First off, this is not a game. It's an interactive novel. There is no skill, or luck, or strategy. There's certainly no goals to achieve — which is very much the point. This is a story about people whose lives have been deprived of purpose by the corporate takeover and deindustrialization of the rural American south. It's a southern Gothic magic realist ghost story in which the characters do find a semblance of meaning and community in their broken lives, but not in the ways they expect. I think the experience is enhanced if you go in knowing that Conway will never make that delivery which is the game's inciting incident, that none of the characters will find what they are nominally looking for, and that relationships and authenticity matter far, far more than extrinsic goals. Video games are often fantasies of control but this is very much a story about finding meaning in a world that we cannot control, a world that has left us behind. It didn't totally work for me; I found it a bit too surreal and elliptical to be really emotionally resonant. The sudden shifts of setting and the introductions of whole new casts of characters from one chapter to the next threw me off. But the world that it conjures still lingers in my memory three years later and I might even replay it one day.
