Probably my favorite AVN at the moment. So far I've only played through on my main route (Emma's maledom), but I'm looking forward to catching up on some of the others.
We get a lot of Emma in this chapter, which is always a good thing in my not-at-all-biased opinion. I'm actually curious how this chapter would play out for a player who isn't interested in Emma, because short of writing it in burning letters in the sky I don't think mrsilverlust could have made it any clearer that she's in love with the MC. He's the one she goes to for help, and seeing them working together is nice.
The risk with characters who are 'meant for each other' is that the writer has to keep placing artificial barriers in the way to drag out the story. But in this case the obstacles feel real. They're so used to bickering that they don't know when to stop, and they've both got baggage holding them back.
Emma obviously can't handle the dissonance between her beliefs and her kinks. At one point I thought the MC should just make her sit down and talk about where they're going, but I realized why he can't. If he's going to have a honest relationship with Emma he's going to have to confess what he did, and she's the one person who will understand the full gravity of that.
Onto the rest of the cast, I appreciated being able to talk things out with Lea after being honest with her in ch4. It was nice nuance to see someone get angry in the moment and then handle it calmly later. Making Deb and especially Carl both sympathetic characters before breaking them up is paying off. Even though the playthrough is Emma focused, I slept with Deb in seemed like she needed it) and continued to explore with Lea (too tempting). We'll see if that comes back to bite me.
What else? The mystery subplot is well done. It was plausible and grounded, and that gave it more punch than something more elaborate would have had (that's a strong point of NIF in general tbh). The chess games continue to be an unexpected highlight. The ending was a surprise, but I like where it's going.