wtf why am I all of a sudden helping Holm in Episode 5?

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

This is actually bad enough that at this point I have quit the game. I have been trying to undermine Holm throughout literally the entire freaking game and then for some inexplicable reason after Piaggi refuses to side with me and Mortimer all of a sudden times gets frozen and it's telling me I "cast the deciding vote in favor of Holm" and now also inexplicably the game has completely railroaded me into helping Holm.

Wtf for? This is some serious ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ right here. I am going out of my way now to try to find a way somehow just to get Holm killed and make sure he stays in the ether. I don't want to reorganize guests. I don't want the daemon to protect Holm from Mortimer. I do not want Holm to reconstruct his memories.

I do not want to help Holm, period. Is this a bug? Why in the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ am I all of a sudden getting control over any choice at all ripped away from me for the entire last episode? I deliberately and specifically chose Mortimer at just about every turn. I want to ultimately undermine both of them but I especially want to destroy Holm. I do not want him having even a chance of escaping. Now being completely stuck with taking the exact opposite course of action?

what the absolute ♥♥♥♥ is this garbage? is this intentional?

[CrackeR]

It's part of the story.......and seriously, there are a gazillion walk-throughs you can venture into up to the point you are currently for an explanation.
if you dont want to spoil it by using a walk through then stop when you get your explanation.

BTW there IS more than one ending......

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

I know that there's more than one ending and I already kinda spoiled some of it myself looking through walkthroughs just because I wanted to find a way to get off rails. The game was fantastic so far, right up to the point where the big twist is revealed which could've still been okay but was handledly amatuerishly followed by the worst thing a dev can possibly do, which is put your character on rails.

I just hate hate absolutely *hate* the fact that I just spent the whole game siding with Mortimer and now all of a sudden I'm with Holm and trying to save him? ♥♥♥♥ no I want him to choke on his poison tea. There is no sense to it which is all the more disappointing because of how much I played.I am not given any choice on what to do there for once.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Meh, the ending, it was pretty much just "meh." I can now see why everyone was saying the game took a nosedive after episode three. I mean, you're pretty much just getting in the most ridiculous looking psychic battle with your father who's a demon and you and the emma/emily twins are also all demons I mean it's the most stupid and ridiculous looking thing. What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ way to end an otherwise great game.

It isn't even just that the multiple ridiculous plot twists are happening, but the fact that it is done so incredibly stupidly and poorly, plus I maintain that there's genuinely no freaking reason at all for the entire searching through Holms' memories thing. I got completely railroaded for absolutely no reason at all and there was no solid reason for it, in fact the game would've been much better if that entire section were modded out of the game and all use of the ether entirely were modded out like bringing back emma from there into a servant or dealing with the demon inhabiting Elizabeth called asahel.

Like I think that the worst possible thing about that whole part is the fact that it feels like the game has totally taken control over your character which is even more stupid because it actually could've been incorporated into some meta Bioshock like gameplay narrative where you lose control over the direction of the narrative and your character because you find out you were possessed but no, they just had to get lazy and take a really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ direction of the story and make it even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ by hijacking your ability to make any choices through an entire section of the game.

My opinion? It's not actually worth beating for any reason other than to beat it and finish the game. That was one of the worst and most unsatisfying endings to a spectacular game I've ever played. There was really no solid plot and storytelling reasons for it other than I guess they realized they had to end the game somehow but to be perfectly honest the whole game can pretty much be skipped after the conclusion of Episode 4.

[doctapeppaman]

I experienced this issue too.

[MoreEvilSquid]

Originally posted by BlackSun:

My opinion? It's not actually worth beating for any reason other than to beat it and finish the game. That was one of the worst and most unsatisfying endings to a spectacular game I've ever played. There was really no solid plot and storytelling reasons for it other than I guess they realized they had to end the game somehow but to be perfectly honest the whole game can pretty much be skipped after the conclusion of Episode 4.

Episode 5 was pretty terrible - especially the Emily battle - that "battle" is much better if you don't retrieve Emily/Emma from the Ether

What annoyed me, apart from the rail-roading (my first time through I also was pro-Morty, so was wondering why I would suddenly want to help Holm) - is the fact that it's incredibly obvious they either ran out of time or got really lazy, or both. Re-using areas/assets is fine - every episode reuses the areas from the previous ones - but they usually add something as well. In episode 5, the added "areas" were just random bits we'd already seen, shoved together mostly at random for lame puzzles (reordering people?!). The reuse of the "catacombs" was even worse, since that wasn't exactly the most exciting area to begin with (nor did it make that much sense) - then they added that "memory" crap to it, which amounted to a lot of running around - possibly to extend the playtime as much as possible since there wasn't really much in the way of content, save for the multiple endings (which were cool, apart from the previously-mentioned variation).

