Brilliant. The surreal visuals, excellent soundtrack, and brilliant writing sell it all. It's very impactful, it left me reeling after I was done. It's not something I'll ever forget, even in this limited demo. It's incredibly affecting as someone who heavily relates with many of the scenarios discussed on an eerily close level. I haven't even replayed and seen if any actions I take might affect it (I didn't do anything but sit and watch for the first playthrough).
However, I think the game's pacing, in this demo at least, is incredibly abrasive and difficult to accept, so to speak. The game is aggressively fast and does not stick on a thread for very long at all and the sudden shift in tone and in topic is such a whirlwind it makes the game hard to keep track of and hard to keep invested. It's unclear if this is a 'vertical slice' of the game, or if the final game is really going to have pacing like this, and if it does, I think that would be to its detriment. The gamut of topics hit, the ways they are written, and the lightning speed at which they are portrayed left me exhausted, and also confused the tone. This was a game where I wasn't sure if at times I should laugh at what I thought MIGHT be a joke, and at every point, it felt incredibly rude TO laugh at what might NOT be a joke and be a very, very real representation of something very, very real that you went through.
Put simply, it's too much. If this is the pacing the final game is planned to have, then it's a game that will be difficult to take seriously because it won't stay in one place for long enough. If this is just the first fifteen minutes of the game, then that's probably fine, but if this is the level the game will beat from beginning to end you'll exhaust your audience by saying too much too quickly and not giving them any time to absorb or think about it.
This is a brilliant work in its current form. It's challenging in a way I've never had a game be, and not in the "this is what games can do" way, but in the way no game has challenged me with its words before. It just needs time to breathe. It needs time to let players sit with what they have heard and process it. At this point, the content beyond the blunt messaging is almost incomprehensible. It's a game I cannot recommend in its current state because of that, and I want it to be a game I recommend to everyone.