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Review
I'm impressed this game was made in 4 hours, because there's a lot of branching content and different endings. The subject matter is incisive and completely realistic, which makes it worse because real people have gone through this struggle and self-abuse. The supernatural elements are subtle. Rather, this game is about the horror of self-doubt and self-hatred, (Spoiler - click to show) particularly from a trans perspective: the inability to accept your identity and accept yourself as you are, which cuts the protagonist to the core.
(Spoiler - click to show)Tom's behavior in the "true" ending, the one where he forces you into the closet and forces you to delete Molly's number, is sickening. I wanted to tell him to stop, but I couldn't. Because it's never that easy.
I was going to have a line here about how I don't want to compare my personal issues to the plight of "real trans people" like the protagonist of this story, since my problems can't possibly be as bad, but the protagonist thinks exactly the same thing. At any rate, though I'm not trans, I've had my own struggles with personal identity, and many people do. If the protagonist didn't have Tom saying "you need to have suffered in these specific ways, with these specific boxes checked, or it doesn't count", things might've gone better for everyone. I could be misinterpreting here, but it's how I saw the central conflict between Tom and the protagonist.
There's a reason messages like "you need to have lived in these specific ways, or you're not really a member of Group X", and "all members of Group X have lived in these specific ways", no matter how unintentionally they may be presented, have never sat well with me.
A final note: (Spoiler - click to show)It's interesting that you can never get into a lasting relationship with Molly. It could represent how as long as you're hiding from yourself out of shame and self-hatred, you won't be able to find a relationship that will truly satisfy you. Depressing message, but this game is a depressing one.
