Get ready to connive and scheme your way through this short sandbox AVN.

You are Ephialtes - a midlist Athenian businessman with a big mouth, an empty treasury, and a sudden window of opportunity. Sparta's widowed queen has just been thrown in an Athenian dungeon for treason, and you have the leverage to broker her release. The deal you strike: she lives in your atrium. She feeds you Sparta's war strategies, which you present to the council as your own. And, between the strategy sessions and the council meetings, you go to work on her - one trade, one humiliation, one inch at a time - until the legend of Thermopylae forgets what she was.

GORGO: MOTHER OF SPARTA is a short adult visual novel about the calculated corruption of a legend - with a side of Athenian household management to fund it.

Court a queen who is smarter than you

Gorgo doesn't break. She negotiates, weighs, and waits. Every interaction is a trade - and the longer the game runs, the worse the trades get for her.

• Culture Training - Sparts are loud, assertive, and boisterous. That won't do. Dress her in Athenian linens, walk her through the agora as your "slave," hand her erotic poetry to read aloud, hire a painter to immortalise her topless, and grapple with the matter of her meddling son, Pleistarchus

• Every step is transactional - she gives glimpses for information, trades dignity for promise, and a fragment of her body for an answer.

Become a terrible statesman

Between visits to Gorgo, you influence a war council that will believe anything if you hand it to them in your own handwriting, and run an atrium that costs drachmae you don't have.

• Five-stat HUD - Economy, War Effort, Drachmae, Intelligence, and the slow ticking of the Hour of Helios

• Enact edicts of dubious morality - Tax Merchants, Embezzle Funds, Build Roads, Recall the Generals, Bribe Officers, Spread Rumours, and a few darker ones unlocked only when you can afford the consequences

• Sell intel to the Persians for 25 drachmae a piece - assuming you're not too patriotic to help them invade the city you're "defending"

• Weekly random events - a trade ship sinks, the harbor burns, a general defects, the Spartans send envoys, a brothel keeper offers you a favour

Athens needs a wise statesman. A steady war council. A steady hand at the helm of a captive queen. You are none of those things.

Get to it.

- A game of degeneracy by The Sexy Chinaman.