aaaaaand there we go. this must be the precipitous drop in quality i've heard alluded to before because good fucking christ this episode sucked. yet again, despite all that i've told daniel throughout this game, nothing i said influenced him and he inexplicably becomes a faith healer/miracle child in a cult. this entire episode is devoid of importance to the overall plot and feels mostly like a detour to the final act of the game. and, with all that said, that's not even like a nail in the coffin for me had this episode at least been interesting. critically, this game fails to meet that measure too, and this episode feels like a gigantic waste of time.

i've been sitting on this for a bit but honestly? daniel's kind of a little cunt. he's started to become outright unlikeable with his constant brattiness and complete unwillingness to give sean any sort of space or benefit of the doubt. i get it, he's a kid, he's young and impressionable, and it's a cult. but to be honest? this cult fucking sucks lol. nothing about lisbeth is persuasive or radiates "natural cult leader type" in the way that some of the scariest cult leaders of all time have. i'm not asking for a 1:1 jim jones type here, but i am asking for someone with charisma and some level of backstory to explain why she's a cult leader and feels so passionate about something she's actively committing cognitive dissonance over. who is she? well, she's the villain LIS2 needed to have for the episode. why does she do what she does? well, she's the villain LIS2 needed to have for the episode. why on earth would daniel be swayed by her when she has barely any cult members to speak of and overall lacks the power and sway a cult should have? because LIS2 needed a character like her for this episode. it's lazy. it's stupid. it's insulting bad writing. worst of all? it's completely unnecessary. you could've just made this episode in and of itself the journey to reunite with daniel. adding in this cult story dilutes the journey and makes daniel basically unforgiveably stupid and rotted as a character. sean deserves better.

i get that the game is tracking my choices for things like "oh is daniel going to do x y or z in big climactic moments", but that's a one trick pony situation. was it really impressive to see the variants for how the chris situation could play out with episode 2? yes, and it's part of why i rated that episode so highly. i still can think back to how excited i was that not only was this game making the player character sidelined to all the supernatural aspects of it, but that we'd only have a scant fleeting influence on when it even shows up and in what capacity. i was really onboard with that type of plot and subversion of the LIS1 formula. now knowing that my interactions and influence with daniel only goes as far as the big climax moment for each episode, i'm far less enthused. at least with episode 2, smaller choices mattered too, like whether i was okay with him swearing, or whether i encouraged stealing. here, daniel has to be removed from the plot and gameplay for so long because DONTNOD clearly can't keep up with the level of variance and influence that players should have on daniel by this point. it was an unsustainable gameplay system the longer the game went on, but i foolishly believed they at least had some long-game for this whole thing. based on this episode? it's very clearly they were writing as they went, as you could tell with LIS1. this entire episode is filler. the only noteworthy things that happen in it are that karen meets sean and that all three are reunited by the end. there is nothing else that happens here that matters.

i'm just frustrated with this because i really did expect this game to go better places than this. or to have a clearer sense of writing and direction for the narrative. this isn't as bad episode 3 of BTS, but fuck, it's close. i'm starting to outright just not give a shit about these characters and mostly just want to see what DONTNOD is going to pull out of their ass for the ending. i hate to sound this bitter about everything, but i really, really was invested in this narrative, so to see it slowly piss itself like this is extremely incensing. i expected better and got worse.