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Oh man this game is something else yeah.
Weird
I really enjoyed the game and wholeheartedly think it's worth a play, but the pacing in the latter half was off and I was not satisfied with the ending. Too many loose ends even for a cosmic horror, like the time loop or what even happens when you do the ritual.
Then ending with a screen saying to tweet and nothing more was extra rough. Feels like there's supposed to be another ending that does not exist.
I finished the game with a level 18 Officer, and Kat, Roland, Driina, Iben and Embla as companions.
Roland sacrificed himself to give us time to get through the portal.
Iben ended up being dissected but still alive (thankfully I passed the Healing check to end his torment).
Driina ended up praying repeatedly outside the room where Embla went.
Kat was pulled into the wall of the spacecraft by a bunch of tiny hands belonging to the dreamer's servants.
And Embla ended up climbing into that bath to bring back the dreamer.
No idea what happened to my main character!
Does it turn out differently with different companions?
MC either dies, leaves on the spaceship or manages to flee on the ship (the normal one)- on ending slide the ship seems to manage to leave unharmed at least. The game also suggests that we're in the time loop (one of the worst aspects of the game is that MC is just unable to ask right questions...). So it's intentionally vague.
In the final segment on the Eternity Gate, it just feels that you're railroaded. You see all your companions meet a horrendous fate, yet you are compelled to proceed towards what you already know will be a dismal end. You don't have much agency, which I guess is the point of the story.
From a narrative perspective, it was equivalent to watching one of those horror movies where, just as you think the protagonists have won, the monster survives, turns the tables, and comes out the final victor, rendering all the struggles before moot.
Personally, I think that pulling off a Pyrrhic victory and surviving would have been more rewarding. Cosmic horror stories do have those endings too, and they aren't any more cliched than the grimdark outcome that this game chose.
If I were to write the ending, I would actually go for one last struggle aboard the Eternity Gate, where all your choices before affect your ability to save your companions or at least change their fate.
In the final analysis, I prefer "cosmic adventure" over "cosmic horror".
And then point to that as the reason.
I very much think two thirds of the game was completely cut, and the ending moved up to where it was.
I get the same feeling too. Some of the end game text seems to suggest a greater intimacy with your companions than was actually depicted earlier in the game.
For example, when you see Iben on the dissecting table, the text depicts your pathos, on witnessing the horrifying end of this warrior, who "fought so long and hard" at your side. Usually, a phrase like that would imply a long campaign but the entire story takes place in the span of 2 months at most (the end card said that I finished the game in 74 days, which I suspect is slower than the average run). And during that time, there are no meaningful conversations that allow you know Iben better.
You are left to infer that a lot of the bonding between you and him took place offscreen. But implying isn't showing.
Same with your "Goodbye, my friend" comment as you release him from his suffering. Again, it would be implied that you must have gotten to know him well, in your months together. But your friendship with him, or with any of your companions other than Embla, is never depicted clearly.
Even Roland's affection towards you, when he sacrifices himself, seems to come out of nowhere as, before then, he has been consistently gruff and even critical towards you (especially if you play a goodhearted person and turn down rewards).
The end result is a nagging impression that some character interactions were cut out.
Yeah same with how meaty the game was on the first Island(although it started getting a bit dodgy near Corryn) and then it just rushes to be finished.
- Why is time in a loop? Are we lying on a table like Iben and being forced to re-experience everything that happened up to the point again and again?
- What happened to the fungi? Did it take over the world after the aliens flew away in their space ship?
- What were the tiny hands that grabbed Kit? Why don't we see these small people? Do they even exist?
- Why can't I drink the liquid from the vessel and get a different ending?
- Those tentacles that sucked the life force from Embla - they were like the fungi-tentacle monsters? In that case, was this a matter of two rogue AIs fighting each other while the pilot was in a coma?
- Was this the first time Embla sacrificed herself? She does mention that the hero always did the right thing every time he got to the control room. Does that mean it was usually him who sacrificed his life? Did we end the loop?
- Who in their right mind would make me play a game with a God-tier dragon, and not let me fight it in the finale??
- Why was Diina missing her eyes? Did she tear them out or was she being experimented on before Iben?
- What happened after I entered the spaceship? Did they gas us or throw a flash-bang? Why did I have amnesia and just wake up naked? Did the little men or martians knock me out only to leave me be? If all they wanted was a human mage to give their god a blood transfusion, then why be so picky as to choose Embla? My character had more magic power than her, and an entire cabal of mages had already been sacrificed. Why not extract juice from Iben and everyone else? Why did Embla wait for me before she sacrificed herself? Did I control the ship? Nobody else could? Did I have some weird alien DNA that enabled me to? The ship AI or crew must have been terribly daft to wait around for 100.000 years only to have Embla donate blood to a spaceman in hypersleep. Because afterwards, the ship took off and obliterated the fungus-infested archipelago.
The little girl (Newt) mentions that "The monsters mostly come out at night. Mostly".
And the Alien Queen in her hive is very comparable to the Alien Queen. And the seemingly dead colonist says "Please kill me" (in the movie, a chest burster comes out and they shoot it and get ambushed. Here they had plenty of time to actually kill the poor sod. But they didn't). The sleeping god is like the architects from Alien's Prometheus and Coventant movies. Seen in that light, I think it is safe to assume that the archipelago got nuked from orbit in the end...