Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
4 
Report this post
I'm almost positive that was his father at the end. The game opens with the father knocking on the door and getting violently thrown out by the mother, but he says that he came with a present. Next we see the mother emerging with a present (pretending it is from her) and that is where we have teddy. The man at the end recognizes the teddy bear, so it means it must be the father from the beginning.
From that opening scene I kind of suspected the rest of the game was going to be a metaphor for child abuse, but I initially thought it was going to be about abuse from the father. I was kind of confused when the monster took on a feminine form. The alcohol bottles started appearing and so I deduced the father was an alcoholic but it was only very late game that I realized it was actually the MOTHER this whole time.
However, there are some clues to the sinister nature of the father as well. The drawings sometimes depict 2 adults and the male one usually seems in some position of violence or power over the female one. Pretty sure that the father was physically abusive and the mother drank to compensate.
Did the monster model change in the closet levels near the end? I'd have to replay to make sure, but I think that monster might have been representative of the father. We only got a glimpse of him as this game is mostly about his mother. Still, pretty sure in the upcoming DLC we'll be seeing what terrors the physically abusive father spring on the child...
I believe that the parents had marital problems, led to mom becoming an angry alcoholic and pushing dad out.
Neither of my kids at age 2 were drawing THAT well, and they both are very artistically inclined but hey I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.
Hmm, what do you suppose the story actually is though? Within the game, I mean, not before it.
Here's my take on it:
While the child is sleeping, the mother takes Teddy and puts him in the washing machine. The mother runs out of alcohol and turns the kitchen upside-down looking for more (also the fridge is empty except for some cheese, and there's no food in the cupboards). She puts on a black coat (perhaps the father's since it's so large that it drags on the ground) and goes out to buy some. She comes home and drags mud on the floor with her long coat, and the child sees her but doesn't recognize her because of the coat (or possibly because she's drunk and not behaving as he is used to).
Because he can't find his mother, the child engages in fantasies as a coping mechanism and starts collecting nice, familar items associated with pleasant memories of his mother.
When he encounters his mother during the night, he doesn't recognize her because of the darkness and her drunk behavior, and so she seems like a monster, and he avoids her. She goes to the bathroom to wash off the mud from the storm (the water level; the "tree-monster" is clearly female and only partly dressed, and the player even sees her take her muddy boots off when they suddenly plop down as he crawls under a bed).
She finally catches him sneaking around, so she drunkely grabs at him and pulls Teddy's arm off. He runs away, but because he has now seen her up close, he realizes that it was his mother, and that she was the monster the whole time (the spotlight sequence). He flees back to his room and hides in the closet until the sun comes up. Now that it is day, he no longer needs the fantasy to cope with the darkness and his mother's odd behavior.
That's what I thought while I was playing the game, but then the mother had the one-armed Teddy in her arms at the end. That's why I figure it was probably the mother in a large coat.
My understanding of the story is that it's about the child learning to coalesce the two different persons that his mother is - his mother on the one hand and a divorcée and alcoholic on the other. For most of the game he doesn't understand that it's the same person. The aggressive male figure in the drawings suggests to me that he doesn't have the same internal conflict regarding his father; he associates him with conflict but doesn't see him as two distinct entities like he does his mother.
It's hard to say what role he had before the game starts, but the child must have been too young to remember it clearly enough for it to factor into the fantasies.
At this point his mother must've gave up her own son and gave him to her husband. She realized she is not good person to take care.
Yeah...But I should give you a question for you....should there be sequel?
Personally, I don't think so : ) Not confirming there never will be a sequel, but I feel like we wrapped the game up in the way we wanted to. In this case, I think it's best to leave it alone. There are very few story driven titles that do sequels well in my opinion, and I don't think Among the Sleep 2 would be a good idea either.
Although... it is of course very fun and interesting to think about these things. It couldn't be the same child though, I guess.
Yes, there will be another chapted added for free as DLC.
At this point it was clear that he was probably not evil himself.