The game leaves me clueless in the end

[Valentine Kiss]

Can someone explain to me where the real threat lies in the research project that was developed inside the Greenhouse? Does the serum lead to a rapid form of Parkinson's, because of the tremor which people got. Or what else does it lead to ? Thank you.

[StopItStepBro]

So from what I could gather, the soil would allow crops to rapidly grow which would have quicker yields to save the Earth from whatever has "doomed" it, It's never quite explicitly stated if it's overpopulation which led to food shortage or global warming killing off fauna or whatever. Introducing said soil to earth would've possibly had everything rapidly growing and dying which poses the threat of all fauna just straight up dying within a set amount of time, this led to the development of certain compounds to control the rapid growth which the onsite doctor believes is making people sick with some kind of chronic condition, which is never quite elaborated on to the point of total understanding.

TLDR: it's seemingly both the soil and the serum, the soil is explained just enough but the serum is never truly expanded upon so it's either the serum actually makes you sick OR the medic simply just went insane and perceived certain symptoms as an overall sickness.

[Valentine Kiss]

Sounds understandable. Take my points and thank you.

[IDKFA]

Did you watch through the end of the credits? The 'real' ending? "Don't open the box".

That left me a bit more confused than the dirt...

[Valentine Kiss]

Oh, i didn't watch the credits until end. Thanks to remind me.

Update: i just watched the credit scene in a video. And this makes something clearer.

[CrashT]

Where was the information about a serum? I found what I felt were a lot of the logs but got to the end and had no idea why Wyatt thought he was saving people. I know there's Compound 26 and what it does to plants but that's it - I assume it had a down side but I have no idea what that is. I'm completely in the dark as to what Wyatt was doing and why making the entire ending scene utterly incomprehensible.

Checking now it looks like I missed over 40% of the collectables which is really surprising as I felt like I went everywhere I was supposed to? I guess I was expected to explore a lot more but I never wanted to as walking anywhere takes so long and nothing about the game suggested I needed to do more than follow the critical path. I've seen the post-credits scene but that doesn't really help.

But now I'm left feeling like because I followed the critical path (which felt like the correct thing to do) I had no idea what was happening in the end but the game acts like I should understand Wyatt's motivations.

Why was the Frontier Project a bad omen? Why was it shutdown? Why did Jessica's hand start shaking? Why did Wyatt say Jessica was feeling sick? Why did Wyatt feel he had to kill everybody? Nothing made any sense.

EDIT: Something else that didn't help my understanding was that sometimes I'd get a log without realising, so I'd collect a chip and it would play a video log, but I'd also get an audio log and some text logs at the same time but I'd have no idea until I randomly checked it later and found logs I'd never seen before and had no idea where I collected them.

[blumaus]

Originally posted by CrashT:

Where was the information about a serum? I found what I felt were a lot of the logs but got to the end and had no idea why Wyatt thought he was saving people. I know there's Compound 26 and what it does to plants but that's it - I assume it had a down side but I have no idea what that is. I'm completely in the dark as to what Wyatt was doing and why making the entire ending scene utterly incomprehensible.

Checking now it looks like I missed over 40% of the collectables which is really surprising as I felt like I went everywhere I was supposed to? I guess I was expected to explore a lot more but I never wanted to as walking anywhere takes so long and nothing about the game suggested I needed to do more than follow the critical path. I've seen the post-credits scene but that doesn't really help.

But now I'm left feeling like because I followed the critical path (which felt like the correct thing to do) I had no idea what was happening in the end but the game acts like I should understand Wyatt's motivations.

Why was the Frontier Project a bad omen? Why was it shutdown? Why did Jessica's hand start shaking? Why did Wyatt say Jessica was feeling sick? Why did Wyatt feel he had to kill everybody? Nothing made any sense.

EDIT: Something else that didn't help my understanding was that sometimes I'd get a log without realising, so I'd collect a chip and it would play a video log, but I'd also get an audio log and some text logs at the same time but I'd have no idea until I randomly checked it later and found logs I'd never seen before and had no idea where I collected them.

