I played the Caldecott Caper a little less than a year ago and LOVED it, and CalFree in Chains was as good, if not better, than Caldecott. It was super fun seeing characters from Caldecott show up again in the story. The writing is phenomenal, as always, and compared to the Hong Kong campaigns, CC and CFiC are arguably better written and certainly less buggy. :P

I got really attached to Desorn and Valiri — I loved how Desorn was a believer/preacher of Hestaby but still had a sense of humor and wasn't a stick in the mud, and Valiri's energetic and "need for speed" attitude (which I realized later was because she was a cheetah shaman) was so endearing that I couldn't stop myself from romancing Valiri, which made her death such a shock and really hit me hard. I was yelling for like an hour afterwards, and her death informed my RP for the rest of the campaign, which is just marvelous storytelling from Cirion. The characters are so fleshed out and three dimensional. There are qualities of each that are endearing and likable, and qualities of each that are irritating.

Cirion is great at crafting an immersive world and flawed yet lovable characters. If anybody makes fun of Isao's poor English I will kill them. I protecc him. I looked forward to talking with everybody in the PU after each mission, whereas in the Hong Kong campaign I mostly felt like interacting with the characters was a chore (and I didn't really feel attached to any of my companions, whereas in Caldecott and CFiC I loved each and every one of my companions and I would have and did die for them.

The nuance in the different viewpoints and perspectives of the characters was likewise fantastic and very nuanced, even better than Caldecott, and the role-play opportunities to characterize yourself, your views, and your relationships with others were amazing. I agonized over several choices, and seeing my choices come back later on in the game was amazing storytelling by Cirion.

About the ending: It was lovely seeing Valiri again (as a ghost) on the space station — I thought it was extremely poetic that we saw a space station on our first (and only) date and she was talking about how she wished she could go there, and as the last act of the campaign came to a close I found myself tearing up at how fitting and sad it was that I was going up to the space station without her. I'm looking forward to replaying the campaign and romancing Desorn and seeing whether that makes Desorn be the betrayer in the underwater prison.

I also planned my mid-level build around Desorn and Valiri, and when they died, I tangibly felt their loss in the role gaps in my team which I struggled to fill until the end of the game. The mission before they betrayed me I even remarked that there were quite a few companions when compared with other Shadowrun campaigns xD. Amazing ludonarrative there.

I also loved seeing the rewards of the side missions/quests, which were once again so much more engaging than ones from the main campaign. Their background progression (and the hefty emotional rewards at their ends) made the game oh so much sweeter.

Once again, thank you so much Cirion for making and sharing these perfect campaigns and immensely emotionally affecting and rewarding stories and giving them to us for free! CalFree in Chains (and Caldecott, to an extent) helped get me through some tough times, and I'm planning to go back and play Antumbra at some point as well. I am eternally thankful for these amazing stories and characters, and while I am sad to see Cirion move on, I wish all the best, and to keep us posted on any new projects (including non-Shadowrun stuff). It's probably against the Steam ToS or something, but I would certainly contribute to a Patreon or something (and I did search Cirion on a search engine to see if there was a Patreon) — would 100% pay money for these campaigns, especially after playing through them.

EDIT: After reading dev notes, I agree that putting a romance into this game made it a love story, especially because after Valiri's death I role-played the entire game through that lens. Also, I did find the politics relevant and important, but there was also a lot of nuance in conflicting ideologies in a resistance and other "less headlining" topics. I particularly enjoyed the immigration/diaspora vs homeland/tradition juxtaposition between Masato and Isao.