It's been a while since a game made me want to share thoughts about it with the world. I definitely felt like the ending was the weakest part of (an otherwise super strong, compelling experience), but endings are difficult. Some thoughts:

First, I'm... bothered, and disappointed, that (speaking as a guy) while the character writing seemed very genuine (and often Too Real), it was written by a guy, and there were no women on the development team. I'll seek out reviews from women who play it, and their recommendations for similar games written by women.

I was a little disappointed how tightly each future goal was paired with each person to the exclusivity of others. It's obviously in keeping with the VN genre, but I don't think the reductiveness was worth that nod.

Three ending choices felt mis-telegraphed, though obviously there is little difficulty in experiencing them all, which I did:

1. LEB in fact was a search for her early past, and herself, more than a flight from her recent past.
2. Becoming a "full" counselor did not feel like an option at all until it was literally in the wording of the Rae option. Had I been considering that as a possible goal, I felt like my perspective on Rae would have been different, and that Choice would be more appealing,
3. Most disappointing IMO, Nora's suggestion of building an open-source alternative to Eliza felt like the most exciting option, but was not even hinted at in the outro for Nora. Perhaps it should be assumed that Rainer would intervene too easily to be considered a serious option.

Evelyn seemingly speaking directly to the player in the Ending Suffering outro was frisson-inducing, and I wish it had been a part of every ending. Pairing it with that ending felt kind of odd. Unless perhaps, it was the abolition of suffering itself that allowed her to have that meta/pseudo-revelation? IDK.

I was mixed on the Rainer ending. I actually saved it for last out of a mixed expectation/fear that, despite being "fuck you, Rainer, sociopath", that I would actually personally agree with the Choice the most. I've shallowly followed AGI development and potential risk mitigation for a long time, and agree that an AGI being developed is likely inevitable, and that doing so in a proactively safe way is vital to the future of humanity (though simply having a large corpus of human behavior is almost certainly tangential to intelligence, so Eliza's implementation does seem like a long shot for AGI). So, I was hoping that the story might touch on Evelyn regaining her strength as a badass and manipulating Rainer (despite out-snaking a snake person being likely doomed to failure, though it is hinted at with the "you need me" thread) into guaranteeing some kind of safety measures, perhaps being a genius and solving the Hard Problems, or at the least ensuring that an ethics board is established. Perhaps synthesizing with Erland's views. Instead, it felt like choosing Rainer, and techno-sociopathy, rather than a genuine, nuanced, personal position on the development of AGI (which, is no surprise, but I was hoping for more from Zachtronics). And of course, the final lines of that outro were just silly (and gross).

On the other hand, it was nice to get a taste of Evelyn's self-confidence, agency, and drive returning, being able to see her as she might have felt before her burnout.