The answer is bad writing. I hope that helps solve your conundrum. One of the worst endings I've seen in a game and reflecting back on what occurred is borderline insulting.

[Sҽɾρҽɳƚ]

The claw marks on the gate? Hand tremors (from radiation sickness probably)? How did C26 exactly differ as the final soil sample? Animal rumors? 'Meet me in the greenhouse and find out for yourself'?

At first I thought that the protagonists are hallucinating from radiation poisoning and just imagining the fighting scenes, then I thought the soil is probably radioactive. The brown substance on the gauze? Yeah I figured it was iodine as it was later said in the dialogue. Being infected? Maybe they're using humans as a part of the C26 sample? Is the Central in on all this stuff?

Then I got to the greenhouse part one, which seemed promising, but the part with the elevator and all the way to the end was just bad, just trash. So Wyatt was angry with the research being conducted, was he angry that he was being framed, was it all actually his research or did he have a breakdown because he missed his family so much?

[ChubbiChibbai]

Originally posted by IDKFA:

Did you watch through the end of the credits? The 'real' ending? "Don't open the box".

That left me a bit more confused than the dirt...

Because despite him going through all this to prevent the serum / plants from being a threat to humanity he realises that a plant has been sent to the guys kid.

Hence.... don't open the box. Otherwise everything done in the game was futile.

[psionicninja2000]

Originally posted by blumaus:

The answer is bad writing. I hope that helps solve your conundrum. One of the worst endings I've seen in a game and reflecting back on what occurred is borderline insulting.

Yeah, this pretty much it. We START with an interesting mystery but ultimately it never follows through much less gives the player a satisfactory payoff. Is Watson crazy? Is there something genuinely dangerous about the research? Even with that post-credit scene we're not really sure.

This is the exact same problem we had with Firewatch (the story making little sense unless you explore every square inch for every last collectible and even then it might not make sense) and ultimately this why "cinematic games" aren't really taking off. If you are going to limit the audience's ability to directly participate and influence the story, you better make sure the story is worth being a spectator to...

[Le bakor]

my point of view is "the other guy" had a major psychological break down but being rationnal and intelligent he was looking kind of healthy. He started being paranoïac and become being fullydisconnected from reality.
I mean every part of the story is very subtle enough to not have a concrete clue on what really happens.

[Lucafg - Video Games & Art]

SPOILER HERE!!!!

IMHO the story is deliberately ambiguous. You cannot say whether it's a case of paranoia and conspiracy or the compound is really dangerous. Maybe the isolation made Wyatt go mad, he got paranoid, he started to create conspiracy theory in his mind and started to spread fear and paranoia to the already proved team. Isolation in space is a well known serious problem. Maybe the compound is really dangerous, you can see the plants of the first experiments affected by accelerated growth and death. However the bees are still alive, even stronger than before, they don't die when they lose the sting; the plants of the latest experiments with the latest compund are still alive. Hand tremors can be explained as a sign of fear or paranoia and madness or drugs (sometimes even coffee makes hands rattle). Everyone can see that Wyatt has really gone mad!

[Gepida]

It's seems that me the originally this had a much longer story early in the production, which i'm pretty sure got dropped as they run out of money. When I got to the greenhouse I felt that i'm about halfway thru the game. Aaand it was done 5 mins later. what a letdown.
I was hoping for a second Deliver us Moon kinda vibe, but I got a slow paced detective story with a sloppy finish.

[Skree]

Having just played the game in one sitting... i would like to point out that the girl protagonist has hand tremors before removing her helmet. So she couldn't be infected, it was just a character trait of hers, perhaps to show her as more human and afraid.

My take: the research in fort solis drives people mad and kills them, the medic discovered this and decided to stop it, while doing so he fell to madness too, but was in the end a "good guy" who fell to madness.