Okay, something has to be said for the actual power of this story and gameplay combination. Yeah, tech-wise, it's a brass-tacks tactical shooter, but I've played this game twice now IN A ROW, and never felt like any one section dragged on too heavily. Nonetheless, it managed to engage by providing a substantial enough challenge that felt just a bit artful in some places. You have a general selection of weapons, and there's no super gimmicky mechanics to twist the formula in a way that's too jarring to adapt to. So when you actually progress between checkpoints, it still feels like you've used your skills, whether from this game or any other cover based shooter, and done something worth accomplishing.

Which it is.

The story in this game is the shining gem in SO: The Line and it's definitely not one you would want to experience secondhand. You want that gun to be controlled by YOUR mouse when it comes to what dehumanizing choice you'll be dragged into making. While it does railroad you into many decisions, and the results of some of those decisions can be nihilistically inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, your intial run in this game will weigh heavily on you when you're later informed that there were more choices available than you thought possible, especially if you THOUGHT you only had one or two options. With no binary 'right or wrong' morality, you're pushed into making decisions that are too grey to decipher.

So many people have talked about this game, and so few can do so without hard spoiling memes, but even being set up to know a lot about how the game would proceed before I even played, never would I have thought it could still get to me by telling me the mere idea that there was always options, oftentimes several, and one that was always present was the idea that everything I was going through wouldn't have come to pass if I had just stopped playing. And that's true. It sounds like a cop out when you first hear it, but nothing stood between me and just shutting the game down, loading up Youtube and just watching someone else make those decisions for me. The game never takes too much control out of your hands when it comes to the important parts, even when it feels like there's only one way forward. If I wanted to stop feeling responsible for committing digital atrocities, I could have just relegated that task to a random Let's Player and hid from myself.

But I think it's important to press on. Even knowing that you're not going to come out of the experience with warm fuzzy feelings, it's important to challenge yourself, whether it's your skills as a gamer, or just self-examination, so you know where you stand and see if you can make the choice to change that or the industry and genre that this game heavily criticizes. With that, you can use the thoughts that this game may provoke in you to a good purpose knowing that:

What happens in this game is all your fault, but even after you're long done with it, you're still a good person.