I was sold on the premise of old internet and archive investigations, but it does very little with that premise. I was hoping for something along the lines of Hypnospace Outlaw, but at most you get a text summary of what your character sees, with inconsistent direct quotes. Even worse, maybe half of the clues are in one book, meaning that not only are you not investigating, but if you do find some lead you need to follow up on, that becomes very clumsy as physical evidence and the computer are quite separated.
Some of the leads made little sense. I was stuck at one point due to not accepting that googling someone's e-mail would lead anywhere, and dismissed another clue when googling a dance studio turned up something along the lines of "You find a dance studio local to the area" and nothing more, when the investigator should have easily clocked that it was very important. The game is mostly finding keywords that lead to more keywords, and you are supposed to find them in very specific ways. Bonus problem is that the parser isn't that good, it usually requires something very specific. Perhaps accurate, but you very rarely can get "near-misses" that get you on the right track.
The story doesn't really make sense. People say that it doesn't go anywhere when it promises a lot, but I feel like it never really promised anything to begin with. You are mapping out a family tree, but everyone in that family should be well-aware of most of the tree that you are plotting (an arts student casually mentions his third cousins, I have a hard time keeping track of my second cousins. This is a family well aware of itself). The exercise has nothing to do with the motive of the character you're working for as it turns out that she just needed to check that you were an expert in these sorts of things, which itself feels wrong (don't tell me that a well-documented family who made that family their entire business brand could actually get away with what they did without leaving a massive paper trail. No experts should be needed to figure it out)
The ending feels very anaemic. I didn't have a problem figuring out who and why, but with how it was built up and how EC acted, I expected EC to have been in a vegetative state or some sort of mutant. No-one would have both taken it and stuck around (get angry and/or get out of there), EC feels less like a character and more of an object that things happen to to prove a point. It also was an injustice, sure, but outside of the little clinical writing you get, you see nothing of it until the crescendo. Perhaps a point of failure having a lot of the early history being told from just one perspective, but I never felt like I should dislike a lot of the characters. Hell, with the setup, I was in the mindset of being as impartial as possible as to not miss anything. As someone else wrote, it feels like a highschoolers sociology presentation.
A bonus problem that might exist for people outside the US. The content of the primer that they give about US-specific things isn't covering things that might actually be relevant. Half the cast is in grade-school, but I didn't need US grade-school defined to sort them. I didn't need a primer on Jim Crow Laws or 50's euphemisms either, but I've seen both be bigger stumbling blocks for people's understanding of some of the cast. The latter not being clear might actually work against what the ending is trying to convey, funnily enough.
There is something quite off-putting with the images that I can't quite put my finger on. AI or not, it also feels very out of sync with the rest of the style.
Didn't care enough to play the second case when I got the notice that my old searches and clues wouldn't work for this one, even if they contained still relevant info, like a photo of an established character.
