Endings

[Cabe Bedlam]

After finishing the game, I can't help but feel... like I'm missing something. I understand what the fruit does, well enough, and I can guess why Minerva might want it--maybe to try to save her husband-- but I can't shake the feeling that there's unanswered questions that are just hanging there. Exploring the various endings I could reach with my final few choices, it doesn't seem like any one of them explains the whole of it, so I figured I'd reach out and see if people had run across specific endings that felt elucidating.

I've ignored the cave and waited for rescue, speaking to Minerva and having the crew stand up for me, gone into the cave and burned the tree to the ground before sending someone to seek help, and taken the tree back with me with no clear answer as to what I plan to do with it afterwards. I've also heard of an achievement "Worth His Salt", but I'm not aware of the steps to get it, if anyone would be so kind as to share.

Additionally, some of the questions still rattling around in my head: what is the point of the lead in the cans? For such a late reveal, I'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to mean. Surely, Minerva would need the crew to actually survive the expedition down to the Temperance. How did the tree and the Temperance manage to get inside the cavern? From what I understood, I don't think there's even been enough time for the tree to have grown around the ship as it seems to have managed. I suppose given its effects, time weirdness is the least of my issues, but still. And, perhaps most importantly why did Minerva even hire us if she could just sail down to the island like it was nothing? Clearly the ship could support 24 additional people on the trip back, and while I understand the intent to have something to save you if you just want to go home, I can't imagine that she could have predicted an eruption sealing the tree off before she would be able to arrive on her ship... or if she could, why did she even need the tree if she already had the gift of foresight?

[Garb]

This is as much sense as I was able to make of it:

As per the developer response in this other thread, Hunt has been trying over and over again to get a good ending for the crew. If you ask him why he chose you at the end, he tells you it's because you constantly give him different answers, so he figures you must be someone with "meta" properties like him. Some events are fixed though, and a note on the ground and a bit of his dialogue reveals that no matter what he does, the Temperance gets trapped in the ice.

Another undercurrent to the whole thing is what the tree is. Is it a malicious entity? An alien parasite? A benevolent god made manifest? From the hint provided by the same developer comment above, the answer is probably none of the above. In the botany conversations mentioned by the developer, Templeton mentions that he's fascinated by plants because of the way they can get animals to help propagate themselves. Open to interpretation of course, but to me this simply means the tree is just another plant. The purpose of its fruit is the purpose of any other tree fruit: to entice animals to spread its seeds. This makes a lot of sense when you note that the tree entwined itself into the Viscount. So much so that it's impossible for the Viscount to be used as an escape without it coming along. Also important is that the tree's habitat erupts in the rescue ship ending.

TL;DR It's a meta multiverse bending tree that's utilizing Hunt and Shaw to escape its fiery doom.

For your additional questions:
- I don't think the lead in the cans was intentional. Failure to account for heavy metal poisoning was common in the past and lead was often a big culprit. Remember that people only realized the dangers of lead paint around the 1960s. Also worth noting is that Templeton mentions that the tinning part of the Appertton industrial empire has fallen by the wayside and the quality has suffered.

- Don't know how a tree that big grew in 6 years, but as you said yourself, that's not exactly the central conceit of the story. It's a supernatural tree, we should probably just leave it at that.

- I don't have a neat answer to why Minerva sailed down herself with a much better ship, but if I had to speculate: she was impatient and/or worried that someone else would beat her to the tree. Based on how poorly put together the Temperance mission was (motley, crew, sailing ship retrofitted with a steam engine, cheap rations, etc.), the Temperance and her crew were a Hail Mary attempt to get there first with a questionable chance at success. Remember that by the time Minerva arrives in her state of the art icebreaker, 40 weeks have already passed. Perhaps she needed this time to put together mission with a higher chance of success? If you think about it this way, it also makes sense why Templeton is so sure that a rescue ship is coming: the Temperance was never going to be the only attempt.

[TherapyFox]

What happened to the previous crew? They obviously didn't use the cabin and food to save themselves.

Did the crew become part of the tree, used as sustenance as part of the adulting process? The only clue seems to be the corpse of the captain in the boiler room.

If so, I can see the spread of the tree consuming humanity as a kind of Eldritch entity.

[Bellular Studios]

To date, this thread is still the closest players have come from speculation.

[dkangel999]

as i just beat the game im gona give my two cent, cuz im lazy im just gona tag every as spoiler.

im going to list out the main mystery of this game so far
-what happened to the Viscount?
-what is the nature of the tree?
-what does Minerva want with the tree?
-what does Templeton want with the tree?

im going to try to answer these question to the best i can and some of these i dont have an answer to, for the first two question i think the answer is linked. my analysis is that the tree is the biblical tree of life, the wording in which you eat the fruit and get "tainted by awareness" is very much the same wording in the bible in which Adam and Eve becoming self-aware and feel shame about their naked body.
as to what happen to viscount its likely that the captain of the viscount experience the same that Hunt which he keep looping over and over again simply cant not find a way out of the ice and decide the next best course of action is to sacrifice his own crew for the next expedition, this would explain why would the cabin still have full supply when you arrive it.
the exact detail of what happen is vague, the the lone survivor of the viscount was possibly tortured by the captain driven mad by the time loop, this i like to point out at you get information from Templeton in the camp by the cave, he say there is only one survivor but next line keep referring to lone survivor as THEY which im going to chunk it up to mistake by the dev, cuz if not then its a slip of a tongue and Templeton actually also experiences the taint of awareness, which is a big reveal but i have no more supporting evidence for this theory.
the final mystery about the Viscount that possibly purely out of my own head cannon is WTF is going on with that organ why does the game point attention to it? is it so intact? is the music fake video BGM? or real in universe for real organ music star playing? that organ is really weird. i stare at the art of the viscount over and over again and to be there's two point of origin in where did the tree grew out of. either the below the engine, or the organ, base on the art no where else make sense.

