Hmmm. SIN wasn't very good at telling the story it wanted to tell, since the end of the game came out of nowhere and the emotional revelations of the story fell flat because they didn't seem particularly connected to anything at all, but it was okay apart from the pacing issues, and the story could've been enjoyable if it had been told in a way that made more sense. It also gave you a fairly interesting environment to explore and had a decent amount of enjoyable things to do. Meanwhile, Matryona did a better job of telling the story it wanted to tell, but there was really nothing interesting to do along the way, and I also couldn't take the premise itself very seriously.
This sort of thing HAS happened a few times, but in all of those cases I've heard of, the child has either been isolated from society, or society has condoned the child being treated this way. It made no sense that these people were allowed to adopt a child, because prospective adoptive parents are screened. It made even less sense that Matryona was somehow going to school. Students who are legally male and WANT to dress femininely, whether they're transgender or just feminine, have difficulty enough being allowed to do so. I know what it's like for parents to try to force their children to try to become the children the parents want instead of the children that they are, even when it's completely impossible (I'm disabled, and it's happened to me along those lines), but the logistics of this setup make no sense at all.
I'm also a little annoyed that I was able to immediately guess the twist from the first little bit of introduction, especially because that sort of very conveniently circumvents any potential prejudice within the audience?
I knew it wasn't going to be about a girl who didn't want to be feminine, not because there were any obvious cues that Matryona wasn't a girl, but because people don't write stories where being forced to be feminine even if you really don't want to be feminine is damaging to girls. Similarly, I didn't think Matryona would be any sort of transgender person, because those kinds of stories aren't generally written.
In the real world, most children forced to present as a certain gender unwillingly are transgender children forced to present as their birth sex, most children forced to be feminine had the doctor say "it's a girl" when they were born, and most children who are bullied for gender-nonconforming behavior are engaging in that behavior because they want to, not because someone else is forcing them. Yet in fiction, situations like Matryona's are the only situations where doing these things to children is portrayed as genuinely horrific, because that's what goes along with the prejudices that most societies already have. Preventing children from being normal is monstrous; forcing children to be normal is business as usual. You could play this game and feel that Matryona was terribly wronged, but still come out believing that if Matryona had different genitals, everything his parents did to him would be okay.
Of course, it isn't any game's responsibility to comment on a social issue, but it's firmly within any player's right to be annoyed at a game for depicting something that's this close to a way real people are treated badly, but about people everyone agrees shouldn't be treated like that. And ignoring the general issue of people being treated like that at all.
I don't think it would be fair for me to leave a review, so I'm not going to, but I do think it's fair to leave a comment.