Flac posted:

the gameplay is so great at getting you to catch details about people and i really admire that part of this game. thomas's guilt over the deaths of his fellow midshipmen, the chinese intrepreters' (probably speaking cantonese) barely translating the formosans that have their own dialect, that characters like lewis walker can be identified as topmen early just from noticing how climby they are... the ways relationships between individuals, as well as their roles and circumstances within the world they inhabit, are intuited by the player with hardly any neon signposting is such great storytelling to me. wish there was more mechanics based on abstract thought like this in games, though i get how difficult to do it is.

feel like the bargain reveal is a real waste of potential though, esp with henry evans's character because its just never expounded upon how he knows about the watch, or his plan with the book? going back and looking at memories, i noticed he was like, really COMICALLY bad about preventing death as the loving doctor--the indians with the tuberculosis were one thing, but leaving john naples's leg where it was and him dying immediately after he's like "oh you're good lol", and then being all "i got you" while trying to help the butcher when hes got 3 spikes in him. i'm starting to think he was intentionally helping certain people die, possibly to leave a trail for the book? his attitude towards death has me thinking this way, but its frustrating because there's nothing else to go on. i'm less mad that the watch is unexplained and more that his motivations are not clear.

also i don't how to feel about george shirley not being a disappearance when his body cannot be found? the rule has been that bodies being found for the watch to pick up get a page in the book, and i don't see why he should be an exception.