"Either this needs to stop being so relatable, or I need therapy." -My GF playing through this with me

I wanna make it clear for anyone reading this that while I helped with Chapters 1 and 2 of this game, the Intermission had no input from me, and I'm no longer part of the studio that made it. This Intermission was probably the best use of RPG Maker to tell a story I've ever seen. All the little touches in animation, music, and scripting, add up to make an affecting little experience.

Like the way you have to play through Coda's excruciating work life yourself, while the good-seeming bits when the cafe opens up are a near-wordless cutscene, as if Coda is spacing out through them. Or the subtle way the dialogue makes deadnaming feel like garbage, even if the character doesn't realize that deadnaming is what's happening there! Or the way just about everything is interactable in Coda's house, in a way that fleshes out the character and gives a sense of their life story in a way I feel only a game can. A lot of this game's storytelling feels like the kind of beautiful techniques that could only come out of experienced RPG Maker developers, although I might be a tad biased for some of that.

For a while now, I've been pondering about the urge in trans gamedevs to tell stories about our trauma. To be clear, the intermission is a story about an abusive boss on top of the nonbinary feels, and while I don't think content warnings tend to be very effective at deterring people from consuming triggering content, this is the kind of thing that hits someone differently if they have experienced workplace abuse.

But a thing I appreciate is that the themes aren't so singular here, Coda's issues are multilayered, and the Intermission manages to explore all of them in a fair amount of depth despite its relative shortness. The way it uses UI to explore Coda's neurodivergence, an ambiguous amalgam of autism, ADHD, and a traumatic response I don't know how to describe, makes this character feel fleshed out in a way we don't often see in games. I think generally A Snowball's Chance does an excellent job using mechanics to flesh out characters, and I'm confident that will persist well into the game's development.

That all said, this Intermission is definitely a departure from the rest of the game, in terms of being more linear and story-driven than any chapter before it. It could honestly have been its own release separate from the main game and not much would be lost, but I'm glad it's all in one package like this. According to the end screen, the next chapter is coming soon, and let's hope it can follow up on fixing the issues people had with the first two. I look forward to seeing how it goes.