Also the sudden "hey surprise, now time has been frozen for everyone but the PC"... what were they thinking? While plenty of things in the game might be asking us to be imaginative with reality (to put it bluntly), this seemingly random magic crap was far, far more annoying than the "sudden reveal" that happened earlier.

Such a shame they didn't think this part of the game through properly, nor implemented it very well. There could have been a whole bit with Holm taking ill, being on his death-bed, and you could have the option to help Morty finish (absorb) him or fend him off or something, plus there could have been more musings/interactions with the guests while this went on. There were definitely possibilities here - hell almost anything would have been better than what ended up making that episode.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Originally posted by MoreEvilSquid:

Originally posted by BlackSun:

My opinion? It's not actually worth beating for any reason other than to beat it and finish the game. That was one of the worst and most unsatisfying endings to a spectacular game I've ever played. There was really no solid plot and storytelling reasons for it other than I guess they realized they had to end the game somehow but to be perfectly honest the whole game can pretty much be skipped after the conclusion of Episode 4.

Episode 5 was pretty terrible - especially the Emily battle - that "battle" is much better if you don't retrieve Emily/Emma from the Ether

What annoyed me, apart from the rail-roading (my first time through I also was pro-Morty, so was wondering why I would suddenly want to help Holm) - is the fact that it's incredibly obvious they either ran out of time or got really lazy, or both. Re-using areas/assets is fine - every episode reuses the areas from the previous ones - but they usually add something as well. In episode 5, the added "areas" were just random bits we'd already seen, shoved together mostly at random for lame puzzles (reordering people?!). The reuse of the "catacombs" was even worse, since that wasn't exactly the most exciting area to begin with (nor did it make that much sense) - then they added that "memory" crap to it, which amounted to a lot of running around - possibly to extend the playtime as much as possible since there wasn't really much in the way of content, save for the multiple endings (which were cool, apart from the previously-mentioned variation).

Also the sudden "hey surprise, now time has been frozen for everyone but the PC"... what were they thinking? While plenty of things in the game might be asking us to be imaginative with reality (to put it bluntly), this seemingly random magic crap was far, far more annoying than the "sudden reveal" that happened earlier.

Such a shame they didn't think this part of the game through properly, nor implemented it very well. There could have been a whole bit with Holm taking ill, being on his death-bed, and you could have the option to help Morty finish (absorb) him or fend him off or something, plus there could have been more musings/interactions with the guests while this went on. There were definitely possibilities here - hell almost anything would have been better than what ended up making that episode.

Honestly it was one of the most amazingly bad ways to end anything that I have ever seen in any story in any medium, vidya, film, show, you name it. They somehow managed to make it worse and worse and worse, like every passing moment just got so much more completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ than the last. I honestly was expecting all along that they were going to do something lame like reveal Mortimer was my father and/or that my own mother is a demon all the way back in Episode 2 at the latest, which is part of why I was trying to find every option possibly available to avoid using that hand chopping contraption because by then I'd already assumed Sarah de Richet was possessed by a demon and trying to trick me into summoning some terrible demon magic into the world or hand Al Azif over to it which ironically enough made the plot twists that much more surprising and I'm all "wait a minute wut you mean she was actually right?"

But Jesus God man, they had an opportunity to even have spooky bits and just took it in such a full ♥♥♥♥♥♥ direction I couldn't even fathom it. This followed by Emma/Emily also being demons because...like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ what? and my sibligns? WHY so to me it was almost like they were trying to sabotage their own work as thoroughly as possible for mysterious reasons I can't even fathom. It's like they did ever thing they possibly could come up with to break suspension of disbelief, remind you you're playing a game, trash the story, insult the player, have the writers insult themselves just by writing it even, I mean it got to the point where I really just didn't give two ♥♥♥♥♥ at the end. The fact I was suddenly completely railroaded for no reason at all was just the last insult and abuse of the player to where they'll stop caring about the game entirely.

I can definitely now say that, no, there isn't really a point to finishing this game; in fact, you'd honestly be better served skipping chapter 5 in its entirety.

Oh and I almost forgot, the one decent thing I thought I did by doublecrossing Holm and Mortimer by writing their true nature and intentions with Piaggi's letter, and I find out that got him thrown in an insane asylum and nearly defrocked? yeah pffft ♥♥♥♥ this game. One of the best games I've played in the first two episodes, still good by three, and then full on insulting retarded the last two.