I recently finished Gemini Rue and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. I was bit sceptical towards indie and retro adventure games, but it's good to see that I was wrong. This was a great game compared to many recent adventure games which have much bigger budget, but still fail to tell a good story. Story was great, although I managed to figure out who was who relatively early. I had guessed true identities of Azriel and Matthius earlier, but at the point when Boryokudan boss told me that they thought Matthius didn't exist I was 100% certain that he is Balder. Then again it's nice that story gave subtle hints and big revelation didn't come completely out of the blue in the last chapter. I assume I picked those hints rather easily, because I'm familiar with works of Philip K. Dick and others, where people and things aren't always what they seem to be. Also the ending where Sayuri didn't want to know who they were and decided that they should be who they are now was fitting with the genre and much better than ending where they would have learned who they really are. While the story started bit slow I really got hooked on in Azriel's second chapter.

Can't say that puzzles were very difficult, but then again I liked how the solutions were logical and you didn't have to use random thingumabob to whatsit without no apparent reason. Characters always had clear reason why they did what they did and puzzles didn't hinder the story.

And finally I must say that I especially enjoyed Azriel's noir style narration.

I used metagame reasoning: "I can switch between characters! Nice idea! This way I can still progress in one plot branch if I get stuck in the other! Of course, I will have to eventually solve the sticky puzzles, given that the events are coterminous... if the events are coterminous... ohshitohshitohshit this isn't going to end well."

I consider this "dreaded anticipation" the hallmark of a great game - that means it can't be spoiled and doesn't rely on cheap gimmicks.

Matthius' identity was the one I didn't guess, though I was fairly certain he's going to betray me. I guess a genre-unsavvy player was supposed to go "oh shit oh shit" when Giselle gave Epsilon a name. The conduit at Hibiscus Highrise was one hell of a pixel hunt. I had to consult a walkthrough.

The only thing I guessed early was the obvious Sayuri = Epsilon-Five.
This made me think that maybe "Charlie" had already escaped somehow and he'd meet with Azriel without needing to go to Center 7.

Gladly I was wrong, so it made the story a lot more enjoyable for me.

Did you guys see the new trailer for Primordia ? Looks pretty nice too.

Yeah, Philip K. Dick jumped to my mind the instant I started playing.
The story is really like a 50/50 mix "Total Recall" and "Bladerunner" (can't remeber the names of the original short stories this instant). I considered the kind of spacy jazz sequences to be a direct the latter movie, which is a nice touch.

The only thing that bothered me with the low budget production, was the small game world
It was EVERYBODY in Pittsburgh lived in this same house on the Hibiscus highrise!

But all in all, very nice game. Great atmosphere and storytelling. Can't say how happy I am that they're making games like this again!

The fact that everyone relevant to the story ends up in the same 4-block radius in Pittsburgh made me think that Sayuri is the vendor's missing daughter. Maybe she turned up there because she had a deep subconscious feeling of 'home' there. Everyone else has no excuse for all living there, though!

I dislike how you can switch between Azriel and Delta-Six for most of the game. It's a good idea in that the player can take a break from puzzles that stump them and still progress in the game by switching to the other character, but it strongly suggests the notion that both series of events are happening at around the same time. It's OK for the game to try to fool the player into believing something that isn't true (that Delta-Six is Azriel's brother, for example), but this isn't playing fair. To be honest I guessed that just because Sayuri/Episilon-Five are the only character(s) in the game that aren't Caucasian. When there seems to be only one Asian girl in both settings, you start to wonder if they're the same person, especially when one has her face obscured and isn't forthcoming with details about herself.

Given that "boryokudan" is a Japanese term, they could have stood to have a yakuza style rather than generic Western mafia. And maybe New Pittsburgh should have been New Yokohama or something? Something to let Sayuri blend in a little better? The vendor's daughter was 10 when the Boryukuden abducted her (if that's what he meant by "taken" rather than that being a euphemism for her being killed). I'd be willing to believe that Sayuri was a teenager, I guess, but that doesn't answer where's she's been for a handful of years. The re-training process on Center 7 doesn't actually seem to take very long.

Then again, you're probably not being very serious. =P

As for my own pet theories, I think Giselle worked at Center 7 until she discovered what the Director was doing, at which point he had her mind-wiped.