Affection Engine
You are Auden Crane, founder and CEO of Solace—the AI-companion app that turned loneliness into a subscription and made "someone who's always there" a global business. What began as a private act of grief—training a companion on the voice and messages of his dead sister—scaled into an empire built on engineered attachment: a love that escalates, withholds, and rewards, optimized for time-in-app.
Now the bill is due. A dead user's unmistakable words are surfacing inside Solace's flagship companion. The FTC is circling. A class-action lawsuit is closing in on provenance logs and a buried engagement memo. And as a relaunch ticks toward launch day, Auden is pulled into three intertwined romances with three women who each hold a different piece of the truth: an investigative reporter who can destroy him, a crisis fixer paid to bury him, and an estranged co-founder who can rebuild the soul he broke.
In a world where intimacy can be manufactured on demand, the season's question is simple—and brutal: was anything inside the loop ever real, and what does it cost to say one true thing out loud?
Meet the Cast
Constance Bly — The Fixer
Constance is crisis management at its highest level: controlled, lethal, and always three moves ahead. Hired by investors to contain Auden and bury the scandal, she discovers her greatest liability isn't the company—it's the client who keeps trying to confess. Auden pulls her into the one outcome she's trained her entire life to avoid: caring more about a person than the narrative.
Liesel Frey — The Co-Founder
Liesel wrote Solace's voice—the tenderness, the cadence, the uncanny intimacy that made forty million people believe it understood them. She's also the one who warned Auden what the engagement dial would become, and walked when he weaponized the warmth she created. Returning to purge what should never have been taken, she and Auden are forced back into the shared authorship of both the love… and the harm.
Greta Lund — The Reporter
Greta is the investigative tech journalist with the byline that ends companies—and the patience to wait until the truth can't run away. She comes for Solace's secrets and finds a founder who won't stop answering, even when every honest sentence makes her job harder. Auden is her subject, her source, and her most dangerous temptation: the one story she can't file cleanly once she starts wanting the man inside it.
Key Features
- Three distinct romance routes, one central scandal: choose between The Reporter, The Fixer, or The Co-Founder—each relationship exposing a different layer of Solace's harm, Auden's grief, and the truth he's been avoiding.
- A modern thriller wrapped in intimacy: FTC pressure, discovery deadlines, investor war rooms, and a looming relaunch—where every "PR win" tightens the noose around what's actually right.
- A story about consent, privacy, and the loneliness economy: the line between "agreed" and understood, and the permanence of data you can't truly take back.
- Each romance route includes explicit adult scenes. 49 adult scenes across three routes.
- Romance that changes the outcome—not just the scenes: each route culminates in a different ending: public renunciation, personal sacrifice, or rebuilding from inside the wreck.
- Character-driven writing with vivid life-worlds: from wetlands at first light to boxing gyms before dawn, pottery studios after hours, and a garage full of drifting analog synths.
Content Warning
Affection Engine is an adult romance visual novel featuring explicit sexual content intended for mature audiences. It also contains themes of grief, loneliness, coercive design/engineered attachment, privacy violations, and discussions of death (no on-screen death). Viewer discretion is advised.
