itch.io

(have only played one route so you'll have to forgive me; the perspective of this comment is incomplete! will be sure to update when opportunity arises to discuss the other side of the coin obvs)

Overcome with jouissance to see overt propaganda for the time-honoured cause of grilling, getting hammered, and stirring shit with your mates in a park. Tears in my eyes, punching the air and whooping &c

My Switch 2 arrived today. You know this one's good because I have spent the whole evening going through this thing and then writing up my notes instead of getting it set up and ready to go and I don't really regret that at all. This isn't really the sort of story I want to try and capture in some sweeping, unifying statement, because that would be dishonest in discussing the VN in general and Cabral in particular, whose life consists of one fraying thread and loose end sloppily knotted into the next: she's Argentinian and, every working day, faces up against the sort of sneering violence inflicted by the imperial core of managers whose companies directly benefit from the theft of her country's resources and the historic crimes their governments have committed in it all for the sake of making what appears here to be some sort of thinly-described tech slop; she works remotely and lives at home, thus meaning she is forced to fraternise with an internet in many ways undoubtedly extended from the Anglosphere, some of whose inhabitants are, at best, the sort of leftists whose idea of transnational solidarity tends to eschew analysis of her specific milieu, some of whom are the sort of Westerners fling about the same tired tropes you often tend to hear from the denizens of the Wernher von Braun rocket-building coalition who tend to lack their own self-awareness; she is transfem and finds in her national heritage a sense of resolve in the face of constant crisis, even when the icons of said heritage are the locus of reactionary guff imported from the Yanks to be laundered by Milei and his goons; she's got a knack for cranking out short stories about vengeful ghosts with knives and is surrounded by Hamlet iconography (both of which I suppose are in vogue right now?), but she's so, so bad at deadlines, does not have the money to bargain for a better apartment thanks to her faceless bosses; she loves to make herself a martyr about it; in an ideal world where none of those pressures compressed her as did rocks on the back of Giles Corey, she would be playing some Half Life mod with her mates, working on her stories, and rat-arsed on fernet 24/7. 

We are limited by the premise to seeing a weekend plus change of her life, and it'd be impossible to compress all of these little details that arise into a big, universal point that encompasses the whole deal -- but the premise from which you're working is noise, which manifests in many facets: visual (shitty computer monitor which has veins and angels going on and might in its own way be girls unto itself, which Hope and Alexis may or may not know something about, Maybe There's A Whole Route I Haven't Done (Yet) Which Elaborates On That); aural (the hissing of the higher scale of guitars or subterranean synth basslines through plastic headphones our heroine purrloined from the most convenient possible source); creative (just cramming out words upon words until you can't see straight), all twisting into one straight rope in which noise becomes a foundational background pillar of one's own life. 

I made a note in my little pad during one of the first two Clippy scenes which reads "noise as product of creation unfiltered/unmodulated by "conscious" taste" which speaks not only to Cabral's drafting process, and frankly who hasn't severely burned themselves out cramming out god-knows for a writing contest under fake duress, but to the survival strategy of placing oneself at the rear of her mind to compartmentalise all of these vagaries of experience, many with pernicious thorns pricking out to wound the fingertip when touched, because otherwise, having to deal with all of that at once with no filter to gage priorities and no pressure valve would kill a person. (But it's a risky strategy, because if you ignore observable details reality too hard, you also die in your own way through losing connection with the world and yourself; some say this is sort of like remaining in the closet as trans until your mid-twenties or so, but this could apply to other things also.)

Your approach of noise as this multi-faceted, abstract entity allowed this route to pace itself out nicely: you get a fun jaunt around some corporate horror and faint magical realism followed by lengthy and direct discourses on how it is to be Xeneize and how, sometimes, you just have to get out of your own head and rustle some meat together over the sticks. 

Sol gets just enough room to breathe amidst Cabral's self-examination to stand out as her own fully-fledged person. We never see her or get much of a glimpse at her life independent of Cabral other than details of her work and family life, but without her, this whole plot would fall apart: she's a solid enough mate to give Cabral a hand or reality check when needed, and she trawls around forums (and streets) Cabral never sees for labour and leisure alike. You need to have one very close friend to whom you owe your life and whom you don't actually know that much about, beyond what she lets you see, otherwise you run the risk of being swallowed by the noise cast forth by dwelling for too long on yourself or on somebody else.