Some rather talented artists contributed to this, and while I confess to having gone in with low expectations, I found route-hunting for the last few scenes in the gallery to be surprisingly interesting. Hitting the requirements to fill out the last entries in the gallery was unintuitive, but that's not a complaint; I didn't expect this game to make me think. The game shows off attention to detail and an interesting amount of path dependency. Path dependency is under served in games, and the rest of this review is something of an essay about it.

Common modes of path dependency in gameplay are single-pathing (linear), branch-pathing (set storylines), and wholly disconnected blobs of gameplay (open world). Titles where different paths lead to many specific variations seem rare to me. A path with many specific variations is one where the player can roam freely through the gameplay pieces, but the order in which they do so matters. The narrative design of this game is a bit tentacular... as is the theme. Tentacles are involved in the game's path-complexity.

The content is short, but highly replayable due to the author's attention to detail. The brevity of the game helps make the complex pathing interesting, since trying more variations doesn't take a prohibitive amount of time. I'm impressed by the novelty of this enough to suggest that I think this game could suggest a gameplay category of visual novels, where the story breaks apart into many player-directed storylets whose order of events is chosen by the player, then sews together a conclusion at the end based on the storylet ordering and the specific choices made within them. I know there are already other titles which attempt that, and I suspect there are enough that a pedant might argue it into a seeming commonplace, but I don't believe I've seen many titles that help define the category.

In this case, the protagonist also has a good in-universe reason why she can approach events in diverse order. She has little idea what state the region is in, but rather she's flying a ship through a sector of space under deadline when a traffic blockade gives her free time in front of that deadline. That's no spoiler; that's the start of the game. This gives her a reason to go sight-seeing on the clock, but she has little more than an in-system reference guide with which to form her reasons to go anywhere in particular. The star of the story starts out not in a high-stress position where urgent story events have to happen, but rather she's in an unexpectedly low-stress position where the urgent story event just got blocked with no recourse. Now she's reviewing her options somewhere she didn't really intend to be.

That low-stress narrative construct is interesting, and it may have some under-explored potential in being true to life for people in ways that urgent narratives usually aren't. Similar concepts may help with developing excuses for complex path-dependency in games. Many of the specific variations possible in a game will risk seeming forced/unnatural if the tension level in the narrative is high enough that making one decision or another seems like an intense and difficult decision, so low-tension pathing keeps it emotionally credible that the events could happen in many orders. Something else, too... That structure of having to make something out of many low-urgency decisions because the high-urgency decisions are totally blocked, I think people get there in other situations. This game expresses that structure in both its gameplay and its narrative. I found it bite-sized and replayable enough to invite thoughts about its structure, and it reminded me of things that happen well outside of the usual blast radius for a pornographic title.

Ah, of course, when I talk about true to life potential, I'm not talking about the setting... The setting is entirely about being a backdrop for furry porn scenarios. I mean Occupational Hazards did some things that were interesting here which could also work well with other characters in other settings starring in material for other audiences, too.