This game isn't about exploring an alien planet, or an intriguing sci-fi mystery. It's not even really about grief or loss, not directly. To its credit, the twist is unforeseeable, but only because it isn't properly foreshadowed. Hints that things aren't right point in wholly wrong directions, making you think the issue is some corporate sabotage or alien phenomena. Anything else that might be foreshadowing is honestly indistinguishable from things I expect to find in sci-fi written by non-scientists (eg. fantasy metals that aren't real or medicinal formula that don't make sense). The final revelations are almost spiteful in how they treat both the player and the point-of-view character; she's not a real 'explorer' just an author, her efforts at creation matter less than her familial duty, she an inadequate mother because she spends a lot of time working etc. As you slog through the last parts of the game, the writers make you claw your way through the molasses of doing penance for a characters wrongdoings which, until a few scenes ago, where wholly unknown to you because you thought this was an entirely different story. Characters you thought you understood, or had a handle on turn out to be - quite literally - figments of the imagination. In the end, though, the story commits the worst possible crime; I just stopped caring. I stopped caring about Tessa, Melissa and whoever else, because they weren't the people I thought they were and the world wasn't the world I thought it was. Could the story work? Sure, if it didn't value the twist over good writing. Case in point; the Title? the Monolith in the story is meaningless. it has no impact on the plot, has no symbolical value and does nothing. A much more sensible title would be 'The Crash' as it is the only thematically mirrored event between start and end. Do not buy.
