This is, and I swear I don't mean it pejoratively, a game for teenagers. To truly get the most of it, it asks you to 1) have the kind of patience that a large amount of free time affords you and 2) be young enough that you still find transgressive art relatively novel. These two design philosophies, repetition and transgression, work symbiotically: the cruelty of its mechanics buttresses the profoundly unpleasant aesthetic; your willingness to dive back in after repeated failure is contingent on your interest in whatever fucked up thing Haverinen can throw at you next.

For me, the game's disrespect of my time compromised the pleasures of its dark fantasy in about five hours, after I got fingerfucked to death a second time by the Harvestman. After that point, my eyes glazed over and everything started to look like mechanics to me. Every nail-biting coin flip and combat was reduced to a question of whether or not I was going to lose another twenty minutes of my precious life, and although I had previously respected the internet's insistence on playing blind, I fired up the wiki.

After another five hours of noble struggle, I realized that I was not strong enough to defeat the endgame bosses and hung it up. Maybe in the future I'll start another run, wiser and luckier, and achieve a better result. Unsatisfying? Was I filtered? Perhaps (and yes), but frankly the game is not deep enough to justify digging beyond its superficial "pleasures." It's a whole lot of lore and not much narrative ambition, an excuse to create a self-perpetuating misery engine for the player and the characters alike. The dead horse you can beat in the very first screen of the game is unfortunately more symbolic than it was meant to be.

I still admire the ferocity of its vision, its approach to the roguelike subgenre, and the unusual synthesis of its (admittedly surface-level) influences. I'll probably pick up Termina when it's on sale for $5 or so.