And so the game is just a rich and surprising set of flips in state, over and over and over, with greater urgency and seemingly less chance of happy resolution, until by some scheme everything is saved at the last second. The reason he gets away with such a complex abstracted notion of plot is that the scenes themselves can be quite slow, e.g. a person will pause to explain everything so far, or a piece of dialog will be ultra-repetitive, or a person will sit and play with a duck for no reason.