3 people found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 5.4 hrs on record
Posted: 1 Jul, 2020 @ 9:20am

TL;DR: F** this game. DO NOT BUY.

Up until the last 30 minutes, I had been enjoying it immensely. It's a (largely) well-written and compelling story of a woman who returns to her family's hotel after the death of her mother. Her family had split up years before due to an incident at the hotel that turned the town on her father involving a 16 year old girl, and she's there to survey the hotel in preparation for selling it off. So far, so good. until you get near the ending, it's a great, atmospheric mild horror/mystery walking simulator with no jump scares, and I was all in and ready to give the game a thumbs up.

Then the wheels come completely off. Previously, when you looked at evidence involving the death of Rachel (the 16 year old girl), there were notes like "slander about father," which are the main character's opinions. Mind you, this is a character who absolutely hated her father at the beginning of the game, so those only make sense if she's starting to come around to the idea that he's innocent of statutory rape of a teenager. So it looked like the game was going in a different direction.

And then suddenly it wasn't. Spoilers ahead, but IDGAF, everyone should be warned away from this dumpster fire. Nope, the 50 year old father was engaged in the relationship with the 16 year old, yes he did cheat on his wife, and the in-game narrative tries to present this as "simply love." At first, that comes from an unreliable and unhinged ally, so I brushed past it, but by the end of the game, it becomes clear that, nope, this is the case as it's being presented. The game wants you to accept that statutory rape is love, that the townsfolk were bigoted for not liking it, that everything would be fine if everyone involved had accepted it, and that Rachel's death at the hands of the main character's mom was the only thing wrong in any of it. And then, to top it off, to get the "good" ending, you have to let the main character kill herself.

Just a vile, vile experience, and the people that wrote it shouldn't get a dime from you. Such a shame, too, because there were about a dozen ways to prevent the narrative of "lol child molestation is okay," but nope. Now excuse me while I try to get a refund.
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