Questions (Heavy spoiler alert!)

[cptsavarus]

Didn't pay too much attention to this on my first playthrough but now I've started using my brain (not something that gets rewarded much in games these days so it took me a while to warm the old thing up!) I've spotted something that's so obvious it's one of those things you see & just don't think to question.

I've searched the net and the forums and am finding no-one asking or answering this.

Rosaire Armand - the oldest and coincidentally only living human in the village. Why?

I searched his entire property and cannot find a single wolf track or bit of blue ice anywhere on it. Wolf tracks pass directly in front of his drive. Every neighbouring property has something to tell for a Windigo visit, yet he and his property have been completely ignored.

He's a white man, a fire & brimstone christian, a moonshine-fiend and he has some unnerving & seemingly very personal insight into the Windigo and Windigo folklore.

So my question is what is he doing or not doing that the Windigo chooses to leave him alone?

Is he just a convenient plot device?
Is he a complete red herring?
Was his story simply not "given the Windigo treatment" in development?
Is he too old & frail to bother with? / Would the Windigo even stop to discriminate age?
Has he simply done the Windigo or the cree no harm to merit harm in return?
Is there something in his (very stoic) christian beliefs that keeps the thing away?
Is he part Cree & again, is the Windigo in the business of caring about that?

And what's so special about the box in the corner that he tells us not to touch in case we hurt ourselves? Is it possible to get into that box at all?

[Jean-Francois Fiset]

These are good questions :)

For the box, it can't be opened. It contains military supplies, but nothing that can be useful to Carl.

For Rosaire, I'll use the Spoiler formatting. Because I'm not sure if you have completely finished the game, I'll avoid talking about the last part of the game:
As you know, there were 4 people stuck in ice (Gilles Lachance, Gisele Lachance,
Rejean Blouin and Jean-Guy Lamothe). These four people are linked somehow, which is why the Wendigo went after them. Therefore, his path only took him to these 4 specific people.
The Wendigo didn't need go to Rosaire's house or the doctor's, so he simply didn't bother going there.

Rosaire has a few books in his house because as an old man who can barely walks, he has a lot of free time. The "Wendigo book" is actually a book about myths and legends, but only the Wendigo part is relevent to the story.

Hope it answers your questions! Let me know if you need more explanation, I'll gladly answer as soon as I can :)

[cptsavarus]

Thankyou for clarifying that.
I haven't completed the game for myself yet but I watched a let's play of it some time ago, before I knew I'd be buying it, so the plot & ending was mostly already known to me.
More than anything I'm fascinated by all the little details (of which I'm finding many) that alude to sub-plots & relationship intricacies that we don't see explored in the game.
There's a lot of material here & as you can see, I'm totally fuelling my imagination with it! Great fun!

Also you'll probably notice I tend to ask way too many questions that no-one else has thought of!
Who knows though - maybe thinking up the answers to them might give you some inspiration for your future games. Would love to see some of the finer plot points revisited in the next installment.
Thanks again for the response!

[Jean-Francois Fiset]

There is no such thing as "too many questions", especially when you play a mystery game ;)

[cptsavarus]

I'm glad you feel that way... because I have lots more of them! Yay!

To set the stage...

While exploring the village we find references to 6 adults and 3 children who were not party to the death of the young Cree girl & therefore should normally have been safe from the Wendigo.

Some appear to have fled the village (Wilfred & Jeanne Roy) while it's left unclear what happened to the others... Martin Blais and his father; Marie Bedard and her mother, father + 1 unreferenced sibling (the owner of the 2nd bed in Marie's bedroom); and the Cree hunter.

Presumably all but the hunter had left the village, as all the vehicles in the game belong to people who are accounted for.

Toward the end of the game however we find 6 more adults frozen - 2 by the entrance to the Sancutary, 3 in the cemetary and another 2 near the narrow passage after the cemetary.

So my next questions are...

Who are these additional 6 frozen adults?
What were they all doing in & around the cemetary?
If they are the families from the village, where are their cars?...
What became of the 3 children?

And if the 3 children are adult-sized & indeed number those frozen in the cemetary, that leaves the Cree hunter still unaccounted for. What happened to him?

Lastly for now, in the cutscene at the Sanctuary, the narrator tells us...


"A woman had been killed in an unfair accident...
And a young warrior had damned himself to avenger her...
But Hamilton, the one responsible had already been killed...
And so the beast could not quench it's thirst for vengeance...

Sooooo... Rosaire Armand was indeed fair game to the Windigo then - he just wasn't in its path, whereas the others at the cemetary were.
Bringing me to another question for another thread...

[Jean-Francois Fiset]

Alright, these are great questions! Let's jump in! For other readers, I strongly suggest to read the answers only if you have completed the game.

- Who are these additional 6 frozen adults?
The first 2 people you see by the entrance of the Sanctuary are Alexandre Blais and Wilfred Roy. They didn't go with their families because they wanted to warn Gilles Lachance of the danger. However, they couldn't find him, so they tried to escape only to find that the road had been destroyed (landslide). They tried to escape on foot through the forest and got caught by the Wendigo. The others are unknown employees of Cloutier & Fils.

- What were they all doing in and around the cemetery?
Some of them were already in the forest, but the others were trying to escape. Because the road got cut off, the forest was their only hope.

- If they are families from the village, where are their cars?
Alexandre Blais' car is the blue one you find at the landslide. The Cloutier & Fils employees arrived by bus.

- What became of the 3 children?
The Bedards were already out of town (they went to visit Grandma in Lac St-Jean).

- What happened to the Cree hunter?
The Cree hunter was the Cree woman's lover. When she got killed, he became the Wendigo.

I think that covers everything, but let me know if there is still something you need answers to ;)

[cptsavarus]

Nicely addressed. It all ties in very neatly. Thankyou again for the answers.

I like that the Blais & Roy men would've sent their families ahead & gone looking for Gilles . It's the sort of thing I think most men would do.

The Cree hunter puzzles me though.
He was the Wendigo but he was also *tracking* the Wendigo, as we see from his dropped journals.
This seems a bit abstract.
I was under the impression the Cree hunter and the man who became the Wendigo were two different people.

In the real historic folklore of the Wendigo, the process of becoming the creature is descirbed as a descent into madness or duality - the man would still be present in his own mind & could speak and tell you he was still in there - but the creature would take control of his outward actions & the man would often have no memory of what the creature had made him do.

Is this duality what is being portrayed? The hunter hunting his own alter ego, thinking it's a separate creature? Or did I miss a vital piece of exposition?

I'll make this the last question for a while I promise!

[Jean-Francois Fiset]

Oh, my bad! I read too fast I guess :P

Actually, the Cree woman's lover (a man) is the Wendigo. The hunter is another Cree woman whose name is not mentioned in the game.

[cptsavarus]

Aha! Yes, that makes more sense!
The abstract way works too I guess but it did feel a bit out of character with the rest of the game.

I didn't expect the hunter would be a woman though. In my mind I've been hearing the hunting diaries as spoken by a man.
Hearing them as spoken by a woman will tell a whole new perspective. That's very cool!

Where I live if a woman says she's going hunting she either means chasing foxes on horseback or dressing in a short skirt & going to a nightclub...
One who tracks legendary monsters through the Arctic circle sounds much more interesting to me! I like this girl already! Hehe!

Thanks for correcting. It's great that there's so much back-story here that's not in the game - a lot of games make you ask questions but there's no answer to them because the devs never thought one up. It kind of makes game worlds feel hollow when you know there's nothing behind them but programmers sat at desks.
You guys on the other hand seem to have put a lot of thought into the details - and the game really benefits from it - so well done!