Crimson Butterfly is a game to which my emotional ties run very deep indeed. I first played it alongside my dad and my older brother when I was six (I was watching and occasionally exploring the mansions and village whenever we were pretty sure there weren't going to be any ghosts nearby), and I remember being terrified and oddly transfixed by it. I have replayed it during rainy October nights more years than not in the time that has passed since then, and it has not lost any of its lustre. When I was six, it was the scary game with the screaming lady. Now that I am older, it is a sad, haunting, and beautifully melancholic game about fate and love and loss and the bonds of family, and it is also still the scary game with the screaming lady. Quite possibly my favourite game of all time, and one of the most important to me.

It's dense and punishing and inscrutable as anyone will tell you, but it is also whip-smart, funny in ways both broad and subtle, very human through all the surreality, and utterly wonderful. If you come to terms with the fact that you're going to have to restart from that first attempt that you got 3 days in and soft-locked, the experience of going back through the game as it reveals itself to you is extremely rewarding. Its systems are peculiar but definitely exploitable and coming back through with that newfound insider knowledge feels genuinely like "winning" in a way that's difficult to describe.

Of all the games I consider "essentially perfect", this is the one for which the word "essentially" is doing the greatest amount of heavy lifting. But in all the ways that matter, I certainly think of Pathologic 2 as being as well-executed as I could ever imagine it being, and none of its flaws bother me.