i make a lot of shitty mods for bad games for one specific friend i have for no reason other then i think it's really funny. i think i'm super hilarious. video games are the only thing i ever think about and so obviously i have aspirations for designing one someday, creating these mods is a good way for me to indulge in that impulse while also not letting me fool myself into putting "makes games sometimes" in my twitter bio. one time i made a house party (2017) mod that had a ton of bespoke, branching paths with unique endings based on really minute player actions and decisions. when i watched my friend play i was in agony seeing how often he had to restart the entire run because it was just impossible to create convenient save points where he could quickly branch the story to a new ending. i think who's lila suffers from this same problem most of it's playtime. you'll end up in the interrogation room for what feels like 2/3s of the endings but the path to getting there has to be meticulously played out ever so slightly differently each time. each time you finish a story you feel like you're building up to a conclusion that ultimately never arrives.
i've never played another game (or read a story or watched a movie for that matter) that parlays this kind of an anticlimax into the main themes in a really elegant way. it's not a particularly revelatory experience, and the whole Deal with the story is kinda obvious and slightly overdone in general. but it wraps itself up nice and feels like it said what it wanted to say and got out. my biggest beef with the whole package is the obsession with working in 'Lynchian' imagery and items for no reason other then this guy probably likes lost highway too much. it's good and normal to draw on your inspirations but at a certain point it dilutes the actual author's voice and style. and i'm just super sick of david lynch i have to be real. he made like one movie that i can fuck with and everything else is just so over referenced and uninteresting.

Reviewed on Jul 15, 2022


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