Dead Dating

We start in a dungeon, naturally. Our player character (freshly named Slotty McDied, bank manager, chronic amnesiac, and casual drug user) wakes up across from a bound stranger. A cryptic note, a timer, and a selection of adult props later... we chose wrong, and the poor guy did not make it. Lesson learned: always trust the purple dildo.

Back in Slotty's apartment, we piece together his life: a threatening letter he's been receiving for four months, a broken mirror, a suspicious safe (combo: 1069, which we are very proud of cracking), and a mysterious contact named Rex who turns out to be his drug dealer. We meet Rex not face to face, but through a glory hole in a public restroom, where we rendered him a service using the lube we found in the apartment like the resourceful little disaster we are.

After a tram ride where we ogle and flirt with a silver fox professor named Don Johnson, we arrive at Dolphin Bay and board the Pale Mary, hosted by drag queen extraordinaire Spear. The first group of contestants assembles: Carl the bronzed fitness model, Alex the irritating kickboxer, Frank the policeman who insists on police-print swim trunks, and Don the professor (yes, the same daddy from the tram). We chat up Carl on the boat, arrive at Night Dream Island, and settle into a very luxurious mansion with no cell reception.

Slotty finds a new threatening note tucked in his luggage, which means whoever has been targeting him followed him here. That evening, a poolside quiz reveals everyone's types (Frank likes cute and silly guys, Don likes obedient ones, Alex is a bottom who wants a top, and Carl just wants trust). We get paired with Carl for the room-sharing game, snoop on Frank unpacking in his underwear from the balcony like the disaster twink we are, and accidentally offend the professor by asking about Carl instead of complimenting his package.

The next morning: screaming, a charred corpse in the hallway, and Spear is nowhere to be found. Frank gets accused immediately, pinned down by Alex (disturbingly fast for a police officer), and locked in the storage room. Don conducts an aggressive off-screen interrogation while we awkwardly watch. The group investigates, finds an angry diary page filled with self-loathing, discovers the yacht has exploded trapping everyone on the island, and spots a mysterious scarred bald figure watching them from across the island before vanishing into the trees. The demo ends there, with everything on fire (sometimes literally).

We pick up right where the demo left off, speed-running through the early chapters to get to the new content. Slotty McDied re-collects all his clues, has the requisite glory hole encounter with Rex (who is, as always, devastatingly caring and also willing to show us his barcode penis tattoo), and makes his way to Dolphin Bay to board the Pale Mary. We find a silver necklace on the deck with a photo of a blonde child inside, engraved with 'my love, Yaroslav', which means Carl is apparently a Russian named Yaroslav, which is a lot to process. We return the necklace to Carl and he warms up to us slightly, which is more than he deserves.

The first night goes exactly as before: Spear is found dead and charred the next morning, Frank is wrongly accused, Alex tackles Carl dramatically, and the professor conducts his 'interrogation.' This time we team up with Frank to investigate, spot the second house across the island through binoculars, and then witness the yacht explosion. A silent figure (Aram) leads us to the second house, where we meet the five new contestants: Will the nurturing chef, Bruto the Latin dancer, Harry the secretly-famous wrestler in disguise, Yuji the student-slash-psychic with a split personality named Ki, and Aram himself, who refuses to speak to anyone. The two groups compare notes, discover neither yacht is usable, confirm the murderer is still on the island, and agree to cooperate from a distance.

We share a room with Frank again, this time successfully working through every compliment option until he is absolutely melting. Then things get steamy between us and the very enthusiastic police officer, after which we have a cryptic dream visit from the God of Destiny, who is smug and unhelpful. The next day involves exploring the island, discovering a cave on the beach, and descending into a very dark tunnel haunted by a tormenting inner voice, before stumbling out into what appears to be the basement of the second house and finding a hidden speedboat. Victory, briefly. At the dinner party that night, everyone is poisoned, and we wake up in a dungeon. Again.

The dungeon section is where this episode goes completely off the rails in the best possible way. Someone has kidnapped the contestants and rigged elaborate BDSM-adjacent death traps for each of them. Frank is trussed up in cow ears with a urethral sound and a timer that requires a very specific kind of rescue. We answer three quiz questions correctly (saving his mom, lemon juice over beer, yes to the shock question) and then spend a frankly heroic amount of time milking Frank until his cup overflows and the timer stops. We rescue Alex next, working through a weight-distribution puzzle under time pressure. Then we attempt to save the Professor, who refuses to cooperate with the 'colonoscopy' framing and loses badly because of it. Bruto is also lost to a ping-pong ball situation that none of us fully understood. We end the stream somewhere in the dungeon with the body count rising and Omer's hand in genuine distress.

We kick things off sick and Justin-free, which honestly just means fewer witnesses to my increasingly unhinged commentary. After speed-running through the now-familiar setup (naming ourselves Slotty McDied, cracking the safe with 1069, rendezvousing with Rex and his very proud barcode tattoo), we board the Pale Mary and meet the first wave of contestants all over again. The ranking system is in full effect: Frank takes the cop crown, Carl is objectively beautiful, and Alex remains aggressively not my type but strategically necessary for the investigation route.

