That was a very powerful game! I enjoyed the presentation a lot (and as someone who's just started using Decker, that was interesting to see what one can do with it!!), and the story was the kind to twist guts.
What I appreciated, to be honest, is how I could somehow understand all characters' perspectives, even when I disagreed with their words, actions or ideas. Aria is a very flawed protagonist, and yet, she managed to move me. The end of the game, of course, was certainly a big moment. The kind that sticks with you, because it did NOT shy away from showing broken characters navigating complicated situations with complicated feelings.
SPOILERS BELOW
Something that particularly made me think is Ariel's date with Violet. Obviously, Violet is sincerely a "bitch", as Ariel puts it, but the question of betraying the trans community by passing more and more, by turning into a "cis" woman (with quotation marks) is one I didn't see being tackled all that much? I just remember the video of a trans man, explaining he was worried, as he was passing more and more, to lose the solidarity he experienced in feminine communities when he presented himself as a woman. So I think the question of where one belongs, as a trans person who has a passing, was interesting and tackled here in a gut-wrenching way.
The last scene was also interesting, especially considering how twisted it was?? Like, Ariel is obviously a mirror of Aria, and it was somehow confusing (in a good way) to see Aria experience pleasure during her own rape by being filled with a phallus — the same one she got rid of. There are certainly several ways to read this scene, but I understood it as her internalising the violence she was put through during the whole game, and integrating the belief that she somehow lost a part of herself, perhaps even a part of her transidentity, by getting bottom surgery. I personally think saying trans people are less trans because they got bottom surgery to be transphobic, so I think that ending helped making Aria look like the broken victim of transphobia coming from her own community. A complicated topic, for sure, but I'm glad the game handled it and did it so well.
Congrats on making this, and thank you for releasing and sharing it!!