Love the atmosphere of the opening scenes. There's a wonderful earnestness to the character interactions, the unspoken pain of the protagonist mixing with the quiet domesticity of an abandoned world as they navigate an almost embarrassingly plain loneliness. The sound design and washed out photo backgrounds are charming and do a lot of the heavy lifting to flesh out characters who only have maybe 10-20 lines of dialogue.
The second half tries to wrap this loneliness into an overarching thesis on capitalism and the isolating, demoralizing effect of living under it, which is just way too broad and didactic to work in a 20m RPG maker game. It's not inaccurate, but there's nowhere to go from there (quiet literally in the game, where you end on a floating platform with a fishing line that will never get a bite). It maybe works on a formal level, but it's a disappointing and grim conclusion to an affecting start.
The second half tries to wrap this loneliness into an overarching thesis on capitalism and the isolating, demoralizing effect of living under it, which is just way too broad and didactic to work in a 20m RPG maker game. It's not inaccurate, but there's nowhere to go from there (quiet literally in the game, where you end on a floating platform with a fishing line that will never get a bite). It maybe works on a formal level, but it's a disappointing and grim conclusion to an affecting start.