This game has been on my wishlist for years, and I jumped at the opportunity to pick it up at a good price. The art is gorgeous, the music is fantastic, and based on the reviews, it seemed like a good story with good queer representation.
Some of that is true. The art and music are indeed brilliant; I'm glad the soundtrack is available on Spotify because I'll probably come back to it every now and then for some casual listening. There are indeed some queer characters, though there is mainly only diversity in sexual orientation; there is only one instance of a trans character off-screen and a non-binary character that is featured as a secret cameo from another game. The story does indeed have elements of good character development with some sense of closure if you get each character's endings.
However, despite all of that, I can't recommend the game in good faith because it is overall just not a very well-written story. I love the fact that it is trying to be progressive. I also liked that characters' sexualities, when revealed, were met with no hostility and immediately accepted by other characters. But at the same time, so much of the writing falls into the typical traps of men writing women. I'm talking "her tits breasted boobily" levels of cringe at points.
Minor story spoilers about a particularly bad point in the story:
[spoiler]There's also a loli sex worker, and some of the dialogue hints at the horrors of the sex industry and infantilisation of women. But it never goes much deeper than a superficial remark about keeping the underage appearance for the purposes of sex work. Even more egregiously, at one point this character gets hired to spend time with the player character. Granted, it was just to comfort the player during that point in the story and no real sex occurred, but[/spoiler] it's still disgusting that such behaviour is not only allowed, but encouraged by a peer of the player character. When you consider this, along with other equally terribly lines of a similar nature [spoiler](e.g. a father telling his daughter to dress up in a way that make people think he's her sugar daddy??),[/spoiler] the whole game just felt like the writer's poorly disguised fetish.
What about the rest of the story, aside from the above? There are hints of deeper meaning and commentary about society at large. Multiple elements of the worldbuilding introduced throughout the story are really interesting to me; the ethics of AI sentience, police corruption and brutality, transhumanism and brain digitisation. The problem is that it's all rather superficial, which is really baffling considering how much writing there actually is. Not only is most of it inconsequential, the way the player character is so strictly neutral with everything is also extremely tiresome. You can't just bring up how terrible the world is because of the capitalist overlords, and then immediately go "oh but actually maybe they're not so bad, I think". I had to drag my feet to continue the next day in the story because I would go in fully expecting the plot to not progress in any meaningful way.
I'm not saying that the game has nothing to say; there IS a main plotline/moral of the story that picks up towards the end of the game, and is significant to the player character (which is in stark contrast to everything else that happens up to this moment). But if that was truly what the game wanted to talk about, then it really should have spent the vast majority of the game developing that thread from the start.
I completely understand why this game is rated as overwhelmingly positive, because it is one of those games that people will say is actually really deep and mature just because it is set in a dystopian future and has lots of talk about sex, violence, and death.
