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things i've bought that i played
I'm just going to start trying to get entries out about every game right after I finish them BUT FOR NOW, ANOTHER ROUNDUP. Major spoilers for Braid, decent-sized spoilers for Genesis Noir, gameplay spoilers for Oracle of Ages, hints at major spoilers for Link's Awakening.
1. Gris (Switch). Gris is a platformer about...I don't know. A big statue goddess is destroyed and all the color leaves your world when you lose her and you set out to restore everything?
This was a lot like Fe (yes I wrote #4 on this list before I wrote #1, yes referencing it like this is confusing, no I won't change the order) in that I didn't really know where I was going most of the time and relied on the game to steer me, and also in that it was gorgeous but often kind of frustrating mechanically! Specifically because your character in Gris is horizontally like 90% cloak, and the base of your character is the feet which are TINY, so I kept thinking I had landed a jump because of the HUGE WIDTH OF THE CLOAK but I guess the feet missed it so I fell.
Hilariously enough, the underwater levels felt fucking INCREDIBLE to navigate? [SHOUTOUT MYSTICAL TURTLE!!!!] This is a first for me, my entire life has been platform games that I can navigate confidently until I have to swim, at which point I can't maneuver for shit, and suddenly here's Gris making me feel clunky as hell on land and impossibly graceful in the water. IT WAS GREAT.
There were parts that were a little frustrating to parse, but overall it was a gorgeous game, VERY soothing, and a nice way to spend a few hours.
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2. The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages (Game Boy Color via 3DS Virtual Console). Oracle of Ages pairs with Oracle of Seasons, which I talked about here Because I played Oracle of Seasons first, I had a code from that game that let me link the two stories and play Ages as a sequel to Seasons. I was able to bring over some items from my Seasons game, some characters from Seasons showed up and remembered that we'd met before, and there's an extra final boss that caps off the overall story instead of just the individual game.
The linking mechanic is very cool, especially for 2001. There's no set order, so either game can function as Part One or Part Two depending on which order you decide to tackle them in. As you explore you run into characters who say "oh hey, can you take a message back to my pal in the other game?" and if you do that you get a code that you can bring back into your linked game for an item or an upgrade. Very cool although it was a little frustrating when I found empty caves or something and thought "okay, they wouldn't just put an empty cave so clearly I need to do something here" only to remember later that it's probably where a code-offering character will show up if I play the games the other way around. I'm not doing that anytime soon, but I'd definitely like to try it sometime and see how they each feel different when the order is reversed.
I definitely preferred Seasons to Ages. Some of that might have been that because the games look and feel so similar, this just didn't give me much new stuff to work with and felt like More Seasons. Some of it is definitely that the time travel gimmick simply isn't as interesting to me as the seasons gimmick - I got excited initially because I thought there would be more Chrono Trigger style NPC detail, where person A in the past is the ancestor of person B in the present, and maybe you do something that changes person A's circumstances and you can see the impact on person B. That wasn't really a thing outside of some really specific tasks you had to complete for the main quest, they didn't sprinkle optional bits around for FLAVOR which was disappointing. Ultimately it felt like a retread of A Link Between Worlds - it mattered less that the worlds were past/present (I often forgot which I was in) and more that they offered slightly different ways to move around similar spaces. None of this is a knock on the game, which was good! But changing the seasons in OoS was SO COOL and the time travel here just didn't compare.
Din >>>> Nayru and her stupid friend. I DON'T SEE WHY WE COULDN'T JUST LET THE LITTLE DUDE KILL HIS GRANDMA? Why did I need to risk my life to save his?
One other thing I found out about that was very cool - in both of these games, there are a handful of different animals companions who help you get around (one can swim up waterfalls, one can jump up onto high ledges, one can fly over holes in the ground). You meet all three of them but you end up sticking with one. I ended up with the flying bear, and I was SO confused because in each game there is an entire region of the map that's impossible to navigate without him, so I had no idea how people with the kangaroo or the dodongo managed BUT IT TURNS OUT THOSE REGIONS CHANGE DEPENDING ON YOUR COMPANION? They just designed entire interchangeable sections of the map, which, again: 2001. It's cool!
