jabberwocky 1 singlehandedly made me drop this for about a year. from the beginning to looking glass insects i really enjoyed this - it's so controversial and taboo, but it all feels exceptionally interesting and beautiful to me. a total paranoid psychosexual surrender that's really rare. i fond its unsubtle, and kinda clunky, references to foundational philosophy and literature super charming too; i actually read cyrano de bergerac midway through playing this. it creates this strange conversation between the player and the characters - i love getting book recommendations from anime boys. but with the climactic focus of its "true" protagonist i found myself exceptionally disappointed. i get it, you have to explain your central premise/mystery at some point, but like, i already (at least in my mind) understood it - and i didn't even like the way the game seemed to explain itself. i think in some ways its physics may be "bigger" than i'm giving it credit, but i just feel like it whittled itself into something so dry, so boring, and so rejecting of the ambiguity it had built up to that point. plus the "choose your own ending" idea just kinda feels like a lazy way to avoid having to fully deny its ambiguity by declaring a "true" reality. even unreality has to be realized; if every ending is real and none of them are real, make it feel that way. and all this is in service of the most banal, cliche quotev adjacent optimism. the conclusive messaging of this game is actually offensive to me in how dull and empty it is following the story. for something so set up as subversive, unrestricted, corrupted, and forward-thinking a straightforward "living is good, actually" felt like such a slap in the face. i honestly would have preferred it telling me to end everything