I was also in the “nope, no way am I doing this” camp after reading the contract (I was shocked that the whole egg implantation idea hadn’t been even mentioned before that!), but I wonder whether the story is actually substantially different if you do; like your review said, the game mostly treated my playthrough as if I had gotten the procedure.
Looking back at your review:
I’m 100% agreed on this. I wanted more from the worldbuilding so that I could understand why the PC (and other characters) would so cavalierly accept an alien egg being implanted into a seven-year-old boy (never mind the actual Uplift part that essentially makes him into a different person). That just seems like SUCH an incredibly drastic thing to do to a child! I would have thought there would be a minimum age requirement for the procedure. Is everyone in this society really just chill with the idea of parents doing body/mind alterations to their children? (Compared to real-life US society, where gender-affirming care for minors—which the minors themselves actually understand and want—is getting banned.)
The part of the game that hit the hardest for me was in the path where your grandson’s buglet gets injured in a way that will permanently stunt its growth, and the aliens want to take it away to get reabsorbed(?) and reborn so that it won’t be disabled. All the characters so far had been quite cavalier about curing/erasing disabilities up till that point, but in this case Weston gets upset and protests quite a bit—and understandably, because the aliens would rather kill and remake his friend than let it live on as a disabled being. Another case, like Weston’s, where adults are making these drastic and rather horrifying decisions on a minor’s behalf.
That case aside, though, the game didn’t sell for me that the aliens were evil—the “your old body gets killed inside a monster and it makes you a new one” reveal just had me shrugging. If you’re fine with having your body (and maybe mind) completely redone and with being a host for an alien egg, why does that cross the line? The true horror for me was, as I’ve already mentioned, the cavalier attitude everyone had toward the idea of foisting this procedure on a 7-year-old. I wish the game had given my character the option to express that, instead of just telling me things like “You’re optimistic that this procedure will make Weston into someone you can relate to personally.”
Can I also mention… the fact that a bonobo becomes a hideously ugly Black woman did not sit right with me at all.