The linked ending was weirdly disappointing? When you complete an initial game, the world ends up in a post-game status where everyone's happy and knows the story has ended, but there's no equivalent status when you complete a linked game - however you save, you always come back to the world as it was just before you beat the final boss. It makes sense from a mechanical standpoint, because doing that to the initial game prompts you to try a linked game and also facilitates the item transfer between games, and there's no equivalent benefit to doing the same thing to the world of the linked game. But it is weird to have a little coda on the first half of the story and not on the second. The linked credits were also a little bland because the images are all for the story as a whole and not Ages specifically. JUST LITTLE THINGS, STILL GOOD OVERALL. Oh but the linked credits end with a little sailboat...as Link goes back to Hyrule...and we know from the events of Link's Awakening that his boat is going to fucking SINK and then all hell is going to break loose. THE INCOMING TRAUMA!!!!!!!!! (The most recent Official Zelda Timeline actually did some wildly stupid shit where it decided Awakening came before the Oracle games and it was a different incarnation of Link? HARD PASS. ORACLE LINK WENT ON TO DO A METAPHYSICAL GENOCIDE CHANGE MY MIND.)
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3. Genesis Noir (PC). Okay the thing about Genesis Noir is that it would absolutely fucking slap as a Damon Lindelof limited series and once I realized what it should have been, I could never truly appreciate what it actually is.
You play as a watchmaker named No Man in a stylized black and white cityscape. You're in love with a nightclub singer, and she's shot by her jealous saxophonist/lover. You arrive at the moment he fires the gun, and time freezes allowing you to see the trail of the bullet, which for the purposes of the game contains entire galaxies. The gunshot is...the Big Bang. You get the idea to prevent the Big Bang and save the singer by creating a black hole, and the game consists of exploring different areas in the bullet trail cosmos, seeing the history of existence go from nothingness to stars to planets and so on and so forth, as you try to piece together a way to undo it all to save her life.
It's a very cool idea! It looks cool as hell! It would be BETTER as a Damon Lindelof limited series! Nothing about the gameplay is particularly exciting and I did look up a good number of things in a walkthrough because not to destroy my own rep but I fucking hate any puzzle I can't immediately begin to solve. SORRY TO HATE A CHALLENGE BUT I DO!!!!!!!!! If I have to untangle clues in the most tedious way imaginable for a solid hour I love that shit, but if I look at something and don't immediately have some sense of how to start working on it then I'm going to give it like thirty seconds and then I'm going to Google it. The gameplay is completely different level to level and sometimes it was very clear and sometimes it wasn't.
Anyway: Cool idea, looks cool, doesn't necessarily feel great to play. Also I got annoyed as the game went on because it ends up focusing VERY heavily on four humans that you meet in your journey through time and space, and 1.5 of them are actually characters I felt I bonded with in their initial appearances, but having Cavewoman #1 and Samurai You Bumped Into Once suddenly return in the final act as major fucking characters while the game completely lost interest in the nightclub singer and the saxophonist was really irritating to me. (Martian Physicist Lady rules and can stay.) Then suddenly me and my pals are doing a trippy dance in space and singing and dancing? AFTER CHASING THE SAXOPHONIST THROUGH EONS I NEVER CATCH UP WITH HIM OR THINK ABOUT HIM AGAIN? The ending does hinge on the singer but not in a way I found satisfying, because the real focus is still on your new pals. I'm not saying Damon Lindelof would NOT have done that to me, but I am saying that if he had, he would have pulled it off.
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4. Fe (Switch). I wish this game were better! That sounds stupid, I obviously wish all these games were better, but BEAR WITH ME.
Fe prides itself on not telling you shit, which! To be perfectly honest! I generally did not appreciate! I bought Fe on sale last summer, started it last November (the last time I was trying to cut through my Switch backlog), and bounced off it almost immediately because it does the same thing The First Tree does of wanting you to explore but not designing a game that's especially conducive to that. I got lost as hell immediately the first time I played and just could not be bothered with it.
This time around, I just said fuck it and did no exploring, headed directly for the marked waypoint on the map at all times, and just in general did not exercise much independent thought. Consequently, I realized JUST BEFORE THE FINAL SEQUENCE that the collectibles I had been ignoring all game were how you unlocked new abilities. There are three types of collectibles - one you occasionally come across in very obvious clearings, the one you collect to unlock new abilities, and one I only knew existed because my save file said I had 11 of them. I didn't figure out what that last one was until after credits. I SIMPLY DID NOT HAVE ANY CLUE WHAT I WAS DOING.
