Entropy's Ending [Major Spoilers]

[CBC]

Humanity is stuck in hell. Forever.

Probably the most beautiful, yet most dark endings to a video game I've ever experienced.

It all ties together incredibly well.

Aria is stuck in a loop. Time and time again, infinitely, she has been rewinding Earth for it only to be destroyed again and again.

But why can't Earth solve its destruction this time? What's special about this disaster?

In one word: Entropy.

You can't escape it.

There is an element of Entropy that transcends the rewinding technology. Decay, laws of nature, or even statistical accumulation mean that we can not expect to rewind ourselves out of disaster forever. This is why the catastrophes were becoming more and more frequent, and more and more severe.

You see it in the Entropy Center itself... Each time Aria is rewound, the Center falls further into decay, and so does Aria's mind.

Aria is doomed to repeat this hell infinitely. The computer records 9999 loops, clearly reaching the limit to it's capability of counting them. In doing so, she's also condemning the entire Earth to live and re-live their destruction and two years of anarchy that leads up to it (going off emails we found from Center staff).

Humanity is stuck in hell. Forever.

The only thing that gives me hope is that the Center seems to be in further decay with each loop... Meaning that eventually, Aria won't be able to rewind Earth, and will finally let us all rest in peace.

[LordRetBrick]

Not sure I agree about the decay, seems to me that the centre itself is also rewound each time, the decay I'd assume mostly took place during the thousands of rewinds the crew did before giving up.

[purity]

1, I insist there have infinite Earth at the right (infinite explode earth at the left is obvious), my opinion is 1. there have three line at the right when aria flying before landing, but when she land, only two earth show up, so I think there have more time line but you can't see it. 2. I'm a optimist.
2. Earth got saved is hopeless, even each loop is not same. Although I'm a optimist, I still don't have hope.
3. I think the moon also will back with aria, although the centre is so destroyed.....because second game or new game plus is cretainly the same, so I think the better ways is when you pass the game, you reload it, it shows you the ending not the new game, but it just shows, and shows a same game, so maybe the moon also backed with aria. About how, I think the core might explode too every time so it make the moon back.
4. Inherit the three, why the centre is so destroyed, the message shows us the centre final rewind is they rewind the earth to two years before. but in game we all in one day, we wake up then the earth exploded, and you could earn enough energy to rewind one day in one day. so this two years is the reason why the centre have too much weeds. In this two years aria tried to analyze but she failed.
5. Explode reason is rewined abuse. I agree with that, so that's why earth can't stop it, because the reason is on the moon.
6. so let's see how to save the world, for aria the only way is in one time line she use the core to rewind the earth centre that make it got fixed and started to rewind the moon, which also will power the moon centre, so the earth and the moon will keep rewinding until the moon centre doesn't exsist. That maybe the only way.

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I read all reply in this post, I also agree another theroy is the moon not rewind with aria, so this might be last chances for aria.

[Drawoon]

Even if there is no decay, they're only rewinding earth and the moon. Threats from outside could still end the loop. The sun burning out, the heat death of the universe, or just any comet to the entropy center would probably be enough.

[Trindalas]

im not sure if there are alternate endings, or if you just interpret it differently, but in my game as i was walking towards the once again destroyed earth, and i started floating, i just moved towards the right side where the earth was NOT destroyed, and in my eyes it says i hopped to an alternate timeline somehow where the earth was saved. can you just keep walking straight to the destroyed one? it was just my natural instinct to try to go towards the good, lol

[darkwind]

I just finished game. I must say that I thought that green earths in new loops mean that we save it from that disaster. The problem I had was how we did it, what did we change in our actions that saved earth this time. But I see that people think that it's just reset and it wil happen again.
Did author ever said something about ending?
And one more question. Was anything said about lack of fall damage? In Portal we had special boots but here nothing. Did I miss something or it's just "we are on moon it has lower gravity"?

[ph0ne (greatijedi)]

I'm pretty sure I know why the cataclysm is happening.

One of the logs near the end say that the ghosts you see come about because someone is rewinding too much. It is said that this leads to the other potential timelines coming close to the timeline we're playing.

Therefore, the cataclysm is happening because all the ends the EC rewound are all happening at once. You might notice that one of the ends of the world is an AI Uprising in one of the pie charts you see - since this end is all of the ends together, the AI rebels are attempting to reach the Moon since the Earth is done.

So yeah. The end can't be stopped, and rewinding more will only damage the Earth further.