inhabits the sense of childness better than most things; the third graders here being utterly unhinged in their expression in a way that rings far more true than either the naive or precocious archetypes that children are often chained to in fiction. in third grade these kids wrestle with mental health, death, and the eternal cudgel of generational trauma; they respond accordingly with coarse jokes and catastrophic outbursts and reflection; they seek companionship, they try to wrangle their feelings, and the outcomes are mercurial and messy and ugly and dumb and real. in third grade these kids are about what I remember of being in third grade — an impressionistic, heightened portrait, if not always a direct doppelganger

it uses its own status as remake as an opportunity to carve up the format with broad, erratic cuts. equally crushingly earnest and sneering at its own earnestness; irreverent humour picking at its own skin. embracing a need for warmth, kindness, and compassionate understanding while burning its own history with a magnifying glass for fun and interjecting frequently with self conscious fourth wall breaks and edgy non sequiturs

plumbs the depths of rpg maker design to pull elaborate gotchas; a puckish sprit overtaking the game's more perplexing asks; saving a life only by being impossibly hypervigilant to the point of psychic phenomena or counter clockwise time travel. scenarios get increasingly unmanageable and more brazen in their expectations, forcing failure and having you reckon with an endless parade of "what if"s while simultaneously showing an undeniable cleverness for these kinds of punji stick designs

the queasy true ending is the elaborate last showcase of the game's dueling philosophies. telling us what we already know, it sets the table up for unconditional love and understanding before the dealer flips their cards to reveal some things are immutable; the participants bowing out with a hideous BANG, canned laughter, and the wistful murmur of those who want to be better — to themselves, and to those around them

rest in peace parun