There are some other things I forgot to mention yesterday (and couldn't edit my post in time due to my computer breaking), so I thought I'd make an addendum post. I find it almost surreal how much this game lines up with my real-life experiences. If it weren't for the fact that he's divorced, John would've been a 1:1 direct parallel to my own real-life father, in ways I needn't explain. It made the scenes he forced poor Alex to talk to him and him alone (as well as his crazy obsessions with her) hit pretty close to home for me, which likely seriously heightened how much this game sucker-punched me in the feels. ^^; Even when he wasn't actually talking to her, seeing his bright red eye perpetually spying on Alex while she's having fun felt rather unnerving.
[Spoilers ahead!]
Even other situations in the game felt so trippy in how much it parallels to my situation - him forcing a blocker onto Alex's computer (mirroring my own father installing a similar blocker of his own on mine), Alex using the computer's Terminal utilizing the programming tricks Laguna taught her earlier on (mirroring my closest friend, skillful programmer that they are, helping me utilize Windows Terminal tricks to bypass my own father's blocker), and losing several friendships in one fell swoop due to poor wording choices from Alex due to the stress she had over the situation (mirroring me doing the exact same thing in 2017). Besides the aforementioned divorce thing, and how not all of Alex's friends map 1:1 to my own history, the only irony is that certain names of certain characters do not entirely match my life - were you to swap them in just the right way, I'd seriously feel like you had been spying on my life since the day I was born and decided to make a game about my life to try and reach out to me Matrix-style, or you were like my future self or some shit XD
This game will always hold a special place in my heart because of how deeply relatable it is for me. I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel my mind telling me I should ironically tell my dad to play this game simply so he could experience how it's like to be in my shoes when he yells at me, but deep inside I know that he'd either just entirely miss the point of the game or why I'd ask him to play it in first place, or just get mad at me for having played a "queer game" and quickly connect the dots as for my secretive gender identity. Sigh, ah well, sorry for rambling, I just kinda wanted to get this off of my chest ever since I finished the game. Regardless, thank you for having made this, Victoria - sincerely. I loved this game.