The basic idea is that you're a little fox running around a forest that has been invaded by some kind of hostile force. You encounter various baby animals who warm up to you immediately, but adult animals don't trust you if you can't speak/sing their language. The main objective of the game is to help various animals who have been harmed by the invaders, have them teach you the song of their people as thanks, and then use that song to unlock new areas.
There are a lot of gorgeous elements in this game, and the singing mechanic was really interesting, and tree hopping could sometimes be delightful when I wasn't getting fucked over by camera angles, but ultimately for an exploration game it always felt too fucking hard to get my bearings and that really impacted the experience.
The ending was a wild mix of satisfying and anticlimactic? There's no combat in this game - the invaders can "kill" you, but for the most part all you can do is hide from them, and figuring out how to do that is one of the game's main challenges (like "I need to get across this stone bridge, but there's a guard on it, how can I get around him">), so there's no big boss fight or anything at the end, but there is a sequence with a HUGE fucking crowd of invaders that I naturally assumed I had to avoid, until eventually I realized I could literally walk around among them and they wouldn't do a goddamn thing. It was weird to have the last challenge be the only one where nothing was out to get me. Beyond that - the game doesn't end. There is some GREAT story stuff, you complete your last task, the threat is averted, there are some beings it seems you're going to interact with, you unlock a cutscene, the pieces are all there for a killer ending! And then when you come out of the cutscene you're alone. That's it, that's the game, you are now free to move about the forest as the credits roll, the game ends when you decide you've had enough exploring and turn it off. It was weird! I didn't like it!
So: Overall I like this game, but I wish it were better. I especially wish it were better because I want to play it again sometime now that I have a better handle on it and can be more thorough, but I know it's still going to be Like That aka impossible to get my bearings.
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5. Braid (PC). Braid is a game that dares to ask the question "what if a man...was bad?" But the woman he's bad to is a metaphor for the atomic bomb or something, so it doesn't really matter in the end because the things that he went on to do were so big that she mainly only matters as far as his relationship for her was a catalyst for his later achievements and/or crimes.
In terms of mechanics, Braid is a puzzle platformer that plays with the flow of time in a bunch of different ways. You can always rewind time (and the game will force you to any time you die, you don't restart a level so much as CTRL-Z your way to a few moments/seconds/minutes earlier), but most levels have something else on top of that - sometimes time moves forward when you go right, and backwards when you move left. Sometimes when you rewind time, a shadow of yourself does whatever you originally did, while you do something else. Sometimes you can slow time down. It's cool as hell and a lot of the puzzles were really interesting to solve, but it's also a game that has clearly decided to adopt "I don't care about the player experience" as a mission statement. Most areas have a quick introduction to whatever new time travel mechanic is being introduced, but other than that there's no care with regard to learning curves or having skills build on each other. The game is still workable because you can skip any puzzle that's too hard and come back to it later, but it does feel more hostile than it needs to, and not combining different mechanics (you can't slow down time AND have a shadow double) feels like a wasted opportunity.
Still: Very cool and interesting!
The story: TRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH. Someone recently mentioned this game on a podcast I listen to, and mentioned that the ending takes you by surprise as you realize you're in the wrong. And I already had the game and hadn't gotten around to playing it, and I had no right to be mad because the game's thirteen years old but I was still bummed to be spoiled! Except then the literal first piece of story in the game is "a woman is mad at me and I think it would be great if she could just accept that I know I made a mistake and not be mad at me for it" like OH OKAY. THIS MAN IS THE VILLAIN. This leads to a framing device where you're trying to save the princess, who's been taken away, except it just sounds like she left because you suck? Anyway in the final level you're meant to think that you're saving her, but then you rewind time and as you see the level play out in reverse you realize she was running away from you.
There ends up being a bunch more story stuff but it's purposefully vague and confusing so it's like, is this about a relationship that ended? Is this about a stalker and his victim? Is this dude just in love with his mom? Did he invent the atomic bomb because a girl didn't like him? I refuse to think about it any more than I already have because fuck this story. The game is structured to make you think "we love her and we're going to get her back," then pulls a GOTCHA when it reveals that she doesn't under ANY circumstances want you back, and then in the epilogue it's immediately like "okay but now that we've Made You Think, what if we completely distance ourselves from the idea that she's a human and not an ideal" and just goes off in nine different directions that all treat her like a prop.
My understanding is that this game blew people's minds in 2008 because indie games basically didn't exist at the time (at least as far as most people were concerned) and like, we were all dumber in 2008! That's the exact same year that I was like "the fact that Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog kills the love interest to provide an origin story is extremely powerful and creative" so I'm not judging! But it's 2021 now and the story is dogshit.
