Story explained? - SPOILERS FOR ALL CHAPTERS -

[robiwan]

Just finished the game and I gotta say that I didn't fully grasp the story. This is what I've understood so far after one playthrough:

- Emily had a difficult relationship with her parents, who did not like each other; her mom tried to divorce and take Emily with her
- Emily thinks her parents got together because they were pregnant with her
- Emily had a good relationship with her dad, who she went camping with and who taught her about astronomy
- Mom was an alcoholic and had some sort of mental condition
- Dad was a potentially violent but definitely disturbed kid, became an architect like his father
- Dad was preoccupied with death and violence from a young age and talked about a treehouse for Emily's whole life
- Emily and her mother experienced "trauma," and Emily was likely also mentally ill
- Grandfather & grandmother were very wealthy, particular, and prideful - needed everything in its place
- Grandfather's building collapsed and he eventually died (Dad did not send him to a hospital and he died in hospice)
- Mom seems to have died in the mental ward at a hospital that Grandfather designed
- Large tree growing in every part of the game, Emily does not remember consuming or wanting food or water, and she thinks everything is fake

Why were the police at Emily's house? What does the ending mean? Is Emily dead? What is the actual significance of the treehouse? Why was the whole world turning into a treehouse (with the branches growing everywhere), and what was the black sludge?

I'm sure there are metaphors somewhere in this, but it's a little too abstract for me to piece together. Anyone else get some other meaning out of this?

[Auster]

Another consideration:

In in the apartments, the puzzle block seems to show "GONE" upon completion. Maybe at that point, she already kinda understood what happened to her father, but still has trouble accepting or understand. And as the game is called "The Almost Gone", I imagine this could mean she, too, wants to be gone due to grief.

But in a hopeful note, adding to my previous message, maybe she doesn't die, if everything we see is indeed a representation of her mind just making sense of what's going on.

And the note in the wall blocking the patients wing of the hospital, as well as what she says when interacting to the boat, could also mean that her mother caused all this, as mentioned before. But Emily's reaction to the morgue could imply she's still anchored to life, as she still seems to cherish her mother and refuses to see (in multiple senses of the word) her dead by what to me seems implied around the hospital as a consequence to Emily's potential suicide (or inanition by apathy).

[Aryn11]

Since necro is common in this thread already I will throw my two cents in. I agree with a few others that the father was a psychopath and an abuser, and I think that the mom did kill him and by doing so was trying to protect Emily from him. It's possible the dad did something to Emily, either in the course of the altercation with the mom, or maybe he was hurting her and that's what caused the mom to commit violence. It does seem that the brunt of the conflict happened after Emily had already died or at least was not conscious, given that she's so shocked to see the police cars around her house. In other situations where things happened while she was alive, she seema vaguely aware of them even if it's just a vibe.
Anyway yeah it's definitely subtle to the point of being obtuse and I'm kind of on the fence about the absolute lack of closure lol. Good storytelling but i would prefer a wrap up.

[TheFourteen]

So after having to spend 5 hours to get that last achievement, I decided to use that time productively and go over stuff again with a finer comb on my final playthrough.

One thing that is fairly certain is that Emily is dead. She’s a teenager and a somewhat unreliable narrator throughout the game, obviously caught in a liminal state beyond time and space and unaware of the exact circumstances of her death.

The black sludge obviously represents death and is present throughout the game where people died. The first and strongest presence of it in the early game is the bathroom, which is obviously the place where she (and possibly her father) died. In the later TV report showing police at her house, there is also a shot of the bathroom in the footage, implying strongly that is was the scene of a murder/murder-suicide (a singular suicide wouldn’t cause this much presence of police and reporters).

The interesting question now becomes who killed her. There are arguments for three primary suspects: her mother, her father, and herself.

As mentioned before, Emily killing herself seems unlikely, as it wouldn’t warrant this level of emergency response. Also there are very few indicators for this throughout the game, except for a few mentions that she also has the beginnings of mental health issues.

This leaves her mother and father, and I have yet to come to a conclusive answer – both are possible in my eyes.

The key in implicating her mother lies in a closer study of the house in chapter 1. There are moving boxes with Emily’s stuff inside and her father’s books are missing from the bookshelves, clearly implying that he is the one planning to move out with her. Considering her mother was filing for divorce and custody of her daughter, it might be the case that her father won custody, considering her mother was an alcoholic and diagnosed with clinical depression, making her unfit to serve as her custodian. This may have been enough to push her over the edge, as she seemed wistful of the days before her birth (listening to her wedding song on repeat when she was alone). In this case her father was truly loving, despite his troubled childhood. The note sending her to the treehouse (which was never actually built in reality, as Emily states when inspecting her father’s plans for it) was in her father’s handwriting, and could be his final words to her as he cradled her as she was dying. The camping trips served to get her away from her mother when she was in a bad state. His eventual fate might be obscured from the liminal death state as he remains alive long past the events of the game.

Then there’s the (apparently more commonly accepted) theory of her being killed by her father. This mostly rests on the assumption that he truly was a psychopath and potentially a secret serial killer (based on him querying her about her classmate’s secrets – though there are never any actual implications of sexual abuse – as well as locking up his dying father on the top floor of his building). There is no mention of her father after “the bathroom incident”, implying he might have been killed by police or committed a murder-suicide after killing his daughter. The house door being boarded up might be literal in this case as well, with her father expecting the arrival of the police (further cementing the murder-suicide theory). He probably found out about his wife filing for divorce and custody, started packing his and Emily’s stuff to take her away, before his wife called the police. In Act 2 there’s also a witness report on their garden table, with some curious text prompted by inspecting it:

> What is this? A witness report? I can't read the rest...
> Was mum happy then? Was she happy being pregnant with me, or was she already so afraid of everything?

