coming into this with fairly low expectations, and only walking away mildly disappointed. that's not like, an awful thing, right? like this could have definitely been much worse. but so much of it gives a "so what? who cares" feeling. all of the new characters are fairly unremarkable sans rachel, and i just did not walk away from LIS going "i want to see rachel amber" or "i am interested in chloe's life pre-LIS". those are monumental walls of care to scale, and this game doesn't.

i think the biggest thing is that rachel amber just comes off as a very big manic pixie dream girl archetype. she's supposed to be this effortlessly charismatic and attention-grabbing girl who knows just the right thing to say at any given time with a slight laura palmer edge to her and. . . i'm bored! i'm bored of this character. i think her interactions with chloe are fine, but anything where i'm supposed to care about rachel amber just falls flat for me. why should i care about her dad having an affair when her dad is a nonentity in LIS and she's going to end up murdered? and it doesn't help that rachel can know chloe for all of one day and go "wow we have this intense and powerful crazy thing going on". i'm supposed to believe that these two bonded that closely over the span of ditching class together for one day? it's just too much too soon. if you're going to make BTS be about chloe/amber, surely you can develop and slowburn this relationship better than this?

i think fundamentally i don't understand why we need to see rachel amber. she works much better as a posthumous character; either her implied supernatural gravitas can be something to infer or it can be implied to be a confirmation bias situation. either one works, and failing to deliver on this tall tale of a character makes her boring. she comes off as a cliche and i don't see why her storming off on chloe warrants a big "SMASH SHIT UP" section. i care about her by proxy of caring how the interactions between her and chloe are going to change chloe. beyond that, nothing. it's probably the worst thing you can do to chloe as a character to make me fail to see why rachel amber was worth all this devotion.

gameplay-wise, i think backtalk is a very silly and not very well implemented mechanic. i would probably feel more receptive to it if it didn't feel like a "oh god, without time powers we need SOME gameplay mechanic players can engage with". chloe's superpower is. . . being really pithy and insistent? it's not out of character, but it makes her feel so much less likeable. that's actually a huge problem with this episode: chloe is very difficult to empathize with. it's been a year and she's still mentally doting on max despite getting pretty obviously ignored. as someone who has had this type of situation happen to them: yes, it sucks, but her continual need to address max in inner-monologue and journal entries borders on obsession and devalues the character's presence in LIS retroactively. i can live with chloe being an edgelord who lashes out at virtually every authority figure, but at least let her story exist outside the shadow of max. in a perfect world, you could salvage chloe's adoration of rachel and max and turn it into "chloe just has an obsessive co-dependent personality", but the game plays these two relationships too straight for me to see them commenting on it in a meaningful way like that. oh well.

i don't have much else to say. there are a lot of bad moments and i felt myself losing interest pretty quickly, but i don't hate it. there's potential for a somewhat compelling character story to be salvaged here, and while expectations are still low, i do at least want to see what story is going to be told over the next two episodes.

if nothing else, the music choice in this episode was pretty good and elevated scenes that otherwise could've fallen flat. give me more of that and i can tolerate all the character writing issues. LIS was a "moments" type game more than it was a well-told character story, so might as well lean into that.