The time travel stuff remains cool. Too hostile, but cool.
1. Gris (Switch). Gris is a platformer about...I don't know. A big statue goddess is destroyed and all the color leaves your world when you lose her and you set out to restore everything?
This was a lot like Fe (yes I wrote #4 on this list before I wrote #1, yes referencing it like this is confusing, no I won't change the order) in that I didn't really know where I was going most of the time and relied on the game to steer me, and also in that it was gorgeous but often kind of frustrating mechanically! Specifically because your character in Gris is horizontally like 90% cloak, and the base of your character is the feet which are TINY, so I kept thinking I had landed a jump because of the HUGE WIDTH OF THE CLOAK but I guess the feet missed it so I fell.
Hilariously enough, the underwater levels felt fucking INCREDIBLE to navigate? [SHOUTOUT MYSTICAL TURTLE!!!!] This is a first for me, my entire life has been platform games that I can navigate confidently until I have to swim, at which point I can't maneuver for shit, and suddenly here's Gris making me feel clunky as hell on land and impossibly graceful in the water. IT WAS GREAT.
There were parts that were a little frustrating to parse, but overall it was a gorgeous game, VERY soothing, and a nice way to spend a few hours.
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2. The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages (Game Boy Color via 3DS Virtual Console). Oracle of Ages pairs with Oracle of Seasons, which I talked about here Because I played Oracle of Seasons first, I had a code from that game that let me link the two stories and play Ages as a sequel to Seasons. I was able to bring over some items from my Seasons game, some characters from Seasons showed up and remembered that we'd met before, and there's an extra final boss that caps off the overall story instead of just the individual game.
The linking mechanic is very cool, especially for 2001. There's no set order, so either game can function as Part One or Part Two depending on which order you decide to tackle them in. As you explore you run into characters who say "oh hey, can you take a message back to my pal in the other game?" and if you do that you get a code that you can bring back into your linked game for an item or an upgrade. Very cool although it was a little frustrating when I found empty caves or something and thought "okay, they wouldn't just put an empty cave so clearly I need to do something here" only to remember later that it's probably where a code-offering character will show up if I play the games the other way around. I'm not doing that anytime soon, but I'd definitely like to try it sometime and see how they each feel different when the order is reversed.
I definitely preferred Seasons to Ages. Some of that might have been that because the games look and feel so similar, this just didn't give me much new stuff to work with and felt like More Seasons. Some of it is definitely that the time travel gimmick simply isn't as interesting to me as the seasons gimmick - I got excited initially because I thought there would be more Chrono Trigger style NPC detail, where person A in the past is the ancestor of person B in the present, and maybe you do something that changes person A's circumstances and you can see the impact on person B. That wasn't really a thing outside of some really specific tasks you had to complete for the main quest, they didn't sprinkle optional bits around for FLAVOR which was disappointing. Ultimately it felt like a retread of A Link Between Worlds - it mattered less that the worlds were past/present (I often forgot which I was in) and more that they offered slightly different ways to move around similar spaces. None of this is a knock on the game, which was good! But changing the seasons in OoS was SO COOL and the time travel here just didn't compare.
Din >>>> Nayru and her stupid friend. I DON'T SEE WHY WE COULDN'T JUST LET THE LITTLE DUDE KILL HIS GRANDMA? Why did I need to risk my life to save his?
One other thing I found out about that was very cool - in both of these games, there are a handful of different animals companions who help you get around (one can swim up waterfalls, one can jump up onto high ledges, one can fly over holes in the ground). You meet all three of them but you end up sticking with one. I ended up with the flying bear, and I was SO confused because in each game there is an entire region of the map that's impossible to navigate without him, so I had no idea how people with the kangaroo or the dodongo managed BUT IT TURNS OUT THOSE REGIONS CHANGE DEPENDING ON YOUR COMPANION? They just designed entire interchangeable sections of the map, which, again: 2001. It's cool!
