I'm not saying Alex is in total the representative of the author, I'm going by the author's own words outside of the game talking about Elisa Lam. He was pretty open near the release of Yiik about the Elisa Lam case being a major inspiration. Most of my issues come from playing into the similarities, making it obvious for anyone who has a passing familiarity that this is indeed based on the same case. If the game has been inspired by that case, but Allanson never talked about it, and the missing persons case in the game didn't so closely reflect the one in reality, I don't think it would be as big an issue for me, but that's not what happened, and while I liked a lot of stuff surrounding I.V, I think it's fundamentally trying to build on that story that just, is really hard to get invested in bc of how distasteful I find it to be.

I'm sure there's details of the plot I'm missing. While I played through the whole game and tried to engage with it, it simply did not hold my interest, so I'll admit I didn't really put the work in of trying to understand it. I simply did not think the Blue Woman you meet once outside the factory was important. I can understand that the Essentia 2000 lied about Sammy/Vella/her being Alex's soulmate, given that it seems the ending implies that, yes, the Essentia 2000 lied, and she is instead a... version of Alex as well? So, playing into his own self obsession, of course another version of him would validate that as fate and try to hide it. I don't quite know if I have those details right but, again... The game hides things, and obfuscates, and that might be cool, but it requires a base level of investment that it frankly never earned from me.

It reminds me a bit of a Deltarune mod called Ribbit. It has a lot of hidden lore and answers if you want to go looking for them, but the core cast of characters are so unlikable and there's so little grounding in reality or any resonant emotional core that, from my view, it hasn't really earned that depth it's trying to present. Now, a lot of people like that mod, a lot of people like Yiik, I'm willing to admit that that level of things is just my own perspective and it kinda prevents me from engaging as much as I'd maybe like.

Still, I think my question was more about the decision to parallel Sammy to Elisa Lam in the first place. Basing her so closely on a real person and then extrapolating this whole crazy plot still just feels a bit wrong to me.