This story touched me emotionally, oh my god i teared up during the story and cried at the endings too. It's well written and told in a compelling way and i appreciate that the story wraps up really well too. The art and music also adds a lot to the narrative and it really helped to make you feel what the characters are feeling during emotional scenes.
If you're interested in a good story for a few hours I'd definitely recommend this!
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The story is so tragic I cried.
The flashbacks help to distance the sterile hospital from the happy memories of Caleb and Aran together in the house, making the present day feel really desolate. "At the very least they're both alive and they can be happy again" was a really prominent thought in my head until the one tenous thread to those happy days is severed permanently with the reveal that the original Aran is already dead, and those good memories are in the past forever.
It really helps you to empathize with the loss that Caleb feels as you realize Aran didn't make it that far into their "10 year relationship" and is just left behind in the past forever with the rest of their "relationship" being Caleb torturing himself and others in his grief. I genuinely cannot replay the happy memories again without tearing up knowing that Aran dies so early and the scene where Caleb uses a sledgehammer on Aran's corpse and turns all their love and hope and happiness into raw meat and a long-dead brain in a jar actually fucked me up. I genuinely felt grief for Aran and every time I see art of him smiling or being happy in the past that actually hits me.
To top it all off, the endings for Aran being "resurrected" are also really quite tragic. Forgive me if I misunderstood but the resurrection is basically just cloning and the real original person is still dead right? I feel like Caleb would know this as the person who made it happen, and the endings have an empty feeling in them to reflect that, like Caleb is just plastering over his pain by pretending that HIS Aran is back and never took his own life while some poor test subject has basically been killed and a new Aran is just confused and lost.
The ending where he takes his own life next to 7 and wakes up with Ro and Aran back in the house and the first thing he does is hug Aran and cry hit me so hard. I really am so impressed with how this game made me feel because I usually find it hard to be moved by fiction but this story really did affect me.
I had to take a break after that but I went back in and did the 07 endings where he bcomes his own person and im so glad I did that because it gave me some hope. The good ending where Caleb doesn't forget his grief but "moves on" and 7 doesn't forget his trauma but becomes his own person with Caleb really feels like closure. Like they're finally free from the events that happened so long ago and they can move on and stop torturing themselves, its really quite hopeful while still being somber which I adored. In a way, it kinda gave me back the "At the very least they're both alive and they can be happy again" hope I had at the start, just in a different way.
Also the music box at the end is so not fair for my heart.
This game is amazing, that is all.