A game about choices that doesn't understand their role in storytelling. A horror game that doesn't understand horror. A game that concludes a decent setup with an embarrassing ending.

The first half is bursting with jump scares, even the extremely silly ones where a deformed face screams at you directly, giving this high-budget game the feel of a free Unity horror game. We get some actual breathing room towards the end but at the same time the jump scares that still do occur destroy any leftover atmosphere. This is worsened by a dumbed-down narrative. The Storyteller is a childish addition, the archetype of a mysterious meta person who's above the narrative. His sole contributions are nebulous predictions and a patronizing pat on the back if you managed to save people - and maybe he reprimands you if someone died. I wouldn't know, I didn't bother to check any more endings.

And y'know, I got to my first ending and it sucked ass - a completely unexplained conflict suddenly emerged for that shitty 'ooooOOOoooo the evil thing is still out there' moment. I redid a dumb decision I made towards the end and saved everyone, but that ending is almost exactly the same and it still sucked ass. I even watched an ending compilation and they all sucked ass. If I let someone escape early and then save everyone else later on, why does that first someone come back to the spooky ghost ship alone and they don't even try to call each other before, while in the other endings he returns obviously not alone?

As often present in horror media, there's an ideology of nihilism where mostly bad things simply happen and you're forced to live with them. This cheap trick has little bearing because death can be thrown in at any time. Even worse, the game later tries and fails to rationalize the spooky happenings instead of staying with a purely supernatural explanation. As seen before in The Suicide of Rachel Foster, rationalization does not make horror more grounded, believable or impactful.

So what bearing do your choices have in the end? In a good narrative or even your local DnD campaign, the entire world changes with you. Here, there are binary choices: you survive or you don't. There is no moral, there is no larger point, character arcs begin and get thrown away. There's only a bunch of cutscenes with no emotional release. The gamification of the narrative can be seen by people commenting on how shocked they were when an early innocuous decision has grave consequences later on. One person even said that the storyteller is their favorite character. He's not a character, he's the writer's desperate attempt to give a nihilistic narrative an even more nihilistic twist.

Games like this are built on the belief that there's always a choice, but this one doesn't have an answer to any of them. As The Armed sang not so long ago:

Expectations, secret rattlesnakes
It’s never really how it happens
It’s never really how it happens

A good fast-paced platformer. It's nice to see ongoing support, new levels added and revamped, and a lot of built-in features like a map editor, leaderboards and modifiers. The movement is generally fast (though you can also take it slow) but not as smooth as I would've liked, because some actions are context-sensitive or done automatically, like grabbing ledges and the same button being used for dashing and boosting along a wall, which has a slight delay when switching between those actions (or possibly, a skill issue on my side). Still overall pretty enjoyable with large levels, multiple routes and lots of new ideas. From here, I'd recommend playing DeadCore (my beloved) and Valley (if you want more story).

It's like reading a Three Investigators book. A well-crafted mystery but on its own, you won't remember much of it. It's well-rounded, but a bit too round. A good cast of characters, a semi-intriguing mystery with a few nice twists, good art, digestible dialogue, and meta-storytelling including the branching narrative gimmick... It almost pains me to mechanically list all these features as if I'm trying to describe the features of an accounting software, but there's not much thematic depth to it, maybe because it has so much breadth: memories, dead and missing parents, issues with your parents, issues between your parents, issues between friends, environmentalism and power, but they're merely means to advance the plot.

I wanted to write about a comparison with Carto, the predictable heart-to-heart conversations between children and the story branching, but I don't feel strongly enough about it. This is a rather fun story, but it won't change your life. Apart from making you a furry (which I approve of).