After the first version, I was hyped about the game for a while, and props for Yusuf that despite his IRL troubles, he decided to continue. But, I feel like the writing took a massive nosedive in this chapter regardless.
There's the whole Ava thing. In chapter 1, it was a getting drunk then high and then cheating situation, it was clear. In a podcast, Yusuf talked about the situation sort of being based on a personal experience, and said he wanted to explore the other side of the story. It was obviously a no go for a lot of people and they wanted nothing to with Ava who was a pivotal character in the game, but you do you. Now, the whole implied rape situation seems just to a massive cop-out as others mentioned already. It only serves to try to wash her out of the situation, so that people would still deal with her or getting sympathetic, but the problem is that it's full of plotholes. In chapter 1, which I had to replay and still present as it was, she got an unopened beer bottle, she drunk and smoked despite her bf's warning, and seemed to go on willingly. Now she gets an already opened mollied beer, then being helped up, and the Bryce wakes up being drunk high and mollied himself and starts to take off his clothes. At this point you could even debate if he managed to get it up in the first place and how the whole thing ended with both of them having no clothes on. Ava appearing in their middle school chapter also is an inconsistency, since Annie doesn't seem to recognize her at all. Maybe she forgot about her but still iffy. Either chapter 1, which was mostly an outsider pov when it came to that party should've been changed, or the original plot should've been left in, regardless of how unsympathetic Ava was in it. The only thing worse than this would be a revelation about how they actually never fucked, but the message sender took her clothes off and that she was just a victim of a sinister plot.
The rest of the storytelling so far also seems awfully reliant on plot convinient, despite it being supposedly a realistic story. Them randomly picking up Ava from all people is already that, but then the car having BOTH tires blown out right before they'd drop her off just screams asspull in order to continue the story as intended but not having a coherent idea of why Ava would stay with them for the rest of the trip. The convinient store mom (best girl so far by the way) also seems rather unecessary, since the whole plot revolves around them going to far away from where they lived, the best it would lead to is what, some camsex scenes? The lack of meaningful choices in order to push the story in a certain way are also jarring.
Despite the interesting beginning, and some of the tone that I can relate to, most of the writing when it comes to the main plot and how it's being handled is super bad.
Ps.: I hope Bryce won't conviniently also comes back making this shit into Chasing Sunsets 2.0
