@SomeDuder : Work for what? Trauma? Making the reader as depressed as possible? Whatever it is working at isn't a good thing.
@Lepper : The "beautiful detailed art" seems to mostly skip over the character design though, given that the characters kinda mostly look like Animal Crossing characters.
And don't even pretend it is just the loss of innocence on the way to "adulthood". Adulthood was somewhere between the 1st and 2nd levels where things were just tough but manageable. She went right through "adulthood", through "war veteran", through "survivor of an H.P. Lovecraft story" and straight into the realm of "Harlan Ellison's imagination on a bad day".
In most other stories, they're considered dark if everything is trying to kill the protagonist and has a good chance of succeeding.
In this story, everything is trying to cause the protagonist a fate worse than death in the most twisted and horrifying manners possible... and she is just a 12-year-old girl with a semi-crippled arm.
The author of this story is fucked in the head in so many ways. Why else would they write a story about a vast, inescapable Kafka-esque kiddy-rape-dungeon?