History

It feels like the creators of the game have puzzle pieces on how the world works but have no idea how they fit together. They know that capitalism is bad, they say that the world was destroyed by it, but then later they say that it was destroyed by "people insisting on driving cars everywhere" and "a drive for endless innovation". This is important because the game and its message heavily rely on "Earth was destroyed and we must avoid making the same mistake again" but it becomes apparent again and again that they don't actually know what the mistake was, so when the antagonist of the game shows up it is a comically evil fascist maniac who loves genocide and kicking puppies, I guess, and with him he brings a bunch of people that are written exactly like the Slytherin house in Harry Potter, meaning evil people who are evil because evil.

Meanwhile, the system itself is never questioned to an absolutely aggravating extent. The fascist governor who wants to wipe out all native life on the planet is heavily disliked by the majority of its, population, even by the military, yet there is only one ending where the governor is "overthrown", via electoralism.

The game's fundamental misunderstanding seems to be that it thinks that the lead question to be answered is "How much of nature is humanity entitled to claim for its own survival?", but this is the wrong question to ask. Humanity at large is not benefitting from the destruction of nature. The world is being destroyed for short-term benefits of the top 0,1% of humanity, with everyone else suffering the consequence alongside the planet itself. Humanity would very easily be able to sustainably coexist alongside nature, yet the ruling class consciously decides not to do so to chase ever-increasing profits. This is how capitalism is destroying the world, but this game doesn't understand that and as a result, the plot is completely incoherent because it's based on a misunderstanding of real world issues.

From a creative perspective, I strongly dislike the way this game handles character deaths as something you have to specifically work to avoid, and how completely random and weirdly inconsequential they are most of the time. Tammy dies in the very first year, I later read that this is unavoidable during your first playthrough, and it's completely irrelevant. It has no impact on the game or the characters, especially because her father dies shortly after and a few months later it's like they never existed. Why did they die? What was the narrative point of that?

Later, both of my parents die within a few years of each other and sure, there are a few scenes of the main character mourning, when you go to the place they worked we melancholically reminisce about them, but our character really doesn't change at all after being orphaned, and neither does anyone else. Because characters were dropping like flies for seemingly no narrative reason, I didn't really care either, my reaction to my mom fucking starving in the fields was to just throw my hands in the air and go "Yeah, okay, sure, whatever."

Lastly, the friendships/romance with the other characters. My favorite from the start was Tangent and I started dating her at age 16. After that, it didn't really come up. There weren't any cute date scenes or anything, after all we have to deal with Governor Umbridge-Hitler who wants to wipe out all native life on the planet, there's not time to go on cute dates. There's no time to bond with the rest of our friends either, because we're too busy lamenting how mean the evil Slytherins from the other ship are who hate friendship and fun and feelings because they were born with the evil genes, I suppose.

I don't know how the game ends from this point and I don't care. I don't care what the weird deja vu dreams were about, I don't care about the "past life" stuff. I don't care about the ancient alien buildings and I don't care about why there was an eldritch horror. Of course our character is the only one who has these visions because this is literally just fucking space Harry Potter and we're the chosen one, the boy who lived or whatever. It's almost certainly some meta nonsense about "ooOOhh it's like when you start over in the game, your character's life also starts over" as if we hadn't seen that a million times.

I'm very disappointed by this game. I liked the aesthetic, I liked the diversity, I still like a lot of the character designs and the card game mechanics. I'd still give the game a 6/10 or a 6.5/10, and some of you might be able to look past its flaws and enjoy it a lot. But to me, the human condition is the most fascinating thing in the world, nothing interests me more than to explore the reasons and motivations for why people do the things they do, why the world is the way it is and why things happen the way they do, and this game tries to comment on that and fails miserably at every corner. It knows that the status quo is bad, but it doesn't know why. It tries to present solutions without knowing what the problem is. And I think the fact that the game is genuinely trying and failing to make a progressive, anti-capitalist statement is what frustrates and disappoints me so. It tries to envision a better world but it just cannot get past its liberal ideology, the most sophisticated critique it can muster is no deeper than "maybe humans are the real virus :/".