After mopping up all the miscellaneous trophies I could (I think I'm sitting at 79% completion, lawd), I decided to, you know, actually get on with the story from Meridian onwards. Consider me thoroughly, thoroughly intrigued, and Ashly Burch keeps outdoing herself. I have so many questions, and theories that are probably entirely wrong! I love how much intriguing non-essential world building the game offers. (I also stumbled on some data points that brought up terms I hadn't gotten up to in the main quest line at the time.) The voice work and timing in the audio logs/holo vids is much better than the cutscenes in the game itself, and they tend to have a better naturalistic dialogue flow.
The data logs are so goddamn good, too, and I again love the world building so much. The style of the data logs/points/whatever remind me tonally of Black Mirror quite a bit at times, which is incredibly refreshing for world building and exposition dumps in video games. There is a refreshing casual tone to the data logs, whether it be a news excerpt, a letter, an advertisement, etc. It was a clever choice. I love that they cover all elements of society - politics, relationships, body image, entertainment, health, etc. They're all a bit nihilistic, whilst also being unnerving, funny (sometimes full on black comedy), and in some cases, disturbingly quite probable in general. The human/machine/employment conflict is particularly relevant. I'm annoyed I'll never be able to find them all, as they don't show up on the map.
I was also pretty blargh on the thought of the collectibles at first, but alongside some clever enemy placement/combination and some fun platforming, the text that goes along with them has actually made them quite worth it for me. The story told via the Vantage points, holy fuck. It was genuinely engaging and nuanced. I had no idea there was text to be read at first, and was a bit confused by the out of context audio. I'm really glad I did read them.
