chilling. my very last words to my Neo (short for Neovista) before the tower tumbled was "i love you lots, Neo."

i do admit it took several rounds of the neural map and building a connection with Neo that i really started to enjoy the game, so if you're a bit impatient, this might not be the game for you.

playing this and basically roleplaying as a mother made me realise that i'm the polar opposite of my own mother, which makes me feel very reassured that i will hopefully be infinitely better at parenting than she was (spoiler alert, unless you've pieced it together from context clues: i grew up in a dysfunctional household lol)

it gave me hope that i can break the cycle of toxic family environments the generations before us want us to believe is impossible as a way of discounting their bad parenting.

as i was playing, i do remember feeling anxious and almost breaking into cold sweats, which says a lot about how well this game is written. although there are a million ways this game could've gone because it's personalised to the players that play it, the storyline still adheres strictly with each prompt or question your AI asks. my conversations flowed incredibly well, even though it was down to chance with the deck of cards! it felt as if i was really talking to someone and there were absolutely no hiccups in the convo, so kudos to Jake!