It's what the title says: there are robots built specially for Adult Fun Times (tm) and four of them were hired for a raunchy party where a murder happened. At least, I assume it was a murder, since all other parts of the title have managed to prove true. I finished the story without ever finding out exactly what no-good, horrible, bad thing happened at the party. There's a bunch of things going on, and a lot of scope for exploration.
There's some timed stuff with the opening credits, edging me towards quitting immediately but never quite pushing me over the edge. I decided that a little timed delivery here might be forgivable.
Turns out we're ... some kind of indentured worker or convict? Our situation seems comfortable enough, but it's clear that we're not here of our own volition and part of the reason we're getting involved in this at all is because it'll knock some time off our sentence. No, we don't actually go to the party, not really: that's already happened. We're just supposed to question the four sex-robots, and since there's some sort of cloak-and-dagger business involved, we have to do so while posing as a client. Which means we also get to engage in Adult Fun Times with the robots because, hey, that's what they're nominally here for. And it's our cover. Totally.
There's also another thing involving the resident AI that somehow has access to our dreams, and I wonder if perhaps we're also a robot only we don't know it. Then there's our upstairs neighbour and his virtual-reality porn website. Halfway through, we learn how to access the VR logs -- the memories, if you will -- of our sexy robot suspects/witnesses, and that means multiple viewpoints of the same chain of events. It's a recipe for something awesome and incredible.
But. BUT.
Look. I'm in the middle of choosing my next move when suddenly everything is taken away in favour of a scene with our upstairs neighbour barging in, which is rude not just in-game but out-of-game as well. Was this on some sort of timer? Because given that I hadn't touched anything when this happened, it really feels a lot like it, and you know how I feel about timers. I hates them with the fire of a thousand suns. People, if you want something to suddenly interrupt an ongoing scene, have it be triggered by the number of moves made or by specific actions taken. DO NOT PUT IT ON A TIMER. But whatever, I'm invested in the story now, and I'm assuming we have a threesome because that's where I steer the conversation. Next scene, it's night, I'm in bed with the sex-bot, and our neighbour barges in again! As though he hadn't already done this literally a minute ago! What the ever-loving hell?
Restarting the game reveals that this one moment in the beginning where we have to wait for someone deal with some paperwork ... we actually have to wait in real time for it to happen. I hadn't noticed the first time around because I was busy checking other stuff out and the thing was finished and ready by the time I got back. If I had noticed, I'd have dumped this game immediately.
Also, all timer issues aside, the game requires that each in-game day, we go through an exceedingly tedious cycle of actions that includes actually playing through a boring workday as bored office drone. Dude, what is the point? Seriously? And it looks like there's a hunger daemon lurking in the background, too. Though I will admit that nothing in this paragraph really bothered me in any meaningful way until I realised just how much the timers were screwing me over.
Suffice it to say, once I got to an ending (without, as I said, ever finding out who even got murdered) I felt zero inclination to play this again just to find out more. It's like getting all the ingredients for a wonderful full English fry-up -- bacon, eggs, mushrooms, black pudding, baked beans, toast -- and preparing that breakfast by boiling the hell out of it. Yes, even the bacon and the toast. I am especially upset because this could have been So Damned Good.