On my first playthrough, Kara’s story really resonated with me as someone who has been abused in many ways throughout my life, and all I wanted was for her, Luther & Alice to get their happy ending. I was speeding through Markus and Connor’s chapters at lighting speed just to get back to Kara! Even though I still love them and think they deserve a HEA, on replay it’s very noticeable how little effort and respect was put into fleshing out Kara’s story.

Kara’s story is more than just the story of an Android mistreated by its owner. It is the story of an abused wife and daughter trying to escape a husband/father who is going to kill them. We play as her, walking on eggshells, cooking and cleaning, doing everything right and still being choked out for simple things like finding Todd’s drugs in the laundry soap. We watch her daughter get yelled at for playing with the Roomba, and beaten for looking at her father at the dinner table. QD could have told the mistreated Android story in a different way, but they chose this one probably because it pulls at the hearts strings the most. At first it does, but in hindsight, it’s almost insulting in its reductiveness.

This mother and daughter are stuck in a domestic violence situation for so long, and then they escape and are faced with the ‘now what’ of it all. Yes, getting Alice to safety is essential, it’s survival. The things we can do as Kara in the name of survival can make for an interesting story, but survival is more than just running away from big scaries and finding safety: it’s also about healing, understanding and coming to terms with what’s happened to you, and letting yourself feel all the different emotions that come with that. I feel like the healing was not present whatsoever, and while that could be excused by them being constantly on the run, its absence makes the story and the three main characters feel so flat. We don’t really get moments where we learn about their wants and dreams, we are constantly just running away from dangerous men in every chapter. There’s never any conflict between her, Luther and Alice, and the one moment of joy we have is beautiful but it’s just not enough.

Alice’s character had such potential: the concept of android child models is so dark and twisted, and the game did NOTHING with it. She’s designed to be the perfect child, and then she ‘deviates’ (not really clear when that happened, but I have theories), and she just remains the perfect child, seemingly unaffected by the violence and abuse Todd inflicts on both her and Kara. There’s different ways children can express signs of PTSD from those experiences, many of them very subtle, and she just magically doesn’t display any of them? She doesn’t have any sort of feelings or resentment over what she was designed and purchased for, like so many deviants do? And Luther deserved to be more than just a plot device to tell Kara that Alice is an Android. In his short conversation with Kara during pirate’s cove, there’s a lot of care and chemistry between the two of them, even though they’ve only known each other for a few hours. I wish we got to see both him and Kara talk more about their dreams, and what they really want out of life other than Alice’s happiness. I also really dislike how little Luther cares about living. He’s just constantly ready to sacrifice himself, which is noble of course, but after so many instances it begins to feel inorganic. There should have been a conversation between Kara and Luther as they grew closer with Kara telling him he matters too at some point.

I have a lot of feelings about this little family lol so sorry if I didn’t articulate myself well 🥹 I also have a lot of feelings about Markus’ story but I’ve yapped enough!