I'll copy a comment I made on Rock Paper Shotgun, from where I got recommended this game:
"Wonderful stuff, but I feel I would need much more time to sit with it. I find it astonishing sometimes how the earnestness of some of these personal visual novel stories can give seemingly entry-level philosophy a concreteness that makes you think much deeper about their concepts than something like those audio logs that you find it The Witness or The Talos Principle or something. The latter seem pretentious because their concepts are left so impersonal - "Look how I know about this deep concept!" rather than of "Look at this slice of a life and see how it relates to yours."
I know I'm staying abstract, too, and I'm just not in the headspace to engage with this stuff too deeply. But even though I really, really liked The Witness, and I also know that some of the VN earnestness often comes across as twee, I feel that we could with some more earnestness and depth in game narratives."
And, heh, only now I discover that this is the same team that made tear ripple. That definitely makes sense! I haven't played the second part of that because that's definitely another one of those games for which you need to be in a certain headspace.
Pause for (very slight) spoilers...
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One small bug: I seem to have skipped to some stories early because I thought I was supposed to root around in the web folders, heh. In any case I couldn't get the second part of Twin Story to trigger... I had to read it in the script.