Towards the end I was more or less convinced that Delilah was an antagonist, but I didn't want to tip her or anyone else off to this so I avoided talking to her about it. When I was given the key to the cave and she conveniently saw someone in my tower I figured she wanted me there so I told her I would go and set off to the cave. Because the game didn't anticipate this (or maybe I just failed at spotting the entrance) this action didn't go anywhere. So I had to return to the tower and call it a night.
The next day the door to the cave was locked again and nothing was said about this. Thats when things started coming off the rails for the story. A little earlier there had been some minor dialogue issues where I tried to keep secrets from Delilah that she knew about anyway so I was certain that she was in on the plot. How else could she know these things?
As I progressed through the cave and found the body I didn't tell her, I didn't tell her I got out of the cave, I didn't tell her I found the camp area where the kid had been, yet she knew I was out of the cave and she started talking about the kid out of the blue like she was testing me... She knew I had found the campsite, but since I didn't say anything she reminded me of the kid in order to prompt me to talk about it, testing if I was trying to deceive her. This turned out to be wrong because the game had none of those intentions in mind. They weren't trying to deceive me anymore, they were just going on assuming I trusted Delilah, even though the majority of the game before that had gone out of it's way to create a distrust towards her.
The game succeeded in tricking me into the idea that Delilah was a bad guy, but it failed completely to follow up on it. When I had 0% trust in her, I was still forced into playing the game as if I trusted her.
Towards the end when the fire spread and she suggested I follow the beacon that led to the last cave I was 100% sure this was a trap designed to kill me. I had a ton of evidence towards the fact that Delilah was trying to trick me: She had information only the bad guy could have, she had set me up multiple times, the "hot mic" conversation early in the game, etc. So I tried to escape by leaving on my own, screw the beacon, but unfortunately when I got to the exit it was impossible to leave, Delilah told me "we aren't ready to leave yet" or something like that and the game forced me to backtrack to find the beacon to progress.
At that point the game should have let me end it, accuse Delilah with all my damning evidence. In my game Delilah was the bad guy. That was the only plausible explanation until I was force to find the cave with all the evidence that contradicted all the stuff that came before it.
Due to this the narrative of the game failed completely. I loved the setting, the characters, voice acting and everything else in the game. But the story failed. The mechanics that was supposed to lead me towards the conclusion of the game misled me and in doing so it all contradicted itself.
Perhaps my way of playing the game was a rare outlier, but I didn't do anything the game didn't allow me to and it failed to keep up to its own narration.
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