I agree with almost everything except that I think the game’s most clever piece is that the choices don’t matter. At the time that The Line came out choices in games had taken the industry by storm, games like Heavy Rain and Mass Effect 2 were on people’s minds.

The game pretends to give you choices, but the reality is that engaging and going deeper down the path the game and story lay out for you are a recipe for evil, no matter what you think you should be able to control within the game.

The true choice is whether you play the game or not. Do you continue to go through with the whole thing, commit those crimes and destroy that world, and then blame the game for not letting you stop, when the pause menu and a quit to desktop was seconds away at all times?

It’s not a very mechanically unique game, there’s no mechanical enjoyment pretense to justify seeing it all through, you do it through your vicarious, detached interest. Essentially whether the horrible events that occur unfold or not entirely depend on whether you allow the game to fabricate the scenarios by your implicit enabling.

I think whether that was intentional or not just heightens the intrigue of the entire thing. All that being said, it’s a shit game, but its execution and moral message dovetail, intentionally or accidentally, in an extremely unique way that’ll never happen again. That fragile balance of unknown intent and message will be upset if ever they were to remaster it.