You know, it occurs to me that this is exactly the sort of exchange that seems like an innocent joke about incest games now, but would take on a whole new meaning if it turns out Bella had a miscarriage. Just saying.
I got to be honest, I never actually thought about that, but would be the kind of thing that in hindsight will make you taste foot.
Acting Lessons. Sigh.
Okay, here's the thing. AL is a very well-crafted game with excellent character work and a lot of good bits. But it's also a fucking bait and switch. The game is not what it presents itself as for the first 6 chapters. The end of the game not only takes a famously dark turn, but that turn doesn't flow out of the events leading up to it. It just pops up out of nowhere and completely changes the tone of the game, practically wallowing in misery by the final episode. The endings can have some nice, bittersweet moments depending on how you play, but the emphasis is mostly on the bitter half.
As long as you know that going in, I think you'll be fine if you want to try it (assuming you can handle dark stories, obviously).
Now I don't know if you played it live and if you were misled about tags, or the dev's posts AND since by the time I played it I was spoiled about any possible twists in the story I can't make the claim that I'm 100% sure,
but I'd like to think I would not have been blindsided about the big event. Predicting the exact thing that would happen and the culprit absolutely not, but growing up in post communist eastern Europe, I would have 1000% expected something extremely bad to happen(Sexual assault, shooting, knife, drug gangs) from dealing with people like Rena's bf and Peter. I don't want to offend anyone, since its just my supposition, I might talk out of my ass, but this seems to be the kind of thing sheltered first-world people from western countries, that live in a world where
words are violence and don't know how bad, 'bad' actually is would get blindsided by.
Again, if the tags/devs promised comedy and then come later seasons he pulled a Ryan Johnson, then fair enough, but from what I've seen and I've read every post in the AL thread from start-to-date when I went and played it, it seems to me people were just shocked a dev in this genre of games actually went there, or upset he fucked with their waifus, or my favorite bulshit reasoning 'I don't play games to get sad'... I don't have an opinion from a storytelling perspective, but from a gameplay one, yeah, he probably should have made this avoidable, or affectable by player choices. The only thing I take issue with is the 'getting blindsided' aspect of it.
Fun fact, only 2 people in the entire thread predicted the exact guilty person and ending and most aspects of their theory crafting were just hunches. I don't know what that says about DPC's writing, was he too good, or complete shit at setting things up? You make your own conclusion, I just found it interesting.