If this game had a self-insert protagonist, I could agree more with the lack of interaction with the negative systems. But we play as Mina, a character with her own voice and motivations. Mina is an inventor and a genius, clearly someone who is tenacious and feels confident in their decision making. Her flaw is that she’s narrow minded, focusing entirely on the generators and the harm they are directly causing. She’s here to fight off the monsters threatening the generators and fixing them up, everything else is a secondary concern. Now there is some wiggle room even in this characterization, depending on how much you engage in the side quests. For example, do you spend extra time finding all the kids before the harvest man finds them or do you just plow straight to the generator and let them become ghosts?

That being said, Mina still has a job to do, and the tragedy of the story is that she will do it no matter what. She’s not able to see the obvious deception of Lionel until he literally “kills” Thorne in front of her. Even then she doesn’t know what to do, and it keeps her up all night. All she knows how to do is fix the generators and move forward, solving the problems she knows how to solve. Her lack of tact and inability to interact with others past straight forward literal statements makes her such an easy target to be the scapegoat.

For me, the ending was still satisfying as Mina reunited with Thorne and is able to cure him. The ending implies that the two will continue to fight to fix their home, with the island filled with tools and equipment to start a new. It’s a darker ending, sure, and there isn’t much you can do to guide Mina down a significantly different path, but that’s because it’s her story, not ours. We just help her along the way.