Okabe's already broken, and this show spends twenty-three episodes making sure you feel every crack get wider. The time travel isn't the point anymore, his failure is, the way depression doesn't resolve like a plot twist but settles into your chest like a weight that won't lift. You watch him choose to forget the people who saved him because remembering costs too much to live with.

Okabe has abandoned the life that broke him. Once a self-styled mad scientist, he is now just another college student, depressed and traumatized after failing to save his friend Kurisu, and he tries to forget his time travel ordeals alone. His friends know little of what he has been through. While working as a receptionist at a college technology forum, he meets Maho Hiyajo, who serves as interpreter for Professor Alexis Leskinen's presentation. Together they reveal Amadeus, an AI that stores a person's memories and builds a faithful simulation of their personality. Okabe learns that the two once worked with Kurisu and have simulated her in Amadeus. Hired by Alexis to study the simulation, he finds old wounds reopened, and he must steer clear of the disastrous consequences of disturbing the flow of time. Set on an alternate worldline branching from the original Steins;Gate, the series is a psychological sci-fi thriller.