Can't achieve the Selfish/painter ending

[RobinMc4]

I played the game and achieved the classic loop/wife ending many times and the wife and child ending once. I found many guides, some walkthrough step by step and video but almost everything is outdated due to the age of the game.
If I understand correctly the game work with a system of points promoting one end or another depending on the items you collect (mostly whispering items).

For the Selfish ending you need to avoid the ghost of your wife at all cost, don't let her kill you a single time, and do not push her wheelchair at the end.
Follow path of the rats and collecting rat drawings should helps too.

But I can't achieve this end it seems, no matter if it's a new game or a game with all collectibles.

Is there a way to see the points given by each items to help me? I know I should avoid anything relative to the wife (burning notes, her handwrite letters, jewelry, perfume) but I'm not sure for some items for the painter like the knife, the clock, the bandages, the phone and other.

Any help is welcome, I become tired of trying endlesly to get the last end T.T

[RobinMc4]

Okay I finally got the painter ending.

For those who seek help I basically did a speedrun on my game with all collectibles previously gather (so neutral score point from the beginning):
-Absolutely no items picked up in the run appart for the obligatory ones (engagement ring, skin/canvas, blood/paint, undercoat/bone, hair/brush, finger, witness/eye) AND the cranck which is in the chapter 5, in the closet next to the bottle of whiskey.
-Ofc I avoid all death and absolutely all encounter I can with the wife. I did not push the wheelchair once again. I even totally ignored the little room in the last chapter with the wife portrait and all her belongings that you can gather normally during the game.
-I followed the rats and used the cranck instead of the chain in the Chapter 5. I used the second cranck in the dark room with the big hole too to bring back the portraits hanging in the air.

I hope I forgot nothing and it will help.

[sylence]

I'm currently in the same boat. Tried to follow lots of different guides, the tips written down here and even followed a full YouTube playthrough as close as possible. However, I've never been able to trigger the painter or family ending. Frustrated, I've chosen to do a bit of reverse engineering and attached dnSpyEx to the game to debug it during runtime.

So far I have a rough idea of what the issue could be. In general, the different actions taken during gameplay award points to one of three categories (see below). The points gathered through these actions count either towards just one of the endings or both. At the end of the game, you only get the Art or Family ending if you satisfy the minimum of required points for ONE of these endings. If you have scored more points than required for both of them, the game will fall back to the Neutral (loop) ending. If you don't achieve enough points for any of the Art or Family endings, you will also get the Neutral one. That's what most guides will tell you, but they never get more specific than that.

Let's have a look at some numbers (taken from the current game version 1.1.1).
The Art ending requires a minimum of 190 points, the Family ending 200. Points are gathered from three categories:
* "DefaultPoints": I haven't looked into that yet, but I suspect that these are accumulated points from various encounters during the game. There are various point groups with names such as "choice", "death" or "rat" which each award a certain amount of points to the different endings.
* "PersistentPoints": No clue, was zero in my case.
* "PaintingsPoints": Looking at things awards points in four categories of paintings. These are "Mirrors", "Paintings", "ChildDrawing" and "Wife". Mirrors and Paintings count towards the Art ending, the other two towards Family. Looking at a painting of each category awards 0.05 points per seconds up to a maximum of 20 points. For example, to maximize the PaintingsPoints for the Art ending, one would have to look for ~6.6 minutes at mirrors and another ~6.6 minutes at arbitrary paintings that don't show his wife.

Now back to my issue: After having received another Neutral ending and using the "Finish It" menu option to start another playthrough, I immediately started with 229 points for the Art ending and 183 points for the Family ending. All of these points came from the "DefaultPoints" category. Starting a playthrough with so many points would make it impossible to get anything but the Neutral ending, because the final score will always exceed the requirements for both Art and Family endings at the same time and therefore fall back to the Neutral ending. I'm not sure if this is intentional or a bug. It looks like the DefaultPoints aren't reset when continuing a run with "Finish It".

After explicitly starting a "New Game" from the main menu (on the same save slot), all points are properly reset to zero. I have yet to verify that this fixes my issues...

[sylence]

Confirmed. "New Game" resets DefaultPoints, which are the points accumulated from events (pick up items, experience encounters, take decisions) during a run. "Finish It" doesn't reset that score, which can lead to an inifinite loop if the scores for both endings are already too high from having seen too many encounters.

PaintingsPoints only accumulates up to 20 points in the "Paintings" category, the others (Mirrors, ChildDrawing and Wife) are unused. PersistentPoints are gathered from collectibles (the family photos and letters that go into that little book and rat drawings) and award up to 48 points to each ending.

I've created a list of all encounters/items and the amount of points they add to each ending. All guides I've seen just assume stuff about the impact of certain encounters and are in many cases misleading. Due to the points system, they might still work (if "New Game" is used).

Will publish all that in a blog post when I find the time.