I love this game a lot, played it twice now and this dev made my entire childhood and even earlier adulthood with their games. But I have to say, without spoiling, after playing New Game+ for the first time the ending is rather disappointing. More in depth spoilers below:
None of the mystery gets addressed at all. I feel like unfortunately I wasted my time and money. Rather than feel mysterious and open ended, it felt almost lazy like it wasn't cared enough about to be finished. A lot of your games are open ended but eventually it would be nice if stories are just resolved someway. Seems like lazy writing to not create a conclusion for your characters. That's a huge reason humans engage with stories is some sort of payoff. Nothing paid off here. This game asks a bunch of questions and refuses to provide answers, so you have to wonder what's the point? It's the journey not destination? Well the journey is not complete without the destination in this game, because the focus was so heavily on the destination - which is them escaping. It was the main allure to the plot, everything else pales in comparison (including romance and pacing).
Saddest of this all, after playing through new game plus, seeing the quote at the beginning of the game, and reading what happens if you choose to leave Bataille, it kind of seems like this game is just one big allegory for polyamory. If you leave, the MC dies. The beginning quote is anti-monogamy. The game showed a lot of dualities and dichotomies. The minute I connected the dots is the minute dread set in. This would be rather disappointing a thing if that's the message here. I hope to be wrong. I have no problem with polyamory but I'm beyond disappointed if I sat here hours playing just for that sort of theme/message of the alternate realities representing loving a bunch of people. I work 40-60 hours a week so it's a slap in the face to my time and energy.
Again I truly love the unique work of this dev, but there needs to be a more satisfactory end and more narrative payoff. And it needs to be more than just the theme being someone's personal poly fetish. The story deserves more than that. I hope that I'm wrong and there's more content coming to explain this.