Beyond the evasion that Henry is doing by going to Two Forks because of his wife's alzheimer, it's the parallel to the story between the father and the child what builds the layers for me. The kid built his own fortress in the mountains to not fall under his father's control and to have a place where he could plan out his dreams, a little "fantasy world" as Henry puts it.

The father took it to an extreme, and his cowardice and not handling his responsability made him evade the rest of the world in a demented state of mind, hiding away in the place he wanted to share to his son without being able to connect on the same wavelenght, just like Henry wouldn't be able to reach out to Julia anymore. Apart from the practical use of the information to frame the two protagonists, I wonder if in his little refuge he also was trying to figure out how Henry and Delilah were on a similar wavelenght not just from the walkie talkie frequency, but also in human connection, the kind that he couldn't have with his son.

The chad classic PoP: has to commit to everything he does with everything being extremely dangerous to him all under an hour (or two) to save his beloved

The virgin trilogy PoP: uses a time machine dagger to turn back time if there's a mistake (unless there's cutscene stupidity at play) and has the chance to erase whatever investment you had the past 8 hours of play by doing a time reset at the end and not having to face any consequences to his actions other than not ending with the girl he knew in the timeline where she warmed up to him.

I especially find this aggravating because this game brings the divide between the two focuses I had with classic PoP, where I really liked the set piece feel of the platforming but didn't enjoy the clumsy combat (apart from the gameplay, the animations looked kind of dumb). Here the game forces you into extremely repetitive fight sequences which due to the 3D space could easily be bypassed if it wasn't for locking progression arbitrarily. However the game brings about the idea the prince is battling the possesed soldiers because he wants to end their misery, which makes the protagonist be a little more morally interesting and not be a stereotypical ultraviolent macho man like Doom's (where I always felt weird killing the possessed companions of the Doomguy and how sadistically he smiles while killing them). Everyone he once knew has to be ended, and the girl becomes his only solace which builds up a fun chemistry, and the narration reflects on his feelings on this, but then the time reset happens at the end and all those forced encounters and that connection with the woman didn't matter since everything ends up retconned and never happened.

Such a shame because the game looks aesthetically gorgeous with a nice color direction which helps make the parkouring sections stand out as impressive set pieces, the game mostly set on a huge castle which proves to be an architechtural masterpiece of map design and you can even see the times of the day changing, also just look at some of these screenshots I took while playing the game. The narration and the chemistry between the two main characters really build up to a curious identity as I said too, but I'm disappointed that Mechner took the story in this dumb direction

Thanks Nahuel all the same because the game was fun to play just for the platforming sections

Cave Story fans when Undertale gets more popular because it doesn't rely on dumb fetch quests like finding dogs when it wants to be lighthearted; and because it doesn't have possessed or cursed enemies with no agency over their actions (like fighting you because eating some flowers make them violent or because a controlling device forces them to) so the story becomes dark in a sensationalistic way with a cartoonish evilllll villain, but instead willingly attack you because of empathetic and organic tragic world building reasons and the main antagonists have motives foreshadowed through the game instead of all the complexity being reduced to a character dumped at the last second:

>>>:O

But seriously speaking, I felt there should have been something more palpable when exploring the underground, given that the robot you control is considered throughout the game to have been once used to exterminate the creatures you encounter (although it's later revealed that your specific robots protagonists didn't have anything to do with the incident, removing the guilt that made then more interesting characters and which propelled them to help these things in the first place).

I feel there's only an instance of this feeling of hostilty you would expect in the final area, where the mimigas seem to be working for the doctor for their own protection out of fear instead of being forced by script manipulation tactics of singular characters to kill you, but this instance and that corridor with the deformed baby dragons you were expecting to hatch since the beggining of the game, which with no words leaves a very saddening impact equal to Crocomire's encounter in Super Metroid, are few and far between and the game doesn't have that attractive of an atmosphere to make up for how basic it felt.

Inspecting the paintings lets you discover some sparse details about the life of a painter, though I felt it could have gone more into some emotional dephts for him. Since in one book the painter mentioned wanting to leave his soul in his works, and the fact that the blond girl so worried about being left alone is the last painting he ever made and that being close to people ended up in him being sued (the different "lady" paintings based on a woman that wanted his inheritance), it seems that he felt alone through his life and after he died he wishes someone to be with him. Otherwise, the girl being so desperate for company may have been the artist's intention when painting her, wanting to make a creation he also could cling to. But none of this is ever directly addressed, so it's my speculation and could also just be the characterization of the girl herself and the artist just be nothing more than a guy making weird paintings.

If the point was to be something like that, anyone interested in the game should check out the third Pokemon movie, since it also follows the breakdown of a girl that feels alone and makes up a world of her own to feel like she's with someone else.

To Gsar: This remake adds some dialogue capable of being triggered between IB and the people she is being followed by, and some puzzles are redesigned to stop having some weird answers related to maths and instead follow a more interesting surreal atmosphere. The man who accompanies IB seems to have dialogue that fleshes him out a bit more implying he's from a poor family (after IB has a nightmare) though I didn't try talking to him as much in that scene in the original so it could also be in there. Otherwise, honestly, you don't miss out a lot between playing this one and the 2012 version.