The next big mysteries is Minerva & Templeton which.... there is zero evidence to make any concrete deduction about those two people's motivation. the only thing we know is that Minerva knows Viscount is supernatural, and so did Templeton. both known each other for a long time. tho Kasha mention that Templeton is younger than he looks. Templeton was never truly loyal to Minerva and in the epilogue he seem to know what the fruit is or at the very least know much more than we are led to believe. a big jump assumption i would have to gives is if the tree is the biblical tree then Minerva & Templeton is Adam and Eve but there is zero evidence to support this. other than those two are the only people who seen to know what is going on.

over all this analysis provided no answer, and i think its intentional the writer did a very good job of making sure there's no lines in the dialog for the player to make any concrete conclusion. all that say there's enough loose end to make a DLC or a sequal to this story that im interested to see if they did decide to make a continuation.

[Silvarren]

With regards to the tinning and lead - it is theorized that lead in the cans on the famous ship The Terror, which is one of the more well-known ships that attempted to find the Northwest Passage, are part of what led to the starvation (and worse) of the crew. Very cool touch, if you ask me.

Secondly, I wholeheartedly agree that, as per Templeton's remarks about plants propagating by using animals, that the tree is very much using humans to spread itself and escape its fate. What concerns me is that if it can know what lies in store for it, how much of a consciousness does it have, and what will happen when it reaches civilization? Of all the endings, sailing the tree back is the most horrifying one, to me.

[Chromeo]

I personally don't see why you can't just sail the boat to the city university or something and beach it there, or go to another country, giving it over directly to the company shouldn't be the only option, you should be able to 'give it to the people'.

[Synegg]

Thank you very much for this thread, after replaying many paths and still getting no closer to "the truth", these were roughly the questions I was stuck on, and it left a very unsatisfying taste in the mouth. If the devs always intended to leave most of this with bare bones info and for the player community to group-guess, this thread has given me as close as can be to "closure".

The problem is that if the devs made us go through all this pain, and I mean pain mostly in the "mechanical click and grind" of doing a complex maths problem week by week, rationing the various resources to balance keeping various people alive on the brink of death, only to get to the super vague and lacklustre ending as the "pay-off", then it was bloody unsatisfying. There were a lot of crappy false choices along the way, as many others and threads have discussed.

I can only take comfort in the fact that after much trial and error, I managed to complete an expedition while keeping everyone alive, so that's my "duty" to the fictional crew completed. The dog scene was a gut punch and made me go hug my cat. I was very grateful for that "emotional experience". It was a horribly inaccurate and badly framed choice, but oh well. I suppose the "journey back" to civilisation would be an interesting reflective and soulful experience, where with the multiverse knowledge granted by the fruit, I can now quietly plan what to do with the fruit/power once I hop back onto shore. My alignment is more order than chaos, and more good than evil, so with this omniscient superpower probably try to use it to make the world a better place.

To the devs, overall thank you for making this game, I think with a little bit more tweaking and polish in the middle, and some more clues and reveals at the end, it could have been absolutely amazing. At present, you have a weakly thumbs up from me. This is of course only the feedback of one person, so by all means take it or leave it.

Thank you to the multiple intelligent people above who have provided great comfort.

[LeeM]

I enjoyed the game overall, but also felt the ending a bit out of place in an otherwise gritty down to earth game.

A more satisfying ending would have been to foretell the lead poisoning earlier, have the crew of the temperance find a lost crate from the Viscount (perhaps after the lifeboats when resource is low). Only open up the cave / tree option if the player added the lead poisoned food to hotpot.

Then you could slowly play up the weirdness of all the proceeding events leading up to cave/tree events with ghosts of dead sailors , monstrous animals and a set of fully fantastical epilogues - go wild. Finish with a short cut to the island shelter in the snow with smoke from chimney stopping, and the small sails of the approaching rescue ship.

Implication - crew died after going mad from lead poisoning, all tree events are madness. Only true ending is to avoid eating from crate, which should lead to an empty cave and rescue ship (without Minerva- whom wouldn't be there in reality) or death if not enough resources.

[LeeM]

So I just replayed the landing after the lifeboats, and you do in fact find food from the Viscount at the cairn and eat it, potentially meaning heavy metal poisoning is actual cannon explanation for the tree , Minerva and everything else past that point.

I guess decisions like the scout leaving to live with dog / lost camera are signs of this. I would have gone further and had more oddities over a longer period with more opportunity to eat the food and get further poisoned.

Also would have been good to give player a choice to eat the food or not, even if the player was unaware of the effect and not eating the food was almost certain starvation.

[Smoker]

The tree was also the sailor's curse song

[Rastapopoulos]

Just beat the game and even now it still feels unsatisfactory to me I decided the bring the Viscount and the tree back to Minerva but i don't even get to meet her or anything like that as opposed to the ending where you abandon the mission, as expected she make sure the story isn't published and all in all i think everyone just got worst off as it doesn't seem like the story was told at all, Kurt is alone in his theatre, Hammond demoted to working on a train, Kasha can't publish the story, Templeton just resign from working with Minerva for whatever reason, and yourself the player doesn't even get any kind of epilogue, no mention of what you become or what happened to you. After all i did to keep my crew alive and well i expected a bit more grandiose of an ending this just felt like unfinished business