Guess who finally had a chance to go play through Neofeud :) I messed up a fair few times along the way, but completed some sections of it pretty smoothly. I'd guess it took me about 5 hours?
It's got a really good plot, and I definitely got very sucked into the world/storyline, good job! :)
The ending was interesting (spoilering for any reader who hasn't got there yet):
I felt like there was some interesting and complex stuff there that I couldn't quite work out how I felt about it; there's a sort of air of tension about the changes (I guess inevitable for there to be Neofeud II), but moreover it's really interesting what has & has not changed. Despite the quips Sybil makes about violent revolution, class-wise the reforming society seems to be going for progressive wealth redistribution; it's also definitely showcased as there being a reliance on terrifying levels of autocratic power on Sybil's part to maintain these social reforms. I guess I felt like the characters were getting decent personal payoff, but that the ideological payoff was a lot more mixed. I guess maybe I partly feel that because the political world/culture I come from has "end autocracy" as pretty much its founding tenet? I dunno. I'll be interested to see if any of this works out or is revisited in Neofeud II!
Oh, and the one plot point I never worked out:
Whose blood is it on the wall, who the scientist's phone is set to accept? Is it from the beast-artist-thing?
And yes, definitely looking forward to part II. Also, if you want an extra character voice and can put up with a British accent, give me a shout; I'd love to voice someone! I do spoken-word storytelling so I'm fairly used to performing a bit vocally, but I've not gotten my voice in a computer game yet. :)
A couple of things about Norton:
Norton just kind of vanishes - I kind of presumed they dropped him off somewhere safe, but I realised afterwards that actually I have almost no idea.
Also, the one line of dialogue that sat really badly with me in the game as a whole is Norton's line about his son coming out as transpecies and transgender. I guess personally speaking,
I've got a lot of friends who're trans activists, and the "people will say they're trans-species next" thing is often pulled out as a way to elbow-jab and undermine their identity, since it implies that gender can be simply and genetically determined in the way that species can. Of course Neof is sci-fi and having a trans-species movement in future is within the realms of speculation, but having (so far as I remember) the game's only reference to trans folk being accompanied by something that I've usually seen used as a trope to kick trans folk didn't feel ideal.
And a terminological-mixed-with-worldbuilding question: there are a lot of references to "liberals" through the game, which is a term I have a lot of interest in. I got the vague sense that in Neofeud, "liberals" is primarily code for "middle class or fairly wealthy, essentially status-quo/centre on the fundamentals of the system, but with philanthropic tendencies and opposed to direct violence against the poor", rather than the definition of "someone on the centre or left with a strong democratising and anti-statist streak" definition which is more how I'd think of liberalism (as someone from the UK). Would that be accurate?