This game is really is made for doomscrollers and tea sippers lol.
I'm not really good at reading copious amount of text in games, but this game had me hooked in reading. I liked how the game lead you through many different kinds of rabbit holes to figure out different details of each character from different angles of writing. For examples, we can start searching for someone on the web, then turns out they have a different article in a local newspaper that exposes more of their background, and another different article on a business magazine that exposes their business dealings.
The game design is quite interesting in this sense. There can be characters with no web pressence, which means that you have to search within magazines. There are also characters with literally no pressence in any media at all which requires me to intuit who they are. It's really similar to how you would solve puzzles in Obra Dinn.
Speaking of Obra Dinn, you would really tell that it's inspired by that game. It has the same "get X correct to lock in answers" mechanic that it has (and the designer did leave a tidbit article in the game to confirm this). I think it's cool that despite that similarity in the game dyanmics, both games are very different in execution; Obra Dinn has almost no text while this game has so much text.
Maybe that says something about me, haha. Maybe I'm just nosy. Or maybe I like finding things out. Maybe it further explains my love for debugging in programming? I wonder if all this is related.
Anyway, the game is really well made, and I appreciate the ridiculous amount of polish the developer did with getting artists, testers, composers to work on the game. I feel like the best part of the game is that the content given felt so real. Maybe because I have live through the era that the game takes place (late 90s).
I really feel like giving the game a 10/10, but there are still small areas which I felt can be improved. There are a small handful 'paths' in the game which...I didn't really agree with, but maybe I'm being too harsh. Then again, I am trying to be as critical as possible here so 9/10 it is!