The second line seems rather out of place here – maybe a bug and it should have gone with the pregnancy test? There is obviously some temporal distortion going on, as indicated by the presence of the dog house even though the family never owned one – at least not after Emily was born. So everything here is highly unreliable anyway. I also don’t see any implication of her father having an affair with the female architect living on the same street – he merely never mentioned her, and considering she lived with another woman (the photographer), I’d assume they’re a lesbian couple.

The strongest argument for her father being the bad actor comes when inspecting the pills on the floor of her mother’s room in the psychiatric hospital:

> Why, mum? Was it my being gone that made you feel so bad? It feels like we're both victims.

While this could be read as her mother being controlling and unwilling to let her move out with her father, the last sentence makes it read more like Emily becoming aware of her own death and her mother being consumed by grief after her father killed her. In this case the writing "I tried to protect [you]" on the blockade to the psych ward is a message by her mother to Emily (it could also be by her father, but the handwriting doesn't match exactly – though the treehouse note at the beginning is mentioned to have been scribbled in a hurry).

In the end for me, it all comes back down to the moving boxes. If her father decided to take her away on a whim after being confronted by his wife, it makes packing and neatly labeling moving boxes seem weird in context. It might be my own prejudice based on personal experience (my mother suffered from severe anxiety disorder and depression in my childhood), but her mother being a severely disturbed individual and being locked up in a psych ward for killing her daughter and committing suicide after she comes to regret her actions reads more strongly to me throughout the game.

Obviously lots of room for interpretation here.

[TheFourteen]

Originally posted by uhsauh:

So the timeline is this:
[...]
- When grandfather got ill, dad didn't send him to hospital. Instead dad kept grandfather in the basement and leave his oxygen tank unfilled and let him die.
- Dad met mother, mother got pregnant and they got engaged. They had a daughter named Emily

Just wanted to point out here that Emily used to visit her grandparents while her grandmother was still alive, having her father's old room be remodeled for her use. Given she has her own computer in that room, her grandmother's death can't have been more than a few years ago, considering she is still a teenager during the events of the game, meaning her grandfather's death may have even been more recent (maybe even triggering the police investigation into her father to begin with).

I also read some of the stuff in her grandparents' appartment as implying that they were not fond of her mother, with them keeping their own stash of clothes for Emily and Emily rarely being allowed to stay over night, likely due to her mother's control issues. Also there's mention of her mother not coming from money like her father, which the grandparents might also have disapproved of.

[ZeroUnderscoreOu]

I've been meaning to post some of my findings since my previous post, but never got to it and now I don't remember most of it

This video is the main reason why Emily being dead makes no sense to me. Here, the game writer Joost Vandecasteele talks about the theme of the game. The theme is breaking free from your past and overcoming "excess luggage" imposed on you by your parents. I don't think you can get that idea across if the main character never overcomes said luggage and instead dies to it before growing up. There's another, longer video with the writer and the art director talking about the game. I haven't watched it, maybe it provides some additional details.

I believe the witness report suggests that her mother was said witness, so whatever happened didn't involve her. Some notes in the asylum suggest that maybe Emily's father committed suicide and then Emily possibly did the same. Though overall my opinion is that Emily is alive and the story is her mind wandering rather than her soul. Maybe a dream, maybe she's unconscious after some accident. In the end, she's able to make peace with herself, her past and her issues and sleep calmly.

In 2023 I emailed the devs asking about the story. Reply:

we left the ending open for you to make your own story.

but this explanation comes very close to what we had in mind: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1115780/discussions/0/2569816316385159260/

Link leads to this topic Not very helpful considering that even back then this topic had several conflicting opinions (unless they mean the very first post).

I really dislike this vague, almost shapeless "make of it what you will" kind of story telling where you have to research and guess to try to make any sense of the story.

[TheFourteen]

Originally posted by ZeroUnderscoreOu:

I believe the witness report suggests that her mother was said witness, so whatever happened didn't involve her.

It's not specified who filled out the witness report. The following line oddly talks about her mother's pregnancy, which is what might have given you that idea, but just before that Emily specifically points out she can't read anything past "Witness Report" (which is why I think the following line was placed there by mistake), so there's no actual way of knowing who filled it out.

[val]

Originally posted by TheFourteen:

Originally posted by ZeroUnderscoreOu:

I believe the witness report suggests that her mother was said witness, so whatever happened didn't involve her.

It's not specified who filled out the witness report. The following line oddly talks about her mother's pregnancy, which is what might have given you that idea, but just before that Emily specifically points out she can't read anything past "Witness Report" (which is why I think the following line was placed there by mistake), so there's no actual way of knowing who filled it out.

isn’t the report found in emily’s backyard though? it’s been a while since i played this but i recall the location of where the witness report is found implies it was her mother, because it was in the same area as the family dog that emily didn’t know about (assuming her father isn’t the one giving a witness report due to being dead / arrested for emily’s murder / etc depending on your take).