Played the first one a couple years ago and loved. Just picked this up in the Games for Gaza bundle, and it's the first I played, It's a fantastic stand-alone or sequel game with so many beautiful, flawed, lovable characters, fun dialogue, and an exciting mystery at the heart. I also wanted to point out a couple things I haven't heard praised yet.
- The character creator. I hear what everybody's saying about the color and design being flatter than the NPCs, and that being distracting. Also though: not only do you have the ability to select from a wide variety of pronouns, you can also choose body types that I have literally never seen before in a game. I literally felt better about my own fat, trans body by the end of this game. Not only was I playing in a similar body, I interacted with cool characters that I genuinely liked, and *they* admired and respected me (Zapper called me hot). Unique in my gaming exp.
- The consent model. The player has an opportunity to skip the minigames, and several opportunities to skip any romance. At the end of every single chapter, you get to edit your character (thankfully for me, because I chose a dumb last name not expecting to hear it again). And there's a dedicated CW page with several options of varied spoiling. In a tech landscape of "update now" or "remind me later", I love the option to just say no.
- Character convos. Oftentimes there are multiple good choices; but sometimes there are options that just aren't appropriate. I appreciated being called out by both Domino and Jynx; I did and said unhelpful, and occasionally harmful things, and they were honest with me. It gave me a chance to reflect on how I would handle these (realistic) conversations in real life.
tl;dr: all the other complements are well deserved. Other reasons to play are an actually inclusive character creator, choices in how you play the game, and realistic conversations that could actually make you kinder to yourself and others.