The linked ending was weirdly disappointing? When you complete an initial game, the world ends up in a post-game status where everyone's happy and knows the story has ended, but there's no equivalent status when you complete a linked game - however you save, you always come back to the world as it was just before you beat the final boss. It makes sense from a mechanical standpoint, because doing that to the initial game prompts you to try a linked game and also facilitates the item transfer between games, and there's no equivalent benefit to doing the same thing to the world of the linked game. But it is weird to have a little coda on the first half of the story and not on the second. The linked credits were also a little bland because the images are all for the story as a whole and not Ages specifically. JUST LITTLE THINGS, STILL GOOD OVERALL. Oh but the linked credits end with a little sailboat...as Link goes back to Hyrule...and we know from the events of Link's Awakening that his boat is going to fucking SINK and then all hell is going to break loose. THE INCOMING TRAUMA!!!!!!!!! (The most recent Official Zelda Timeline actually did some wildly stupid shit where it decided Awakening came before the Oracle games and it was a different incarnation of Link? HARD PASS. ORACLE LINK WENT ON TO DO A METAPHYSICAL GENOCIDE CHANGE MY MIND.)
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3. Genesis Noir (PC). Okay the thing about Genesis Noir is that it would absolutely fucking slap as a Damon Lindelof limited series and once I realized what it should have been, I could never truly appreciate what it actually is.
You play as a watchmaker named No Man in a stylized black and white cityscape. You're in love with a nightclub singer, and she's shot by her jealous saxophonist/lover. You arrive at the moment he fires the gun, and time freezes allowing you to see the trail of the bullet, which for the purposes of the game contains entire galaxies. The gunshot is...the Big Bang. You get the idea to prevent the Big Bang and save the singer by creating a black hole, and the game consists of exploring different areas in the bullet trail cosmos, seeing the history of existence go from nothingness to stars to planets and so on and so forth, as you try to piece together a way to undo it all to save her life.
It's a very cool idea! It looks cool as hell! It would be BETTER as a Damon Lindelof limited series! Nothing about the gameplay is particularly exciting and I did look up a good number of things in a walkthrough because not to destroy my own rep but I fucking hate any puzzle I can't immediately begin to solve. SORRY TO HATE A CHALLENGE BUT I DO!!!!!!!!! If I have to untangle clues in the most tedious way imaginable for a solid hour I love that shit, but if I look at something and don't immediately have some sense of how to start working on it then I'm going to give it like thirty seconds and then I'm going to Google it. The gameplay is completely different level to level and sometimes it was very clear and sometimes it wasn't.
Anyway: Cool idea, looks cool, doesn't necessarily feel great to play. Also I got annoyed as the game went on because it ends up focusing VERY heavily on four humans that you meet in your journey through time and space, and 1.5 of them are actually characters I felt I bonded with in their initial appearances, but having Cavewoman #1 and Samurai You Bumped Into Once suddenly return in the final act as major fucking characters while the game completely lost interest in the nightclub singer and the saxophonist was really irritating to me. (Martian Physicist Lady rules and can stay.) Then suddenly me and my pals are doing a trippy dance in space and singing and dancing? AFTER CHASING THE SAXOPHONIST THROUGH EONS I NEVER CATCH UP WITH HIM OR THINK ABOUT HIM AGAIN? The ending does hinge on the singer but not in a way I found satisfying, because the real focus is still on your new pals. I'm not saying Damon Lindelof would NOT have done that to me, but I am saying that if he had, he would have pulled it off.
-----
4. Fe (Switch). I wish this game were better! That sounds stupid, I obviously wish all these games were better, but BEAR WITH ME.
Fe prides itself on not telling you shit, which! To be perfectly honest! I generally did not appreciate! I bought Fe on sale last summer, started it last November (the last time I was trying to cut through my Switch backlog), and bounced off it almost immediately because it does the same thing The First Tree does of wanting you to explore but not designing a game that's especially conducive to that. I got lost as hell immediately the first time I played and just could not be bothered with it.
This time around, I just said fuck it and did no exploring, headed directly for the marked waypoint on the map at all times, and just in general did not exercise much independent thought. Consequently, I realized JUST BEFORE THE FINAL SEQUENCE that the collectibles I had been ignoring all game were how you unlocked new abilities. There are three types of collectibles - one you occasionally come across in very obvious clearings, the one you collect to unlock new abilities, and one I only knew existed because my save file said I had 11 of them. I didn't figure out what that last one was until after credits. I SIMPLY DID NOT HAVE ANY CLUE WHAT I WAS DOING.
The basic idea is that you're a little fox running around a forest that has been invaded by some kind of hostile force. You encounter various baby animals who warm up to you immediately, but adult animals don't trust you if you can't speak/sing their language. The main objective of the game is to help various animals who have been harmed by the invaders, have them teach you the song of their people as thanks, and then use that song to unlock new areas.
