Dane Qualtiere

This game is set in an imaginary Teenage Girls version of Alaska, where magical mind reading twins with shared visions is more believable than a troubled teen in mid 2000s Alaska being able to fully transition. The Trans aspect of the story is clearly the focus of the game, but it feels incredibly mishandled. So far, the beginning of the game almost borders on painting the Trans character as wildly unstable and mentally ill, painting him and his transitioning as a result of abuse, which comes off.. really odd, and somewhat undermining the acceptance of trans people with a story that makes it seem more like a mental illness than an acceptance of the self. The story is very inconsistent, with the main characters talking about how hard it is for them to be in their childhood home in one minute, then recounting the endless tales of adventure and fun they had in the next. The main mechanic of the game is also inconsistent, in some scenes being a shared definite memory, and others being remembered entirely differently from each other, to the point of being almost the opposite of what happened. The writing almost seems to change direction by the sentence, half of which are borderline nonsensical. Mechanically speaking, the game is incredibly clunky with incredibly poor level design and unresponsive controls. There is no direction and finding items around the house that dont trigger a cutscene seems like pointless and often very cringey filler. I’m not finished with the game yet, I will try and finish it but I find myself literally and loudly groaning almost every 2 minutes at either a bad line, a weird direction in the plot, or just the general “I read Into the Wild once and fell in love with my imaginary version of Alaska” feel of the game. Hopefully it gets better.