New player who has now finished Episode 3, here to once again give my thoughts and impressions

You can read my episode 1 and 2 impressions here and here.

"Wow, my impression of Beatrice was that she was just a one-dimensional evil witch, but somehow this episode is giving her a kind-of beautiful redemption arc, I'm starting to- ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?"

Yeah, to get the elephant out of the way, embarrassingly I completely fell for Beatrice's act hook, line, and sinker, and upon looking back I should have known that was what was happening all along since the game mentioned Beatrice using the "North Wind and the Sun" strategy. In fact, I'll admit that I purposefully waiting a day to make this post because after finishing episode 3 I was embarrassed for falling so hard for Beatrice's act. I know it sounds silly to be so embarrassed over reading a visual novel in my own privacy but that's genuinely how I feel.

All things considered though, this has very easily been the best episode so far. Eva Beatrice was a wonderful villain, the reveal of Ange at the end was freaking badass (I remember earlier in the episode wondering why Kyrie, in her internal monologue, casually dropped that Battler has a half-sister. Now I see what that was foreshadowing), and Eva was a really interesting character to focus on. I thought beforehand (and still think) that she's a total bitch, but after learning about her childhood and the rampant sexism she went through, I have to admit that it was genuinely satisfying to see her solve the riddle and win the game this go-around. I didn't find her quite as compelling a character as Rosa in Episode 2, but I still really enjoyed her.

One thing that's bugging me now, though, is that ever since it was brought up that Battler can simply argue back against scenes depicting grand magical duels by simply insisting the duels didn't even happen in the first place, it's made me wonder how much of the story I can even take as genuine fact. It does make sense, as technically we are viewing the events of the story through the lens of Beatrice's game, so if we assume that the story isn't an objective, omniscient retelling of events but rather the events as portrayed by Beatrice's reconstructions of the events for the game, we indeed could assume she isn't fully telling the truth. However, this causes two problems; one, we've already seen magical duels before. Kanon fought Beatrice's Seven Sisters in episode 2, but we didn't see Battler struggle to explain the events of that fight. So... was that fight not actually shown in Beatrice's reconstruction of events? If so, how am I supposed to tell which events in the story are objective retellings and which are retellings through the lens of Beatrice's game? Second, how am I supposed to solve the mysteries presented in the story if I can't tell which aspects of the story are even true or not?

Oh yeah, about the mysteries. I have no guesses this time, to be honest. This is the first episode where I'm truly scratching my head because I feel so lost on what's happening. I once read somewhere that Umineko is significantly harder to "solve" compared to Higurashi, and that seems to be the case so far. I surprisingly don't mind, however, because I'm having so much fun reading through the story.