I thought that both the very beginning and the final area of the game were fantastic, dripping with shocking emotional dilemmas, but the middle 80% of the game’s content seemed like it relied too much on oddball humor and not much else. The game hilariously plays with expectations and has no shortage of genuinely witty satire of its genre, and I found myself amused by nearly all of it, but after the first two hours as I was walking across long linear worlds and listening to dozens of characters try to tell me jokes, I started to wonder where the emotional gravity had gone. “Why is this game making me laugh, when I thought it was supposed to make me cry?” I asked myself. “Where are the feelings? After such an excellent and powerful prologue, why is the game taking so long to show me more?”
Later that night, as I was lying awake in bed, the answer hit me: the game was quirky and lighthearted because I was sparing everyone’s life. I wasn’t playing as a murderer. If you want this game to have drama, you have to cause it. And I think that’s where all the hype is coming from, all the talk about player choice. This is a game about being a tree-hugging pacifist, or a murderous psychopath who kills anyone who gets in the way, or anything in between. You only need to live with whomever you decide to be, because the game won’t let you ignore what you have