There are a lot of gorgeous elements in this game, and the singing mechanic was really interesting, and tree hopping could sometimes be delightful when I wasn't getting fucked over by camera angles, but ultimately for an exploration game it always felt too fucking hard to get my bearings and that really impacted the experience.
The ending was a wild mix of satisfying and anticlimactic? There's no combat in this game - the invaders can "kill" you, but for the most part all you can do is hide from them, and figuring out how to do that is one of the game's main challenges (like "I need to get across this stone bridge, but there's a guard on it, how can I get around him">), so there's no big boss fight or anything at the end, but there is a sequence with a HUGE fucking crowd of invaders that I naturally assumed I had to avoid, until eventually I realized I could literally walk around among them and they wouldn't do a goddamn thing. It was weird to have the last challenge be the only one where nothing was out to get me. Beyond that - the game doesn't end. There is some GREAT story stuff, you complete your last task, the threat is averted, there are some beings it seems you're going to interact with, you unlock a cutscene, the pieces are all there for a killer ending! And then when you come out of the cutscene you're alone. That's it, that's the game, you are now free to move about the forest as the credits roll, the game ends when you decide you've had enough exploring and turn it off. It was weird! I didn't like it!
So: Overall I like this game, but I wish it were better. I especially wish it were better because I want to play it again sometime now that I have a better handle on it and can be more thorough, but I know it's still going to be Like That aka impossible to get my bearings.
-----
5. Braid (PC). Braid is a game that dares to ask the question "what if a man...was bad?" But the woman he's bad to is a metaphor for the atomic bomb or something, so it doesn't really matter in the end because the things that he went on to do were so big that she mainly only matters as far as his relationship for her was a catalyst for his later achievements and/or crimes.
In terms of mechanics, Braid is a puzzle platformer that plays with the flow of time in a bunch of different ways. You can always rewind time (and the game will force you to any time you die, you don't restart a level so much as CTRL-Z your way to a few moments/seconds/minutes earlier), but most levels have something else on top of that - sometimes time moves forward when you go right, and backwards when you move left. Sometimes when you rewind time, a shadow of yourself does whatever you originally did, while you do something else. Sometimes you can slow time down. It's cool as hell and a lot of the puzzles were really interesting to solve, but it's also a game that has clearly decided to adopt "I don't care about the player experience" as a mission statement. Most areas have a quick introduction to whatever new time travel mechanic is being introduced, but other than that there's no care with regard to learning curves or having skills build on each other. The game is still workable because you can skip any puzzle that's too hard and come back to it later, but it does feel more hostile than it needs to, and not combining different mechanics (you can't slow down time AND have a shadow double) feels like a wasted opportunity.
Still: Very cool and interesting!
The story: TRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH. Someone recently mentioned this game on a podcast I listen to, and mentioned that the ending takes you by surprise as you realize you're in the wrong. And I already had the game and hadn't gotten around to playing it, and I had no right to be mad because the game's thirteen years old but I was still bummed to be spoiled! Except then the literal first piece of story in the game is "a woman is mad at me and I think it would be great if she could just accept that I know I made a mistake and not be mad at me for it" like OH OKAY. THIS MAN IS THE VILLAIN. This leads to a framing device where you're trying to save the princess, who's been taken away, except it just sounds like she left because you suck? Anyway in the final level you're meant to think that you're saving her, but then you rewind time and as you see the level play out in reverse you realize she was running away from you.
There ends up being a bunch more story stuff but it's purposefully vague and confusing so it's like, is this about a relationship that ended? Is this about a stalker and his victim? Is this dude just in love with his mom? Did he invent the atomic bomb because a girl didn't like him? I refuse to think about it any more than I already have because fuck this story. The game is structured to make you think "we love her and we're going to get her back," then pulls a GOTCHA when it reveals that she doesn't under ANY circumstances want you back, and then in the epilogue it's immediately like "okay but now that we've Made You Think, what if we completely distance ourselves from the idea that she's a human and not an ideal" and just goes off in nine different directions that all treat her like a prop.
My understanding is that this game blew people's minds in 2008 because indie games basically didn't exist at the time (at least as far as most people were concerned) and like, we were all dumber in 2008! That's the exact same year that I was like "the fact that Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog kills the love interest to provide an origin story is extremely powerful and creative" so I'm not judging! But it's 2021 now and the story is dogshit.
The time travel stuff remains cool. Too hostile, but cool.