Aunty Jane criticises your character for not actually being clever, instead simply choosing the right answer out of a 50/50 probability - and I felt like this was what the game was for the most part, a series of 50/50 answers that happen to be right.

Whether or not your answer was able to get a response that gave you a clue rarely had anything to do with the characters you were engaging with. Mum likes to be flattered and Aunty Jane likes to win, but otherwise, character responses felt random + continuity between conversations, rare.

i think the core gameplay is pretty fun despite the obviously unfinished story that nonsensically moved forward constantly, introducing and removing characters left and right. obviously this is a very orientalist work but i don't really know enough about hong Kong to really talk too much in detail about that aspect. what really sours this game for me is misogyny. you expect a certain level of ambient misogyny from these sorts of gangster narratives (see any yakuza game), which i could tolerate. but it gets comical when this is combined with 7th gen western open world game design philosophy of "everything should matter to the mechanical logic of the game regardless of how dumb it is" leads to 'you have sex with women to unlock map upgrades and never talk to them again'. it's not outwardly crass about it as a gta or something, but once you connect those dots it's really hard to disconnect it. and no, i dont think you can't depict a misogynistic world in your work, we live in one (!) but you can and should be able to do that without your text itself being misogynist and having to read so hard against it to squeeze even a slightly charitable read out of it. ugh.