EDIT: After finishing it, I'm about ready to tear my hair out. I figured the series wasn't done because this title wasn't listed as the end of the series, but it's very clear even the next one isn't. There's probably three more books of torture to follow, and I can't believe how much time this book spent on something that was effectively inconsequential. Without going into spoilers (though it's not because I particularly think they're good or interesting moments or the like), a good 75% of this book is pointless. It's either inner monologue that justifies your character's actions, particularly if you keep selecting the opposite actions, or descriptions and confrontations that are repeated at least three times each. No argument can happen in this book between characters that won't happen two more times. Even the character talking to themselves in their deranged state threads so much of the same exact ground again and again. The description lists over 400k words and it is not lying. It just doesn't say that it's 10 repetitions of the same 40 thousand words.
I don't know what I expected. Giving up on the series at book 3 had definitely been a good choice and coming back to book 5 certainly reinforced that.
There is so much wrong with this series that is so very well exposed in this book. The first and most glaring is the absolutely pointlessness of this being a CYOA. Let me be very clear. It is not. The same things will happen regardless, and you can only choose if you fail more or less terribly at literally everything you set out to do. One of the biggest issues in book 3, that really started in book 2, and has gone on to completely dominate 5 (and 4 from both the recap at the beginning of 5, and the parts of 4 I did manage to play) was the emphasis on suffering. You will suffer, the people around you will suffer. It's a juvenile fantasy focused on suffering and trauma as some sort of way to become a better person. It's a worse version of grim-dark than the entirety of 40k somehow is and that is saying a lot. Because of this emphasis on trauma, all of your decisions propagate it. You make the right choices? Doesn't matter, someone (likely you) will suffer, push all your friends away or get them killed, lament that you're a terrible person, AND DO NOTHING ABOUT IT.
See, that wouldn't be so egregious if there was an arc to the character, or something to allow me to, I don't know, choose my path, so that maybe I can choose to improve, to vow to not see my friends die again, and so forth. You don't make any real choices because if you did, you could break the self-abusive cycle that this book and this whole series tries to push.
The second most egregious thing in this series is the just abject horribleness of the things that happen. This is to emphasize just how juvenile it is, but it can't just be that something bad happens to an interesting character, but that the bad thing is as bad as possible. All the time. There's no situation in which you rescue someone from what could have been a worse fate. No one can be imprisoned that can't be SAd, or made to eat or drink stones or...worse (not sure how Steam acts around reviews, but the technical term is coprophagia. If you don't know what it is, keep it that way. Seriously.)
Quick aside, but also be prepared for at least half the choices to be a memory test of the previous games...and for them to not matter. Attunement basically never mattered anyway, and it's basically gone in this book. Remember you can't succeed at anything anyway because all the right choices lead to the same amount of terrible stuff happening as all the wrong choices.
Let me show just how bad this is actually. In book 3, a minor side character you meet (that the game tries to make seem more important, but really really isn't) gets taken by that book's baddies, and r****. In book 5, you meet her again, and its revealed she's pregnant because of it. In book 3 she's one of the only people to initially believe and support you (which turns out to be a woefully bad idea even if it does pan out), and is shown to be a reliably strong-willed and determined woman. Really, she was a breath of fresh air to all the disfunction up to that point. In 5, she doesn't feel worthy of courting someone who was very obviously in love with her (one of your friends from book 3) because of said pregnancy from the SA, saying she was "soiled". On the face of it, that seems like it's speaking to a cultural thing maybe, and the way that women were made to think of their own bodies, except none of it is set up in 3 as such. She's not told to be ashamed in 3 by anyone and you can in fact be very supportive of her. That there's this shame in 5 makes zero sense to a strong and kind character previously.
Finally, there's a romantization of the idea of dying for a cause. It's not done well however. It's not treated as a sacrifice made by people in a situation where there was no other option. It's not the last stand of the 300 (+ a lot of others), or the person diving into a wrecked ship to rescue survivors who dies in the process, and so forth. The game and the writer want to make it seem like it would be that, but it's not. It's actually predicated on the above trauma, and painted as this way of making that trauma worth it. It is insane how crazy that idea is, and it's got something of a 14-18 year old's idea of dark and realistic. There's no attempt to deal with trauma, to attempt other solutions, particularly simple ones that come to mind, that might also be in character. Anything, and everything, that someone does to help you, has to kill them or almost kill them. Anything and everything that a person wants to do to stop some big bad has to come at the guaranteed and expected loss of their own lives. And this is not in the sense of the vague expectations soldiers have that they MAY die, or CAN die, but a willful pursuit of crazy plans and impossible odds that guarantee death.
That's not to say of the insane forced prolonging of the MCs feelings, particularly romantic, toward a monstrous abuser. Book 4 is impossible to deal with because of that. They're finally dead (I hope) and gone in hell, literally, and the MC isn't allowed to feel relieved, or even apathetic about it. They have to somehow keep finding connections between themselves and this terrible thing, regardless of how you play your MC. I have made every choice imaginable that should lead toward my MC looking at this other person with, at most, hatred, and otherwise cold detachment, recognizing that though they shared a very screwed up past, who my MC is and who that person is are different and their paths have diverged. The game constantly forces you however to have these long introspection about how it didn't diverge, how you were just the same, and how you still care about that person, and their work, and their worth. THEY HAD NO WORTH. THEY WERE AN ABUSER AND MURDERER FFS.
It's a terrible mess, that suffers from being at least somewhat well written. Don't expect more than to be gaslighted by this book and this series into a dull fatalism punctuated by immature brutality, and torture. IF you want to get the same experience, buy yourself a lot of pins and needles, and turn yourself into Pinhead from Hellraiser.
EDIT 2: Someone, in their review to book 1, made a very very good point, that somehow didn't register to me consciously but immediately snapped to my mind once I read it. You don't play as your character. You're not the MC. You are just sort of tagging along in their head and occasionally making choices, that 8/10 times the character will proceed to self-justify away. The author needs to just needs to give up on CYOA and write this exactly where it should be. In a forgotten corner on Wattpad, or in Amazon's self-published e-books. It's not different from those. A repetitive, over-long, frustrating experience that hinges on exactly one gimmick or plot point.
