Totally fair!

For sure, I think they did a very interesting thing with the game. This organization has a purpose and a daily function. You spend your whole time in a workplace of sorts. But you are not a worker, you’re not even an employee, and you as Jesse only show up after shit has hit the fan. They’re already in the emergency. She’s never been here before, and neither have we. And she doesn’t care how the company operates day-to-day, she doesn’t care how the lights are kept on or the heating functions, she’s showed up in an office that’s turned into a combat zone to do combat and rescue her brother.

And so I kinda like how we aren’t given rundowns on normal operations because this is not normal operation, and Jesse isn’t interested, and so we’re pushed through the emergency. But there are bits of environmental storytelling, and scraps of paper, and notes and tapes, that tell curius players “you know, on a normal day, this place is a different kind of weird. You’ve just shown up on an even weirder day”

Here’s what I’ll say if you’re anything like me: read the pickups. The little scraps of paper you find littered about the offices, the folders, the dossiers, etc. I don’t normally read that crap in most games, but in this game I noticed I started getting intrigued by a few after I’d been in playing for a while, and by the end of the game they were almost my favourite part. The kind of world outside the game’s plot, the mundane day-to-day existence of this organization when it’s not in a crisis, was very interesting to me.

So it might not be to you, people can be very different. But you could try giving reading a try and just see if the oddness hooks you like it did for me.

I thought that heatsink and fan was a spindle of CDs! I thought that was an interesting place to store them I hadn’t seen before…

I’m not sure this song ever made it out of Canada, but Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm by Crash Test Dummies has a verse where a girl in school wouldn’t change with the other girls, and when they made her, she had, in what I thought the lyric was, “burn marks all over her body”. I assumed the song was about child abuse, and they were cigarette burns. The other verses are about a kid with a shock of white hair from “a car crash” and a kid who always has to come home right after school, so it kinda made sense in a consistent enough way…

Anyway, for basically my whole life I thought that’s what the song was about. Turns out the lyrics are “birth marks all over her body”, and the point of the song is more about kids being othered for things outside their control.

I still think I prefer my version…