@starkatt so, I finished my initial playthrough of LKiaB & then I went back to reread what you'd written about it & I think I see at least some of why we had such different experiences of it. For one, I never went back to the Hacker's room after the first, mostly-chaste visit.

Looking back at the game, I find it really *weird* at how carefully the game labels the moral choices for daytime scenes -- but never for the choice-of-where-you-spend-the-night. Most of the conversational options come with an explicitly-labeled judgement, even more often than they come with game-mechanics-guidance. But late-night comes only with the mechanics.

@starkatt and second, I took the framing as an explicit signal that the protagonist was a person-of-questionable-morality, and came at it as a piece of interactive-fiction rather than a roleplaying experience where I was supposed to have agency. Which I think gave me some distance?

@sev

It's definitely clear that the protagonist was set up as a person of questionable morality. I mostly saw it as a roleplaying experience, but it's still hard to not feel like the decisions I made reflected *something* on my choices, at least?

Spending more nights with The Hacker is definitely a big part of why I feel the way I do about how the game treats consent -- I think you saw my post about mixed messages.

@sev I'm okay with a VN about roleplaying an ethically malign person, but it feels like the game wants to have it both ways -- simultaneously exploring territory of manipulation and exploitation, while still wanting to (mostly, barring the end scenes) act like it's existing in everything-is-okay-here consent land.