I keep thinking about the way Cadgan's tail moves now. Nine years ago it was this frantic thing, always wagging, always knocking something over. Now it just... hangs there. Still. Like the rest of him. And honestly that one detail did more to sell me on the whole "cold mountain of a man" thing than any of the actual dialogue. The badger healer comes back to Rannai and the wolves who used to run wild through the misty forest are all correct now, proper, obedient. The new duke's influence, I guess. Something's rotting under the surface. The roots literally stir when Hector walks, some kind of seed-planting fantasy metaphor that I thought would be more explicit than it is but instead it just keeps almost-happening and then pulling back.

The groping tag is doing a lot of work here. There's this one scene early on where Hector's healing Cadgan's shoulder, just this completely mundane medical thing, but his paws keep wandering and Cadgan's breathing changes and the game just lets it sit there for what feels like forever. No resolution. Just tension. Fur textures on the big ass models are surprisingly... present? For something that looks like it was drawn in a sketchbook and then scanned in a hurry. But when the teasing clicks, it really clicks. I spent way too long on a flashback sequence where teenage Cadgan steals Hector's medicine bag and the chase through the forest is both genuinely playful and also. Well.

The voyeurism angle is weirdly subtle. You catch glimpses of things happening between other townsfolk, shadows behind curtains, sounds from the inn next door. It's never the focus. Sometimes I wanted it to be the focus and other times I was glad it wasn't because the restraint makes the eventual payoff with Cadgan feel earned. Or it would if the game ever actually paid it off in the build I played. The adventure part is mostly walking through the eastern forest and finding memory fragments, which is fine except the roots mechanic never fully explains itself. You step near a tree and something pulses and then nothing. Is it a corruption thing? A slow burn transformation? The game won't say. Like Cadgan himself, it just stares at you with those distant eyes and offers nothing.