I know basically nothing about Homestuck or Andrew Hussie so maybe some of the subtext is lost on me but in a vacuum, I found following Zheng's story to be a very interesting character study. She was an unlikeable protagonist and a bad person, which was why it was /so frustrating/ that I was also rooting for her at many points and agreeing with some of the things she said. It was very cathartic to watch her bring the world to its knees and I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see how far the author would take it, and in the end he took it as far as he could.

Zheng was right- the capitalist machine and the spirit of imperialism are far too entrenched in our cultural psyche for us to ever truly escape them so there really was no "winning" against them. It's easy to complain that the narrative lets her off the hook for her actions but I feel like her stepping away was... if not /the/ correct choice, then at least /a/ correct choice. She already failed, her "revolution" just wound up recreating the same systems again because she and the people around her couldn't truly conceive of anything else, and so her ultimate victory was to just extract herself from everything as much as possible. It was no more selfish of a choice than staying, and staying would have meant dying, and having her die out of some misguided sense of honor would have been too cruel of an ending for a game that was already so harrowing.

A lot of things are left unsolved at the end but I didn't mind it because honestly, it felt truer than having them wrapped up. In particular it was fitting that we never really get to see what becomes of Earth in the end because, well, we never found a solution for the problems so we don't get to see anything solved. The cosmic invaders plot fizzling out also made sense because divine intervention from above was never coming, and besides, who cares about space imperialism when we already have imperialism here on Earth? The only storyline that really gets resolved is the Zheng/Abby plot, and that's because they're actual human beings who are able to stand and speak and reckon together.

For similar reasons I don't think the story really had a moral, but my takeaway was that our culture is rotten to the core, but, BUT, individual people aren't, and when we start thinking of people only in the abstract sense (be it as names on a screen or bodies in a revolution) then we lose. You are never going to be perfect, hell in the grand scheme of things you might even be a bad person, but being a dick about it is the least helpful thing imaginable. And stop hurting yourself, that doesn't help either.

Speaking of the game itself and not just the story, I actually really liked the art style. The pixelated photos with simple drawings overlaid was a striking visual style and the designs of the clowns were fun. The music got a bit annoying but it wasn't in the way or anything like that.