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Review
I don't think this was a bad game, but I'm a bit baffled by all the praise and high ratings.
The prose is serviceable, although there's a surprising number of typos. It seems this was originally entered in a contest or game jam with a time limit, so I assume there just wasn't time to go back and edit the work.
The story is, deliberately, more symbolic than realistic, focusing on the theme of whether people are responsible for their actions if they're overcome with desires that go against the norm. (Well, yes. They are. They still deserve compassion, as do we all, but yes, you are responsible for the people you hurt. This isn't a dilemma.) It also confusingly tries to create parallels between that and the things someone might do for survival, which is an entirely different situation.
The characters, due to the mostly-metaphorical nature of the story, are paper-thin, and the goofy references to things like your lumberjack-clad manliness and the virginal state of your daughter in her stainless white dress felt like borderline parody. To the point I honestly think the former at least is genuinely meant as such, but the latter is far more insidious given the themes, as is the fixation on the nuclear family as a site of comfort and order without bothering to flesh out any of the women (or rather, one woman, specifically your wife) or the girl involved. This is, ultimately, a story fixated on the morality, potential redemption and interiority of men who do cruel things, while the personhood and interiority of victims is given little more than a passing glance. (Spoiler - click to show)Your daughter doesn't even speak in the final scene.
I appreciate that we're allowed to choose to leave things on as hopeful or bleak a note as we'd like. I was rather expecting, based on the other reviews, that the overall story would be significantly more horrible, but it really isn't that bad, and I felt almost let down by that even though I'm not particularly someone who enjoys wallowing in suffering, either. It felt like a lot of buildup to not much but a twist that I'd already guessed while standing in the man's bedroom at the beginning. Perhaps it's just that I'm not as readily disturbed by the subject matter as others are, but I'm actually fairly easily sickened and I still didn't find much to haunt me here.
