I played this when the initial release dropped and vaguely remembered it being a little too style over substance but pretty decent overall. Playing the latest release tho... I tell ya, I've gotta get checked for early onset alzheimer's or something. It's so much worse. It's like the writer for this decided to write in a way to piss me of specifically. Like he watched L O S T and decided- "You know, I can do worse than that." and then proceeded to speedrun Damon Lindelof's entire movie catalog so he could use it as his major influence.
Some random thoughts on the characters:
1)Alex, the class dipshit and scatological humour provider and amateur vomiteur... who's also an obsessed murderer at worst or a pervert woodsman at best, gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar and MURDERS THE GIRL THAT CAUGHT HIM! well, no. We just bait and switch and tell the viewer that despite being a shit-for-brains, he manages to convince a girl that a) doesn't like him and; b) doesn't trust him that there's nothing weird afoot, really. Nothing at all. No sir. And not only that, she's both going to keep this information from her friend (with whom she's "scamming" the group) AND she's now going to help him take down posters of a missing girl because... DUNNO! And that would normally not be a problem if it weren't for the fact that I doubt the writer knows either.
2)Danielle, best friends with Lea with whom she shares everything, apart from information that could probably save her life in the future. Why doesn't she share this information? Whatever, don't worry about it.
3)Summer, finally found after being Gone for like 8 years, now she's up to going partying with her friends and her friends alone, absolutely no outsiders allowed. Until 5 minutes later when she decides the clearly sketchy girl that hitchhiked with them is totally okay to not only grope her but also have a threesome with; a threesome with a guy with whom she's been friends with for like 2+ years at that point, a guy that SHE SHOULD KNOW her best friend has the hots for. Why? So the porno can happen! And let's completely ignore her finding a bloody knife in the backseat of a car and instead of handing it to the MC so he can defend them or keeping it so she can show it to the cops... nah. It just disappears, just like the knife in The Last Jedi. Now watch as the cafe guy turns out to be a just hunter who had a half dead deer in the back of hist truck. True Rian Johnson moment. Expectations subverted, fuck yeah!
4)Lea, the girl with the drugs; the drugs the police search for once they're close to town. Really, let me mention it again, the police will search for those. But don't worry about it, she can totally hide them. No problem. Why isn't it a problem? Because it never comes up again even though it's mentioned twice. Hell, the police even let Willie "Nelson" McSnoopdawg and his 7 bongs get to the town with no problem. But seriously, they're looking for drugs.
5)And then there's Keyser fucking Soze. AKA Mei. Mei, the girl who's too embarrassed to have people know she's a virgin even though she's been planning to have sex with this one guy she has a crush on for months. If it's him she wants and no one else, then why's she so fucking mortified? DUNNO! Mei, the girl who's the nicest person in the world, who's so insecure and timid... but who's also a party girl who dumps her friends so she can get to the place they're going to early so she can... throw a party? And then gets surprised when they show up even though she knows they were heading there?? Maybe it was her plan to clean it up before they arrived and she ruined the car on purpose to stall them (even though Lea tells you the car was sabotaged AFTER she had left the group) but then did she never think that they might get a cab? OR FUCKING HITCH-HIKED??? Besides, what was the point to all of that? She's secretly a drug dealer and all that nice and nervous thing was just an act and the party is just cover for a deal?? Did the writer forget that we had access to her inner monologue and that if she -really- was like that, that we should have known? Or maybe she has multiple personality disorder that her friends never caught a hint of for years. Or a twin. Or she's actually an alien. Or, most likely, the writer has no fucking idea.
6)I'm far too fed up to even mention the MC but how disinterested he is when his girlfriend's phone is blowing up out of nowhere or that he doesn't bother to check with his girl when he gets invited on a LINGERIE PHOTO SHOOT or, even worse, when she goes missing and he decides "eh, fuck it" because apparently going to Dreamland is more important than his girlfriend who he said he loved suddenly vanishing while leaving all her shit behind and telling him not to call the cops. Because that's not sketch at all. And then you DO run into the cops and say... nothing. And then he thinks he's going to get murdered and runs into the cops AGAIN and STILL he says nothing even though he hasn't been able to contact her again. Absolute fucking shitheel retard. I hope he dies. Violently.
I read a few pages back and some of the reviews and a common complaint was people not liking the characters. You want to know why? 3 reasons: 1) They're amoral or outright immoral, as in, they don't know or don't care about the difference between right and wrong, which is usually a trait common with villains, not with girls the MC is supposed to want to get with; 2) They're terribly inconsistent. Say one thing now; say the exact opposite 5 minutes later; 3) They're mere vessels for what the writer thinks is coolest. Which in the case of this game is the bait and switch.
And if only it were just the bait and switch. But it's not. It's also JuJu Abrams' patented Mystery Box (tm) AKA confuse the viewer with a multitude of unrelated plot points most of which are never going to be resolved in any way approaching reasonable, if they're not outright forgotten about.
"But hey, it's just a porno. Most of the ones on this site are kinda incompetently written, is this one REALLY that bad?"
Well, most of them are also earnest and aren't presuming to give you something they're incapable of delivering. Not this one. Think of every plotline that's deliberately been left hanging (as teases) and try to figure out how many justifications that are reasonable within the context and world of the story do you have to properly resolve them. You'll quickly find out that few of them can be justified and most can barely be excused. Some can't, even. Not without yet more idiotic bait and switches. And this is because this writer clearly knows a few narrative tricks, just not the basics. And they're just the absolute fucking worst tricks he could've picked, in my personal opinion. So when you combine the bait and switch AND the mystery box, you get the narrative equivalent of someone pissing on your head and telling you it's raining. And when you tell them this isn't rain they keep piddling and telling you "no, wait I got more". Now I'm wet and smelly and in dire need of a shower.
Apologies if certain sensibilities were harmed. I needed the rant.
