Appreciate the insight.
That is not how it ends, but the ending is highly predictable all the same. Under no circumstances should you play it if you're looking for a twist. To the extent the game has novelty, that novelty is certainly not from the game's core theme (a man coping with despair and grief -- I suppose this might be what you mean by "a breakdown" or "mental illness," I took those to be a schizoid episode in which he
actually believes these things to be real, which is not the case here), or from its setting (a seedy, dark carnival -- are there any other carnivals?), nor from the pairing of the two.
To the extent there is novelty, in terms of the theme, it is the union of mythological, literary, religious, and psychological elements, the specificity and consistency of the imagery (e.g., how the cicada or Feejee mermaid are used), and perhaps the intensity of certain themes. For some players, I think the voices in the game will speak with disturbing familiarity. For some players, the arc of grief will feel very real. But for many players, it will just be a not-very-scary horror game retreading familiar terrain.
On a line-by-line level, I think the writing is the best I've ever done
to my own taste, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the narrative as a whole is. And the writing is not going to be for everyone. Stylistically, some people might enjoy the wordplay, punning (I mean, where else will you get "idle offer," "idol of her," and "idyll afar" punned?), and Very Serious soliloquizing like: "There's... a shadow the dead leave behind. / Words that echo in your ears, / phantoms that linger behind your eyes, / and a weight of pain, / heaped up on your back. / Even your
voice has that stoop to it, stranger. / A man can carry the dead, / but their place is on the pyre. / Do you understand? / Once you have a flame, / it will draw spirits from the dead, / as though they were moths." But lots of people won't.
Structurally, some tiny percentage of the population may think it's clever to weave the multiple meanings of "imago" (entomological term for the last stage of insect growth, psychotherapeutic term for the idealized person of another, Latin for "phantom," "echo," "reflection," etc.) and "onkos" (mask, burden, tumor) throughout multiple characters and encounters, or to connect the torment of Loki in the Lokasenna with the serpent on the Tree of Knowledge and a chemical IV drip, or to connect the troll mirror from The Snow Queen, the shattered-mirror motif of horror, Lacan's mirror stage, carnival mirrors, 1 Corinthians 13:12, and the mirror-mark test -- but many players won't notice, won't care, or will be irritated by the navel-gazing pomposity.
But the game was made for me, not for others. It was me applying all that I've learned to try to understand certain hard questions, by rendering it into a game. The specificity, consistency, and intensity of the images and themes is because the mind you're exploring is pretty much my own, under the hypothetical scenario that I had just watched with my grandparents' death. There's no reason why this should speak to others, but it does seem to, so I'm glad. The game contains a lot from Ecclesiastes, but it turns out that pouring all my trivia and intellectual interests and hobbies into the game was not chasing after the wind. All that vanity has produced a generally pretty positive reaction, notwithstanding the game being too "heteronormative" to get an entirely positive review from Vice or whatever.
And even if the writing is all in all tedious and arid for you, I think Vic's art is striking and juicy, so you should play it for that alone. Honestly, the teratoma, black dog close-up, and final reflection alone are worth the low price of admission. The voice acting is quite good, too. And the overall soundscape that Vic created is really impressive.
Primordia had a novel world that was really unknown to anyone and I'm sure that's what drew people in.
Who knows? To me, Primordia is a familiar pastiche. It has some unique lore, but that is mostly in the details (as with Strangeland), not the general contours. I think a lot of people were drawn in precisely by that familiarity: the familiar wasteland, the familiar road warrior, the familiar hero journey, the familiar AI overmind/hivemind adversary, etc. I think what left a lasting impression though were the unique specifics we brought to the setting -- Vic's use of organic forms in an inorganic environment, the humanness of the robots, etc.
With both games, to the extent I wasn't just selfishly writing what I enjoyed writing and reconstructing my interests and passions into a game design, I wanted to make a narrative about the triumph of human spirit and classical wisdom, hope and faith, decency and dignity. I actually think these themes, which should be the most trite of all, are quite rare in game narratives, which are often brutal, ugly, iconoclastic, radical, etc. Many people celebrate those qualities, and that's fine, but mine is not a muse of gasoline and bullets.
