My interpretation of the story (spoilers)

[ani444]

So, after playing the game this is how I generally interpreted the series of events. I've only played the game once so maybe there's some stuff I'm missing, and maybe all of this is obvious and doesn't need to be said, but here I go:

So, I think it's safe to say the game takes place on some type of apocalyptic world. Rising sea levels, dead land that used to be full of life, terrible storms every night. It's not clear if this is a natural disaster or climate change related, but it's not important. Some guy named Hector starts a religion about how he saved his followers from an evil demon using a magic item called the Moon Sliver. I'm going to go out and say it now, I don't think there are any actual supernatural elements in this game. I think this religion this false, and the other examples of potential paranormal stuff are just metaphorical. The demon in this instance represents death/despair, and the moon sliver represents hope. Hector knows that humans will lose their hope in the upcoming bleak future, so creates a fake religion all about not giving into despair and death, with the Moon Sliver just being a random object that's meant to give his followers a physical item to latch onto and believe in.

However, he also goes against his own narrative, and writes about how the demon isn't truly evil and wants to help his followers. I take this as Hector himself becoming depressed and nihilistic at the thought of this apocalyptic world at one point, and in a moment of weakness writes passages that are basically meant to tell his followers to just kill themselves to avoid living in this world. He soon comes to his senses and destroys these scriptures. But not before one young boy sees them. Our protagonist, Abel.

Years later, and there are only 4 survivors. Abel, Daniel, Isa, and Ellie. I don't know if these are the only survivors in the whole world or just in this area, but again not important. The four live together in a peaceful but ultimately hollow and depressing life. It’s shown that there’s some tension between Isa and Ellie, but the main trouble comes when Ellie gets into a relationship with both Daniel and Abel at the same time. It’s implied that Daniel was Ellies main partner and Abel was the secret affair partner, also maybe Abel and Isa were together as well, but the point is that this affair comes to light, ending with major emotional and potentially physical conflict between the involved parties (Ellies room is extremely messy and disorganised, which leads to believe that some sort of fight took place there).

All of these events cause Abel to snap. One of the few things that gave him relief in this terrible world, his relationships with his friends, has now been permanently damaged. It’s shown in a note that Abel has a sort of alternate personality of sorts, his “sin” as he calls it. I don’t know how literal we are meant to take it (personally I think it just means that Abels darkest desires will take control of him, not literally that he gets possessed by a different person). First, he steals and destroys the Moon Sliver. I think he does this to let the demon out, though not the demon as described in the religious scriptures, but instead his own personal demons that are building up inside him.

He ambushes and kills Ellie while she’s in the storage bunker, and then does the same to Daniel when he goes to look for her (the bit where he asks Isa about the combination to the storage safe is probably part of him planning the murders). All of the stuff about claws and growling and all of that is metaphorical. Abel isn’t literally a fantasy monster; the monster is inside of him. Then he goes into the mountain and waits for Isa, who eventually finds him. He explains that he destroyed the Moon Sliver and the truth about the scriptures that Hector destroyed and Isa, not wanting to be taken by the demon (she’s super into the religion and 100% buys into all of it), kills herself. Abel, returning to his “normal” self, spends one more day on the island reminiscing about everything that happened before going back to the mountain and confronting the “demon” which is really just his sin self that was mentioned earlier. Him confronting it at the end I think represents him confronting what he did as well as this dark side of himself. Then, Abel dies, presumably freezing to death on his own inside of the mountain. The ending credits literally being the player moving closer to “the light” as Abel accepts his death.

[Goldrust]

Perfect synopsis cleared a few things up for me thank you