Good, but idk...I think it tries to make its central metaphor (the unhealthy dynamics and personalities of this family that they refuse to look at as anything other than a curse) a good deal too obvious, and some of the deaths here really do look like complete accidents or, conversely, super-deranged stuff (that Walter vignette???) that aren't discussed all that much as they should...I just think that all the numerous things that are good about this game (the way you're forced to stumble around in the dark, the magical realism touches added to the vignettes) are ultimately kind of undone by the writing in general; there really does seem to be a habit to constantly step over the line or clearly move preordained pieces to their proper place so the story/metaphors would make sense, and it doesn't help that I'm not quite sure this is really about anything even as it kind of pretends it is, or that Edith's voice-over, while perhaps mirroring the aesthetic style of unliterary young adults, doesn't take a little away with its uninspiring, bland cadence and substance . In a perverse way, this might've been better if this was more obviously about a honest-to-god curse.

It's been a long time since I've played a video game so purely mechanics/gameplay-based; where the experience centers not on some sort of overarching narrative or character work or thematics, but rather the pure gaming experience itself, the endless puzzle of figuring things out, progressing through a particular set of environments, completing a particular set of tasks. This is just like that, except more than that, it self-consciously opts for the most purely minimalist version of such a game. It's short for game standards, it offers no helpful tutorials, its world is desolate, ruined, and lacking in the multicolored variety of, say, a Mario game. And it is precisely because of that it's so good.

By focusing on taking all the simplistic, well-known gameplay traditions and deliberately extinguishing as much unnecessary detail as possible, and by doing it in such an entertaining, beautiful way (the landscapes and music are something to behold!) the overwhelming feeling when playing this game is that of excitement, of exhilaration. It's so simplistic, but it's in the way it's simplistic, the way it uses its deliberately crafted minimalism, that it becomes genuinely exciting to play, to experience. The only 'unnecessary' part of this would be the player interaction, but that too is such a delightful way of constantly individualizing the specific occurrences of gameplay. Beautiful game. Definitely looking forward to coming back to this when I've played its more detailed ancestors/compatriots to see how it may play differently.

So good that it single-handedly made me interested in video games as an art form again. Hysterically good study of

1) depression, the primary killer of player character Harrier du Bois, who spends pretty much the entirety of this game constantly suffering under it in a pretty brutally honest depiction of what it feels like to have no hopes, no happiness, a casual thought that maybe it'd be better if you just died because it's not like anyone really likes you in the first place, or you're ever really going to amount to much anything to make up for the shitshow your life is now, right?

2) politics-another constant, there even before the vision quests. The entire setting is dripping with the political particulars of the situations of Martinaise and Revachol, and how people respond to them, from the complicated, simultaneously self-absorbed and yet truly communist Evrart Claire, to Rene Arnoux, a man who still holds his steadfast opinion that all would be good if only the great cocaine-addicted kings of old hadn't been killed by all that socialist rabble. The plot only happens because a mercenary being killed was enough to force the RCM to engage with a region they usually don't; capital has a power that poverty quite simply doesn't.

3) the illusory greatness of the past-or would it be *a* past? What it is Harry or any other character desires to see returned is dependent entirely on their own ideology and worldview and personal characteristics. Not only is a constant fixation on the past stifling, it is a fixation on only a mind's version of it, not whatever the real thing was in all its actual complexities and horrors.

4) history -history in DE is a material occurrence. Not something the abstract of which can merely be observed in the details of the present, but something tangible, real. The Pale is mankind's collective memory, perhaps a memory of all time, and it is real and so powerful it might eventually destroy it all. The Great Man Theory is frighteningly, intensely real in the form of the Innocences, turning a bogus historical theory into a terrifying, inhumane material reality.

5) failure. Harry is a failed man, with nothing but his job and his alcohol and drugs. Revachol is a city failed by everyone who's ever cared for it, and Martinaise has been failed even more. No single political system has managed to create a better world, and the status quo is blatantly unsatisfactory. Failure permeates this world like an odor.

6) the intersection between all these things. Harry is depressed partially because he can't stop fixating on the past, on a long-dead relationship with a long-gone woman that failed a long time ago; he uses politics as a way of running from his own issues; yet not engaging in politics would be to deny how the status quo in place has turned Revachol, and Martinaise specifically, into more of a horrorshow, and how that in turn affects the politics and mental health of its inhabitants. The paledriver likes the Pale because for her it is an escape from real life, yet the Pale can also be considered a personification of not only an existential threat akin to climate change, but the past literally destroying mankind and perhaps even the planet, the intense power of man's history and corrosive power of overfixating on it here to truly ruin it all. Everything is connected. One of the greatest pieces of art I've ever experienced, better written than most everything else, and one of the few things which make me glad I'm an Estonian. "No truce with the furies".