i don't like the witchy aesthetic. i think overly mystifying women's shared connections and secret powers leads you precisely to the kind of world this game paints: untethered from reality, out of space, out of time.

i'd prefer not to make this point too strongly, but why would nonhuman extraterrestrials or prehuman ancient beings have the category "woman" or a relationship to it? i really do think that to make a story within this aesthetic interesting, you have to come into it with an understanding and critique of the milieu's constitutive gender essentialism that this game sadly just isn't armed with.

i know how hard it is to believe i might be offering these kinds of criticisms in good faith in 2024, when red strings club, the previous game from this studio, caught some unbelievably hypocritical pseudofeminist crap when it came out, and a similar type of aggressive, vapid moralizing is now a more popular strategy than ever for bringing queer and gender nonconforming artists down a peg. i do just genuinely believe it's disrespectful not to fully critically engage with a text just because some other people do it in a dishonest way.