[Spoilers] What happens if you enter the Nil Number?

[Alice's #1 Fan]

At this point I've beaten the game and I have my nil number, I'm just not sure that I actually want to enter it. I can't seem to find anything about what happens, is it just the bonus room or are there significant changes to the game?

[zodiac]

whole new path, go do it. it rocks

[Llyes]

why wouldn't you? there was significant lead up to it

[Alice's #1 Fan]

Originally posted by Llyes:

why wouldn't you? there was significant lead up to it

It'll probably sound silly to other people, but I like to take some games seriously. I have second thoughts about indulging and vindicating the secret club of psychopaths and murderers by playing into their hands and doing exactly what they want me to do. Naix is a terrible group filled with terrible people and I don't really want to give them what they want

[Moony]

I understand the implications, but I don't think you'll regret it.

[Llyes]

It's an important part of the story, is all I can say, in fact the entire story doesn't make sense without it

[Xaneorath]

Alright, let me honour your reservations and spoil it for you in these nice black spoiler tags down there. I put it into various blocks, so you can check yourself how far you want to spoil
yourself with it:

You give her the number and Ryuki falls into one of his Reality Bug / Chinese Speech - Episodes (btw, did someone ever translate them? Is it actual chinese?).
Afterwards you get a bizarre version of a glitched Naix-Room where Tama is offline. Tokikos Corpse starts talking and tells you she isnt dead. Afterwards she vanishes and you gotta look for her.


You can clip out of the room through the walls and fly out of bounds, where you find her floating around. She thanks you for allowing her to reach Moksha and you can ask her a few more questions, but will mostly get her usual vague answers to provoke you to think yourself about these things.
Afterwards you get the choice to send Ryuki back with knowledge about both timelines. Both what happened in the past and what will happen 6 years later.


If you agree, you get a timeskip to an alternate 6 years later. Basicaly its the "optimal ending". Ryuki solved the case fast and put Tearer behind bars. This prevented a lot of the more tragic occurances which happened in the game. Tokiko however is missing from that timeline.


I think its an interesting and thought-provoking take on reality, especialy if you think it through recursivly into "higher" dimensions. Thats why I try not to talk too much about my interpretions of its meaning and let you think about it yourself. (And if you are curious, check the story branch out, even though I already spoiled it)
I do believe it to be a fair philosophical take which is worth at least to be pondered about.

[kirbo]

Originally posted by Xaneorath:

Its not actual chinese, i think for the most part is actual corrupted encoded characters, so i dont know if its gonna be so easy to translate.
im pretty sure the text used on those prompts is a mixture of some japanese, some chinese and corrupted characters. i hope we're able to decode them eventually /

[YdenMkII]

Originally posted by kirbo:

Originally posted by Xaneorath:

Its not actual chinese, i think for the most part is actual corrupted encoded characters, so i dont know if its gonna be so easy to translate.
im pretty sure the text used on those prompts is a mixture of some japanese, some chinese and corrupted characters. i hope we're able to decode them eventually

Some of them were actually translated in this thread.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1449200/discussions/0/3418810183134107646/
Basically it's running the original Japanese text through 2 different character encoding schemes, shift_jis and utf-8.

[Redblaze27]

Its basically a 20 minute side route where Ryuki has to cope with the knowledge from your playthrough, despite exploiting it to close the case and resolve everyone's problems in the best possible outcome in one sweep.

Tokiko is at piece just vibing out of bounds.

[Zaltys]

It's short, and poses some interesting philosophical questions at the end. Just play it.

[Dark IP]

Don't deny the truth! Do it!

[Ellye]

One question/observation about the Nil Number route:

If you chose not to tell Ryuki about everything, it seems the timeline doesn't change - but shouldn't it change? Shouldn't Tokiko be missing?

I mean, it's easy to explain away as a bug/placeholder in the simulation anyway, so it's not a big deal. Just something I noticed.

[Blackguard]

Tbh, for something that's foreshadowed and sorta central to the whole plot of the game in some way or another, the whole nil number thing ended up feeling very lacklustre and anti-climatic.