I finally was able to sit down and complete the game.
The final episode was absolutely my favorite, and I think it cements Tell Me Why as my favorite Dontnod game. I should be careful to clarify that I was not a huge fan of either LiS1 or LiS2, which I think firmly plants me in a very weird space as far as fans of theirs typically go. In fact, I outright disliked LiS2. Now that that's out of the way...
Tell Me Why manages to tell a story that feels small in all the ways I didn't realize I wanted. I'm so used to playing games that always seem to have a strong need to move from locale to locale at breakneck speed, and be dragging the player along to the next insane story beat. Tell Me Why seeds an interesting mystery, to be sure, in its first episode, but I found that as the story proceeded it was all those small moments between the twins that drove me to love this game. There's such an earnest love for these characters that oozes out of every pore of this game. It's genuine, and it's felt. It's frequent. It's simple, and yet, I don't know how many games I've played where I can say that simple felt quite as real as it did here. Which is actually super fucking weird, considering some of the stuff relating to how memories are seen in the game. Even the areas with their grand, beautiful vistas contrast with these small, cozy spaces you 'live' in in this game. It feels like a place, always, even when it's being a videogame about it.
Being a cis person, I can't speak to this part of the story with much detail, but I can say that Tyler is an incredible nuanced and strong character and I loved the time I was able to spend with him. I think I can only understand a sliver of the excitement trans people get being able to have such great representation on screen. Dontnod I think has made incredible headway here in giving something the trans community has asked for for a long time: a legitimately good trans character that breaks out of the mould of being purely defined by their transness. It's a delight to see and I couldn't be happier to see that others have felt the same way, especially the trans community.
I think Dontnod as a developer still needs to do a lot of work to make the 'game' parts of their games better. The act of actually playing the game was nowhere near the quality of watching things unfold. I greatly enjoyed the puzzles, simple as they were. Hopefully Dontnod's next game gets a bit more adventurous with its gameplay.
Dontnod misses a *lot* more than they hit for me, overall, but this is basically a home run here, in my opinion.