feels v good to play & gets better/gathers momentum as it progresses because u are not forced into an endless sewer/lab gauntlet, but the intrinsic goofiness (dare i say "camp" ...) of RE4 doesn't survive the move to REngine. bemoaning the state of resident evil is the most resident evil fan thing u can do (it's like being a knicks fan) and i even think the designers did an admirable job straddling silly & "serious" here but ... deep down ... i think its an unsolvable problem. its an intuition thing idk. u get it or u don't ...

impressed by the stark, self-consciously OMINOUS presentation here, and the writing is solid, genre-literate, & overheated in the right places. there are WAY worse noir stories out there tbqh. loretta herself is compelling and layered but everybody else is v v flat, which only rly works with margaret.

outside the narrative design (which is great, to be clear — especially love the moments where u can choose to do something irreversibly unhinged) this is kinda shitty as a videogame; like why can't i click to move around and why are the chapters broken up with halfhearted captcha minigames? for a game about a housewife there is basically no attempt made to simulate the mundane detail of loretta's existence. but these are relatively minor problems; the result of insecurity abt making a visual novel more than anything else