The game genuinely felt gross to play, the girl comes off as a manipulative bitch as you try to go through the motions of training her, I felt like wow if she's this against so heavily against just interacting with her husband(not even being willing to just talk), they really just shouldn't be together.
Trudging on out of a sense of pity towards the protag, and genuine curiosity for how darwin's character would play out/be integrated/ explained, his presence as a ghost, or as some kind of weird cupid spirit, or something, was genuinely the only thing that was keeping me going, and the greatest betrayal of them all when it turns out he's not really darwin.
the other "twist" I fully expected from basically the start, due to it so heavily feeling like it was really just her manipulating him(only I was expecting that she actually was hypnotizing him, it's why I didn't mind his pathetic levels of servility, and her rather clear contempt for him simply trying to patch things up and start a conversation, so much... yes, the early portion where she just refused to even talk despite hypnosis(regardless of who's hypnotized) really soured my opinion on her, I thought he was under hypnosis, knowing that he was just that desperate to make her happy, really removes what sympathy I had for him, after seeing her behavior).
By the end I was truly glad to have the option to break up because it genuinely felt like I was saving a stockholm victim, even if it did show a scene saying that he regretted breaking up with his pyschological abuser, but the fact that darwin was actually just some rando, now that's what's unforgivable...
Personality wise there are three characters: The old man is basically like a really snobby girl, that's way too full of herself becoming more and more unlikable the more you interact, the player character just seemed really pathetic and forgetable to be honest, if it actually seemed like the girl was making any effort to change as well, reciprocate trying to keep their relationship afloat he might not have come off as pathetically as he does, but as it plays out, the fact that even finally breaking up upsets him just makes him too pathetic to like, and the girl the most forgettable character of all because aside from her very clearly manipulating him into changing himself to her liking we don't get to see anything else from her, it's fairly obvious that every "emotional" moment is just a load of crocodile tears with no sincerety at all, with the only showings of her real personality being at the start where's she's apparently being her normal self, and at the very end where she laughs over the fact that he'd honestly believed the nonsense enough to get conned out of money, after she got caught faking, and tries to claim that it was all just an effort to change herself in order to fix their relationship<--She NEVER makes an "earnest" effort to actually communicate, change, or do "anything" for him, beyond basic couple behavior(allowing him to talk to her, allowing him to be in her presence when watching tv, allowing him basic skinship aka: hugging, allowing him basic sexual acts groping, and if you invest a ton of time and give up any sense romance betwean allowing him to be her sexual sub that's willing to go through a bunch of hoops to please her) and it's only ever after he's gone above and beyond to earn anything that she somewhat reciprocates. (with the exception of that really creapy final devotion upgrade, and that thing really speaks far more to how creapy she is as a character than him.)
the guy would work better if paired with a girl that came off as either likable or atleast earnest like him, and the girl would work better paired with a much douchier less involved guy that better suited her peronality and methodology. The old man however is a sin, seriously, just let him be a crazy ghost playing pranks, say that she befriended him or something the fact he's just some random dude is a major let down...
Note: though clearly the darwin thing is quite upsetting to me, the low rating is not a result of that, if the darwin premise wasn't a thing and it was just some random dude, I'd have simply dropped it near the beginning and not even bothered rating it due to how bad the impression the game gives off even fairly early on is, independantly of that twist this game is still just really bad, it just happened to be the thing that motivated "me" to play.