"contest not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you spot long a white woman, the white woman spots also."
- frederick neetchah

the parts of this that really hit do so to such an extent that I was both genuinely moved and got that someone-walking-over-my-grave adjacent sensation of "oh this would have Done Shit to me as a teenager" but everything else really just gave me a new appreciation for fatomoru as a group of people looking at this and saying "hold my beer I can hurt you way worse and more gay-ly and with none of the gratuitously ill-considered sexual assault as gratification."

Arc and Hisui/Kohaku routes the obvious standouts and the opening and closing segments with Aoko put a perfect lil' bow on the thing, so bring on witch on the holy night I'm sold lol

a quintessential 4 star 3.5 star (or 3.5 star 4 star?) "hey remember this thing you liked well here's More Of It" indie videoed game experience. loved the first and third chapters, kinda really disliked the second. aforementioned first and third chapters are generally excellent old-school Resi save box run-plotting goodness, but the unrelentingly slavish adherence to its influences throughout (e.g. the distressingly literal deployment of Silent Hill's otherworld aesthetic sensibility - capitalism is a literal meat grinder, geddit??) really makes me wish Rose Engine took some actual real swings of their own rather than just quoting power chords from their idols - also like, it's 2022 your survival horror game does not need boss fights and if you choose to do them anyway they don't need to be mid at best! also the narrative's signal to noise ratio is just enough to move my poor lesbian heart but one does kinda start to detect the tang of deliberate obscurantism for want of anything of substance to say with this material.

anyway this probably comes off more negative than I actually felt abt it, which is not dissimilar to how I felt about Norco earlier this year - this is Very Good but could have been Great, and I'm v excited to see what this team makes next! thumbs up, gets a rec, will def replay at some point for the secret/true ending.