see what happened when she took off the jacket. The jacket removal animation is about two seconds long and her shoulders move in a way that suggests the motion capture was done by someone who had never removed a jacket before. It's hypnotic. I mean that negatively. I mean I couldn't look away.

The real model thing is strange because she's clearly a real person but the whole production has this uncanny valley quality, like a deepfake made by someone who only had access to stock footage of a business seminar. Between hands there's this dead air where she just stands there breathing, and the breathing doesn't match the idle animation cycle so her chest moves independently of her torso. I started counting the frames. 47 frames per breath cycle. I don't know why I counted that. The strip blackjack premise is so straightforward, cards then clothes then cards then clothes, but something about the execution makes it feel like a art installation about loneliness. You're not playing against her, you're playing against a shuffled deck and she's just reacting to a script that triggers on win states. I won eventually and she took off the earrings first. Who starts with earrings?