"David Cage has only one tool in his storytelling arsenal and it is a giant sledgehammer with the word "MELODRAMA!" written down the side. His stories always play out like rampant human misery simulators as written by someone who's never met any human beings. Well, I suppose we know he's met [Elliot] Paige. Fucking hell, do we know that! He probably puts it on his business cards. And just because the story's "depressing" doesn't mean it's "deep" or "complex". There's a moment in Despair: Become Miserable where we literally watch an ugly man in a run-down house loudly explain to no one in particular how much he’s going to enjoy beating up his daughter in between puffs on his crack pipe. Half the characters in these games are like one-off villains from The Incredible Hulk TV series where they had to contrive an excuse for Bill Bixby to hulk out every episode, so they chuck a random, inexplicable asshole into the room to smirkingly give him nipple cripples for literally no reason."