We commit to romancing Alex, pair up with him in the room-sharing game, and agree to cook him breakfast in the morning. There's a brief detour to spy on a naked Frank through his window (very observational of us), a run-in with the professor and his, uh, considerable presence, and then we catch Carl and Spear in something very suspicious on the yacht. The morning scream arrives on schedule, the charred corpse is confirmed real, Frank gets wrongly tackled and locked up by Alex, and the professor conducts his... enthusiastic interrogation. The surveillance footage clears Frank completely: nobody left their rooms all night, and the camera cut out at 7 a.m., meaning the body was placed after that window.

The yacht explodes, a silent figure (Aram) leads us to the second house, and we meet the new arrivals: Will the warm chef, Bruto the aggressively flirty dancer, Harry the secretly-famous wrestler, the masked Yuji and his alter ego Ki, and Aram who refuses to speak to basically anyone. We work through the action sequence carefully, snooping in Yuji's room to find his burned invitation with the words "come," "prize," "10," and "death," and discovering a clock puzzle compartment note referencing Twin Gods, a cruel ritual, and "a black canvas" written by someone whose life was ending. Ki drops by in the night to check on us, unsettled but warming up slightly after we treat him with genuine curiosity.

The dream sequence hits hard: we're underwater, we find Aram bound and used as a prop by a mysterious entity who calls him "Mr. Pig," insists he's done something "unforgivable," and clearly enjoys the whole arrangement a little too much. We wake shaken. In the morning Aram looks exhausted and actually speaks a few words to us, which feels significant. We also find diary pages near Spear's body showing a flashback: Aram at a party, abandoned by a friend who drifted off to flirt with a bearded man at the bar, while Aram tried to chat up someone nearby. The friend may have spiked the drinks with T-Rex. The episode ends with everyone agreeing to try to escape the island, and us heading out with Yuji to investigate, but we call it a night just before things get really juicy.

We pick up at the goodbye dinner, everyone relieved and ready to escape the island the next morning. Then, one by one, the contestants start dropping like flies after their drinks are spiked, and we wake up in what can only be described as a NSFW Jigsaw scenario. All ten contestants have been kidnapped and locked into elaborate (and deeply perverted) puzzle traps, and Slotty, the only one somehow left untied, has to go room by room to rescue everyone. Frank is hanging from the ceiling with a very unfortunate accessory. Alex has been repurposed as a claw machine. The professor, a lifelong top, is forced to reconsider his stance on versatility in order to survive. Carl is put on trial for pretending to be gay for money. Bruto gets the ping pong ball treatment. Yuji nearly drowns until we call out to his alter ego Ki instead of him. Will gets whipped by the professor with what the game diplomatically calls a processing mechanism. Harry, bless him, is the one casualty of my truly catastrophic memory in the matching card game, though we reload and save him the second time around.

With everyone rescued (on the second attempt), we head to the dock to leave, and that's when Alex pulls out Frank's stolen gun and shoots Acam on the spot, convinced he's the killer. We get a bleak bad ending where Alex goes to jail, Acam is dead, and Slotty goes home with nothing. We try confessing to Alex right after the shooting for some reason, and he tells us we're a psycho and to leave. Noted. We reload.

In the good ending, we save everyone and confront Acam together. He admits he planted the corpse, Spear is confirmed innocent (just an event host paid through emails), and Acam is arrested by Frank. Back in the city, the aftermath unfolds over several days: a trial, a prosecutor named Marcos who turns out to be surprisingly decent, and Slotty visiting Acam in prison every single day like the devoted disaster he is.

The trial is genuinely interesting. Thomas testifies that Acam stole his phone after their date (confirming how Acam got the invitation info), Harry confirms he was drugged with seasickness pills on the yacht, and Alex gives a famously useless testimony about the time he found the body. A witness named Nolan reveals that Acam was kicked out of his family ten years ago for being gay, and Dr. Hopper, the victim, was the man who took him in afterward. Acam refuses a lawyer, refuses to explain his motive, and gets sentenced to 20 years with a possible appeal. Marcos pulls Slotty aside afterward and offers to be Acam's lawyer if we can find new evidence.

Slotty proceeds to visit Acam in prison daily, charm the prison guard Lorenzo into arranging an after-hours private room meeting, learn from Acam's awful childhood friend Nolan (now a priest) that Acam was beaten and disowned by his family for being gay after Nolan snitched on him, and slowly get Acam to open up just enough to agree that an appeal might be worth considering. The private room meeting goes very well, Acam says he killed Dr. Hopper to stop him from doing something but won't say what, and tells Slotty the evidence is back on the island. The episode ends with Slotty declaring he's going back to Night Dream Island to find the truth and free his man. The DLC begins... next time.