20.8 hours played
Written 9 days ago
I enjoyed the game. Soundtrack was wonderful. Beautiful story about heavy, but important topics including: [spoiler] queerness, patriarchy, SA/assault, bullying, harassment, environmentalism (sorta), corrupt systems (the police, the school, etc), insecurity, abuse, death, and more [/spoiler].
I will say that your choices honestly don’t matter all that much. The only thing that is REALLY impacted by your choices is [spoiler] whether Kate kills herself or not [/spoiler]. Otherwise, the scenes and dialogue change, sure, but nothing is truly all that different (as far as I could tell.). I mean technically NOTHING you do matters anyway given that [spoiler] you either un-do it all by choosing to save the Bay or you know nothing about the future of any of these people if you choose to save Chloe [/spoiler]. That’s okay with me, personally. In fact I think it’s an intentional choice, given the overall message(s) of the story. But some people might be bothered by this so I figured I’d mention it.
Probably my biggest critique relates to the romance. There are only [spoiler] two [/spoiler] romance options, which is fine—personally I think it was a good choice not to include more than that). The issue I have with it however is that, in actuality, there is really only one choice and that is [spoiler] Chloe [/spoiler]. Read comments online and you'll find that a large portion of the LiS audience vehemently hates [spoiler] Warren [/spoiler] and even feel that this character was only included as an attempt to [spoiler] appease heteronormativity [/spoiler]. This might be true and certainly would explain why the romance with [spoiler] Warren [/spoiler] feels so half-assed. But regardless of the reasoning, it really bothers me. As a queer person myself, I personally felt that both my own personality and Max's personality meshed better with [spoiler] Warren [/spoiler] than with [spoiler] Chloe [/spoiler]. Because of that I found it incredibly disappointing to learn that this love interest barely matters and you get no conclusion with them. Even the scene where you [spoiler] kiss Warren in the diner [/spoiler] doesn't matter because in the end, regardless of your final choice, [spoiler] that scene never happened. [/spoiler] And speaking of scenes that [spoiler] never happened, [/spoiler] I was pissed to learn you never actually get to [spoiler] GO APE with Warren [/spoiler]. Hell, even if you choose to [spoiler] save the Bay [/spoiler], you don't even get so much as a [spoiler] hand-holding scene with Warren at Chloe’s funeral [/spoiler]. Point is I just found it hard to connect romantically with [spoiler] Chloe [/spoiler] even tho I absolutely love and feel for them as a friend, so it bothered me not to have a REAL alternative. I’d rather have had no alternative than a half-assed one.
But even with all that said, I still found the story and the relationship between [spoiler] Chloe and Max [/spoiler] so beautiful and so impactful. Great game.