Ive never played a game that so consistently and deeply makes the player have a bad time, its not miserable just in the story sense (although theres plenty of that), all of the game design is there to piss you off and actually fuck with you in ways that matter, this took huge balls for the developers but it really works with what they wanted to do, and I gotta respect it even though most of my time playing it was miserable.

well written, really well designed (to fuck w u but still), creative and funny. A bad time but a great game

the difference between good cynicism (A Clockwork Orange, No Longer Human) and juvenile cynicism is often that the former cannot be easily read as either didactically moral or immoral—the impossibility of this clarity itself being the source of cynicism—where the latter begets only nastiness and caricature.

The Lisa trilogy tells the story of three descendent patrilineal traumas, with the back half of games taking place in an entirely male-populated wasteland following the mysterious destruction of all women. Porn magazines become the new currency, and every surviving male falls somewhere along the spectrum between homicidal rapist and comparatively harmless gooner (i.e., no way any man would voluntarily identify themselves with). This is fine so long as the game occupies only the realm of levity: a comedic version of Children of Men. But trouble comes when this tendency towards totalizing negative psychology does not give way to any human truths.

That violence is cyclical and murdering people bad is true, but boring because it is a truism.

I struggle to think of Lisa as categorically cynical so much as outright misanthropic. It spells an incontrovertibly bummer text, which only seems all the more of a total downer taken as the middle child of a trilogy of games which are all essentially doomposts. The First teaching you that there is no escape from trauma, The Painful that nothing can amend it, and The Joyful that it will persist even after you're gone. We witness this cross-generational story of suffering. This deterministic cycle of pain. All of this failed human potential for... well, what? Are these hard to swallow truths or an unhelpful and uninspired use of captial "T" trauma as a plot mechanism? The game really wants you to believe the former.

Jorgenson supposedly made Lisa with the mantra of making no statement. To depict things of no agenda whatsoever and as impartially as the programming that allows the game to run properly on computers. This, among anything that acutally happens throughout Lisa, is perhaps what is saddest.

Perhaps the most heart-wrenching game I've ever played. A lot of games like to say "choices matter" but I don't think any game is able to give those choices the same emotional weight as Lisa.

I can't stress this enough: You can permanently lose a party member every time you HEAL YOUR PARTY. One of the only ways to get money is by BETTING YOUR TEAMMATES AT RUSSIAN ROULETTE. This game has mastered the art of the swift kick in the nuts and will give you one at every opportunity. It's awesome.

I replayed this game for the Definitive Edition content, and while I think the new additions are of dubious quality, I'll take any excuse to have my heart broken by this game again.

I hope I never forget this game. It's perfect. Beautiful. I wrote a long review of it on steam in 2019 after 100%-ing it years after beating it. I don't think i'll need to play it again. I don't even wanna tell anyone about this game other than it's an earthbound-like game in the opposite direction of what Undertale was, lol. The story in this is absolutely unbeatable, the gameplay is some of the most engaging in RPGmaker history, the writing is funny in an almost timeless way. The party members stick with you. The themes are disturbing and real. Oh I love it so much aaaaaaaaaaaa

What a game!
Remarkable work of art, fascinating experience. Stuck around in my mind for weeks after playing.
Strikes me as the type of art where the creator maybe doesn't totally "get" what makes it so good, but that's okay.
Play it without spoilers, and IMO avoid the sequel (cheapens some of the plot points of this one).
Great soundtrack too. Can't wait to forget a bit about it and return to it later!