Strong Terries are the first enemy the player encounters. The other one is that her father is the kid the MC spared, which is why she looks like he did and had his toy.All enemies have the ability to either melee the player or shove them to the ground before shooting him. No one ever admits to seeing her and the game repeatedly emphasizes that there are no children in the part of the city where the MC lives, which seems to be trying pretty hard to imply she's not real. Contrast that with the Masks who don't seem to be directly tied to anyone the MC knows or knew.
She looks similarly to the child he didn't kill in the War (same hair color), which suggests to me projection. She makes much more sense as a guilt based hallucination, the MC trying to give himself something to live for despite all the things he's doing and has done.
The child I'm less confident about (and I'm not that confident about the Masks). I think the Mask dudes might actually exist- the cops in the scene where you choose to live or die react to their presence when they're on screen, and they state that they drugged your tea to prevent you from moving when they show up in your apartment the first time. The story ends on a cliffhanger, which I kinda wish I'd known before I reached it. Of course, since 'not' is an alternate ending with several stages left in the game, it's still a choice between playing the game and doing something else. Katana Zero has a point whether to keep going or not. Spec Ops focuses on how fucked up the protagonist is, but they took out the game choices that would let you not do those things. It also does what Spec Ops didn't end up doing when it comes to the morality of the viewpoint character. And then there's the weird starts and graphical weirdness when the character starts disconnecting from reality. Like one scene where you're tied to a chair with a gun to your head, and after you get shot, you get dialogue options about things he hasn't said.
It's not the only game that does fun things with the mechanics and the story, but the devs just do so many fun things with it. The setting kinda goes from goofy to grim at a rather breakneck pace, all in brightly-colored sprite art. You wind up entangled in some sort of intrigue with at least three factions, and have to rather gormlessly try to blunder your way through it. Your character lives in a dumpy studio apartment, carries around a samurai sword, has amnesia (is it a spoiler to say he has a dark past?), and gets assassination targets from his shrink. The setting is right up my alley, a sort of neo-noir grunge and neon Philip K Dick sort of thing. You might have died half a dozen times to the two guys at the bottom of the shaft, but the outside perspective it's one dude brutally ginsuing his way through a whole bunker of people (which looks even more impressive with all the slo-mo parts played out at normal speed). And when you clear a stage, it gives a replay of how it 'really' happened, which from a power fantasy standpoint is very satisfying. The protagonist has time powers that let him bullet time for a few seconds, but his real godlike power is the ability to restart from last checkpoint, so all the (many, many, many) times you die are his precognitions for how things might have gone. What I really like is how well the game mechanics work with the story. The levels are mostly open, which is fun-there's environmental kills and one-use items, but except for a few challenge stages it's less figuring out the way to go forward and more picking from a lot of fun ways to kill everyone in the level. It's a side-scrolling pixel art slash-'em-up where you die in one hit, and the stage starts again so quickly that it hardly matters. So I picked this up on Steam, blew through it in a couple days, and now I'm checking rather intently for updates.
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