Tarot lady pissed me off

This game has its strong points, and weak points. I'll mostly analyze the weak points.
Strong points: The options you get throughout the game can matter a lot when it comes to who lives and who dies. It's visually beautiful (except for water splashing effects). The horror and mystery aspects are done pretty well, and it gives you plenty of anxiety when faced with certain scenarios. There's plenty of collectibles and little easter eggs if you take the time to snoop around a lot. It's got couch co-op which is great, I'd love to see more decision based games having co-op.

However, there are weak points too, in my experience always (also spoiler warning): You get to control a lot of characters, and swap between them quite often, which some might enjoy, but I find that it makes it harder to really connect with them and develop some sort of attachment to them, which makes it a bit harder to care when some might die, or be in danger. To add to this, most of the playable characters I can think of had something that made them a little bit unlikable to me. Kaitlyn acted like a smart ass and mocked pretty much everyone, all the time, while at the same time acting like everyone else's jokes were nothing compared to her humor. She was useful in stressful situations and can use a gun, but her personality got in the way in my opinion. Emma was the classic ♥♥♥♥♥♥ bimbo who doesn't give a ♥♥♥♥ about anything except having fun and drawing attention. Nick seemed like an indifferent to "okay" guy at first, but then momentarily and inexplicably turned into another dumb teenager. Ryan was a boring sour grape throughout the entire story, took everything way too seriously and his attempts at humor were completely wasted, he just felt very soulless all throughout the game. Dylan was kinda cool, i guess, initially came off as a stereotypical douchebag but then got some kind of attraction towards Ryan shoehorned into his story, which is never really even mentioned or worked on again past a certain point. Only thing giving Dylan some points was his humor and edginess, which was sadly mostly wasted on Kaitlyn as well. He also looks really creepy while smiling in some freeze frames when he has to make a choice, i'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but it kinda made me feel like there was something darker to him when there was none, yeah it was that bad. Jacob was just doomed to be an emotionally immature manbaby simp for the aforementioned bimbo, humor similar to Dylan's but not quite as witty sometimes. I was hoping we'd be able to get him to grow the ♥♥♥♥ up a bit by the end of the game and actually turn him into a decent character, but no luck. Abi, Max and Laura are the 3 most decent characters and the ones that remain, from the playable ones that is, although the bar is still not that high. Laura felt like the one with the most development in her character and story arc, I mean she's basically the one who can put an end to the horror or go her own way, she also felt the most expressive for me as a player through the options she was given and her interactions with the Hacketts. Max was cool, you don't get to play as him a lot but he's somewhat and somehow more likable than the majority of the other characters, even if he's largely incompetent in survival situations. Abi was.. somewhat likable. Soft girl in love, sympathetic and somewhat helpful to her friends in survival situations. From what I recall she's also one of the less played characters in the game, probably not as little as Max but still. Now on to the story... So, the options you get are usually highly impactful, like I said, but their theme seems to be quite one-dimensional, or i guess two-dimensional, depends on how you see it. What i mean by that is that you're mostly just gambling on characters living.. or dying. The story and the plot itself are fixed for the majority of the characters, the only ones who have some impact on the overall plot are Laura and Ryan to a lesser extent. The rest of them are basically in the game just to survive, even if they do uncover some important story details sometimes, that's all. Now, don't get me wrong, the potential for protagonists to get killed off is very important in decision based games, but when it's all you have going for them it's really not that interesting, even less so when you have very little attachment to most of them and they're that many. There's also certain times when the game rejects logic a little too hard. For example, if Jacob chooses to snatch the rotor arm out of the truck, Kaitlyn and Dylan can go to a scrapyard to look for a replacement. They find a fully intact car there hanging by a crane, Max and Laura's car I think? They manage to lower it to the ground and after a little skirmish with *cough cough*.. local wildlife, they just decide to take off without even looking under the hood for said rotor arm, which was really weird since that piece is tiny and even after a serious crash chances are pretty good that it's still in there and intact. One last complaint I have about the story is Eliza, Silas's mother and I guess you could say the overarching antagonist? I get the impression the game is expecting you to empathize with her at some point, and I can't say I understand exactly why. I hate the Hacketts, don't get me wrong, but not for the same reason she does. I hate them because of the way they decided to handle the whole thing and put innocent people and children's lives at risk. She hates them because she thinks they just wanted to destroy her life and kill her son, which - according to the cop's side of the story at least - isn't entirely true. She had her son locked up in a cage for people's entertainment, and when she realized he broke out with the help of the Hackett kids she was furious. The only reason they're trying to kill him now is because of all the chaos he's unleashed on dozens of other people. So when I saw that the game gives you a choice between killing and not killing Silas, I was a little surprised. I mean, it's a decision based game, it makes sense that there would be an alternate ending, but the game hasn't really given any legit reason or motive for not going through with killing him, other than a creepy ghost lady who is just angry and screaming at you not to do it. If you do it then that's it, you've saved everyone, everyone who's still alive that is. Everyone can go home, no more monsters. Just a sore dead granny seething at you, and it's really so hilarious I was just "mmhmm"ing at the screen and telling her to stay mad the whole time she was threatening to haunt me.
All in all I think it's a "cool" game, a "cool" experience. Unfortunately nowhere near say.. Detroit Become Human's level of decision based games, but a cool horror game nonetheless.

The game is the Gold Standard of choice-based Storytelling games. Please make more!