I bought this game like 10 years ago and didn't play it until recently.

It's art that holds up pretty well for its age. Glad I took the time to play through it.

I wouldn't give the game a strictly negative rating if Steam allowed me to pick more complex options, but alas I must not recommend it because that's the closest thing to expressing what I feel about this game at the moment.

To put it simply; the antagonists drag this game down and ruin what could have been a masterpiece. The core spirit of the game is solid; it is a deeply personal character study of depression and anhedonia. But several issues arise when the game tries to be more conventional and give us antagonists to fight against. We all of sudden go from a serious and somber experience of what it is like to try to live when a life no longer has any reason to persist straight into B-tier slasher pic territory with some of the most cartoonish and implausible villains imaginable. At a lot of points it is straight out dehumanizing as well. Specially with Joe Davis; it takes a real, profound state of human suffering (quadriplegia) and reduces it to a direct, causal signifier for malevolence. The narrative logic presented is not that Joe Davis is an evil person who also happens to be disabled; it is that he is evil **because** his disability has curdled his soul into pure ressentiment. Susan even starts talking about him in the most insulting and dehumanizing way saying he's just an invalid who can't even wipe his own ass and is just going to live a miserable live forever. This is an act of rhetorical instrumentalization. The complex reality of living with a severe disability is flattened and deployed as a simple metaphor for impotent, spiteful rage. The confrontation is structured as a perverse form of therapy. The suffering of Susan and Mitzi is validated and contextualized by being contrasted with a "greater", more "wretched" suffering that has produced a "true" monster. Susan restores her own will to live not by finding intrinsic value in existence, but by defeating a figure who represents the "wrong" way to suffer. The game inadvertently creates a hierarchy of suffering and response. Susan's depression is implicitly framed as a noble struggle, while Joe's is framed as a source of corruption. This dynamic uses the dehumanized image of a disabled person as a sacrificial object to facilitate the protagonist's catharsis. It is a rhetorical act that affirms the value of one life by rendering another monstrous and disposable, violating the very principle of human dignity the game elsewhere seems to champion through the Susan-Mitzi relationship. And don't even get me started on The Queen of Maggots; she's literally just Susan but older, the obvious implication is that old age = decay = evil and corruption. The game can't even imagine the possibility that a person's body might become weaker without their soul becoming lesser. There are so many issues here that I don't even know how to articulate.

i love susan ashworth so very much i want to give her 50 hugs.