the narrative is elliptical in a way i wouldve loved to chew on like 10 years ago ... but i'm old now and insensate and respond only to sensory inputs like color and sound. luckily this game is full of weird crunchy noises and gross textures in addition to a cast of morose lesbians who look like fanart of themselves. If everyone is gay i think ... no one is gay. i have so much patience and LOVE for proudly tedious, unreconstructed survival horror mechanics!!! the loop here is finessed just enough; you'll come upon puzzle solutions naturally as u explore new rooms, but it's also exhausting to find the item you need with a full inventory and the nearest save room half the map away :))))) a masterclass in what i think the kids call "filtering" ...

also happy to see a game that doesn't bother with delicately alluding to other art (subtle intertextuality ... that thing videogames are famous for); it just plops it in front of you whole-cloth. the silent hill save screen and meat world slop are really obvious, all the classical pieces & cosmic horror texts, but the use of the böcklin painting "isle of the dead" is especially canny — he painted a handful of versions (plus a cheerier follow-up "isle of life"), there are several potential IRL inspirations, it was widely proliferated in his home country ... its so thematically relevant girl!!