your character wakes up, coming off a bender of epic proportions, and fully amnesiac. it turns out you're in revachol, a slowly decaying remnant of revolution and war, and you're a cop, and you're here to investigate a murder of somebody whose dead body is still hanged in the backyard… you are a mess - bloated, pathetic, with a host of warring impulses and demands fighting for space in your head - but thankfully there's a pillar of stability waiting downstairs: kim katsuragi, your assigned partner, a man with godlike sense of dignity and endless patience for your bullshit. together you can investigate a crime, stop a small civil war, and maybe, if you play your cards just right, dance a truly epic dance together in a shot-up church. there are also cryptids, karaoke, board games, mystery of a crashed police car, discovering your own feelings about the homo-sexual underground, and many other things. the thing is, it's the kind of a game where you perform field autopsy on an old corpse while preteen kids are watching avidly and offering their color commentary. a lot of bad things happen - to you, to the people around you, to the town around you, to the world around you. the weight of the history is heavy, and you're small. you can't solve decades of war and trauma and poverty with the power of your save-scumming and pithy one-liners, alas; but you can solve a murder. you can help a sweet and worried old woman. you can put your cheek to a kid's fuzzy plush toy, when offered. you can tell a person, that their loved one is dead, and lie about how drunk they were when they died. you can sit on the swing with your partner, waiting for the tide, and whistle together - two birds on the wire… it's the gentlest, kindest, sweetest, most hopeful game i've seen in the last decade. it's a manifesto to human spirit, and to how only love and hope holds the world, always falling apart, together. everybody is human; everybody is awful; everybody is holy, even you.
