Chimeriquement returns with another stunning Racine fangame mythology and theater-inspired game!
The art is gorgeously rendered - the sunset hues of the background give a beautiful but foreboding tone, as day shifts into night. Andromache herself (apart from being STUNNING, my wife) is dyed with blues/violets, as if she has already fallen into night. I also love the attention to detail as the color of the text changes depending on the theming of the rest of the visuals.
The writing is poetic, filled with regality and theatrical drama. The VA did an absolutely FANTASTIC job, smoothly able to portray both Andromache's dignified grief and tumult and her son's manipulations. The classical BGM does a very good job of setting the tone of the game, and I really liked the inventive use of color matrices to create different variations of the sprite (in particular, the one where Andromache is cloaked in shadow against a red background as ash falls in the back is very impressive).
===SPOILERS===
The myth that this game is based on is a compelling one. Andromache, after the death of her husband, Hector, during the Trojan War, faces the dilemma of marrying her husband's enemy, Pyrrhus, or allowing her son to be killed. Throughout, she struggles between these two evils, wondering if she would betray her husband more by marrying his enemy or by failing to protect his bloodline.
As for the ending, I'm a bit torn. In the end, Andromache concludes that she will marry Pyrrhus - and after the safety of her son is secured, she will kill herself, so that she does not have to soil her loyalty to Hector. On the one hand, you could view it as empowering - Andromache gets everything that she wants. She protects her son while also staying loyal to her deceased husband. She decides to take her life by her own volition. In a certain light, it's the best thing that she can do in a horrible situation, where there are no right answers.
On the other hand, throughout the game Andromache is haunted by the ghosts of the people around her. She continuously wonders what Hector would want, hoping that he would give her an answer. Her son speaks to her, giving her orders in the guise of Hector's will - at the end, he tells her to protect him, speaking as "the last memory of the many ghosts of Troy" - indicating that Andromache is not burdened only by the spectre of her husband, but of all the people who died in the war. In her conclusions, Andromache states that she cannot "betray a husband living anew in me" - that her peace would be stealing away the peace of the deceased. When her son concludes, at the end, that Andromache is finally "the mistress of her own fate" - it rings hollow. Her son has been manipulating her for the entire game, casting blame on her for his possible death, rather than blaming the actual culprit - Pyrrhus. Rather than being the "mistress of her own fate," it seems like Andromache has been controlled by her grief and her sense of duty, beholden to the wishes of people who are dead and gone. As a result, in the end I couldn't help but feel that Andromache was not an empowered woman, taking control of her own destiny, but a tragic figure, suffocating under the desire to serve the people around her.
Overall, one of my favorite games from this developer, 12/10 because it stars my wife ✨