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Up until the end, I don't know who built the damn palace for what purpose, and how could the mechanism to restore Foster's soul be invented with the palace?
And so many things unexplained, especially with the exchanges En and London have had.
I agree entirely. The game is masterfully done and feels and looks like there was attention given to every last minuscule detail... accept the story. That part rather shocks me actually. For all the dialogue and all the detailed conversation the story makes no sense. The characters make no sense or the parts they play. Every story (as they teach in school) should deal with the questions, Who, what, when, where and the most important, why. The who is never explained, we never know fully what this place is for, when is nebulous and why is simply non existent. The game feel and architecture is a masterpiece and yet the story is so random and makes so little sense as to be as you stated a miserable failure. Actually, if you took the whole story out and just played the game for the games sake it might actually help the game.
I don't say all this from a pessimists perspective. This game was so amazing in design that it might have been in most gamers collections but instead will only be played by a few. I would recommend they hire a story writer, give them the idea of what they are working with and then update the game. This game could still make it IF they fix the story. The story is dragging the whole game down.
The garden very likely means that he's been teleported to where the immortals actually are. My guess is that they are very good at hiding since London had trouble finding the palace even with exact coordinates. SO... The immortals (living at a differnet location) are basically impossible to find unless you win their little game and get teleported there.
You can just assume their theories were right. Then the palace is just a place people create "because they can". Sort of like a "retirement home" for the ones who are already immortals. It sure looks like one hell of a resort to me. The facilities they have and their grand design. I'm guesing they want to be ambiguous so that they have room to expand if they decided they want a 2nd game.
Actually we can see that the game implies that Foster = Body En = soul. But that just sounds weird to have En in Foster's body. If BOTH body and soul are that of foster's then the whole story would collapse since En was the one who won the challenge and we can clearly see foster's body at the end. Which makes sense since the red cube came from foster's body being digitzed into the red cube circuits. If you collect all the voices you'll notice one of the poems says "all of them you wear again" or something like that. SO En is definitely in there somewhere. After having won, she must had survived the resurrection process in one way or another.
The Galaxy the story takes place in is one where humanity had a technologcally-enabled expansionist boom, then had a sort of galactic-post apacalyptic fall, and is now on the recovery upswing. Ruins and old tech much more advanced than what's current to the story still linger in various corners of the galaxy.
"Resourcefulls" is the name of a cult lead/started by Ein's "grandfather". The cult believes in a pseudo-darwinist philosophy where only the fittest will be able to enter their idea of heaven, which is conceptualized as a giant eternal palace.
To that end, Ein's "grandfather" has been genetically engineering children, then raising them by subjecting them to extreme physical, mental, and competative trials in an effort to create humans who are "fit" enough to enter this heaven. He also had a piece of old pre-collapse tech wich he claimed could digitize a person's soul and thus act as a doorway to heaven. Whenever an acolyte became "fit" enough by his estimation, he would digitize them with this, turning them into a cube, and tell everyone they had gone on to their final challenge to enter heaven.
He may or may not be Ein's biological grandfather, as it's implied she was recruited as a child rather than born into the cult, but those lines could also be interpreted as him probing his genetically engineered children for the fervence/willingness to start their training, rather than recruitment. Similarly, we don't know if the genetic engineering happend before or after birth, but it is mentioned that Ein was genetically modified by the cult as a child.
Ein turned out to be the "fittest" of the children raised by the cult this way, and thus her "grandfather's" star pupil and greatest prize. But at some point she became disallusioned: she never really cared about the whole heaven thing, but played along because if she didn't she'd be killed, and besides she WAS really proud of seeing herself as "fitter" than the rest of humanity, regardless of the reason.
So, when she had the opportunity at some point, she ran away from the cult to find her own way. Turned out she was a bit lazy ouside of the cult's constant pressure though, and kinda selfish/sociopathic as result of the whole darwinan philosophy thing, so she just ended up as a gambling hustler 'cause it was a low-effort way to live well off her skills.
But Grandad wanted his star back, so he hired the mercenary pirates/thieves Foster and London to kidnap her and bring her back. They did so, but Ein used her "resourceful" social skills to manipulate the normally sociopathic Foster into sympathizing with her, and they tried to bust out of Grandad's commune from the inside. It didn't go well, what with the commune being packed with dangerous superhumans and all. Foster got mortally injured in some kind of self-sacrifice ploy because Ein had told him she could resurrect him if she could use grandad's machine to digitize him. Throughout all this, she began to have serious second thoughts about her life direction and self-centered outlook.
Ein took Foster's cube and scarpered with London, who was pissed at her because Foster was killed saving her. He didn't believe her version of the story, but did believe that Foster legit wanted him to help her. Together they flew off to some dark corner of the galaxy where Grandad's cult lore had implied the physical gate to the eternal palace might be, so Ein could try to resurrect Foster like she promised.
Ein finds what she thinks is the eternal palace, but London thinks is a relic of some pre-collapse high-tech playboy mansion (at first he thinks it's a pre-collapse bootleg robot mining facilty, until they get inside and see the furnishings).
Ein gets partway in, and finds a table that matches Grandad's device, so thinks this'll be where she can reconstruct Foster from the cube. Instead it throws her into the whole echo's/blackouts thing.
Much speculation ensues about the blackouts being a big system malfunction, with the echoes being antibodies created by a security system to keep intruders out. Underneath which, Ein still holds out hope that this is really the "final challenge" that Grandad talked about.
In the end, IMO she was digitized, either on completing her challenge, or back when she first put Foster's cube on the table. Foster wakes up in digital heaven, and Ein is now a cube on the table where Foster's cube was, waiting for the next explorer to move her along down the line by sacrificing him/herself in turn.
How much of that system is intentionally designed, or just an intersection of post-collapse myth and a buggy ancient high-tech rich people's toy is left up to the viewer/player.
There is clearly a lot of bespoke code going on, but it's also IMO clear this is a game where they probably had a shockingly tiny budget, but really, REALLY knew how to plan and project manage. I feel like AAA studios/publishers could probably learn a lot from these guys.
That's the really intriguing part isn't it. Constraints are the father of creativity. Really helps demystify the weirdness of the whole thing so I feel less like I'm being mind probed by aliens.