Brilliant game, can't say I cared for the ending (Massive Spoiler Discussion, obviously)

[jack_of_tears]

I loved the game. I thought it was quirky, thoughtful, artistic as hell and dripping with atmosphere. The characters and their relationships were both aloof and engaging, the choices in character build were entertaining and often rewarding, while the mechanics were both unique and memorable.

That said, I felt the ending was a non-sequitur, with the murderer's identity coming completely out of nowhere and the encounter with the phasmid adding an odd surreal aspect that - while cool - really muddied the conclusion.

Not to mention, it was incredibly anticlimactic and the exposition dump at the end, with your team, felt awkward and unnecessary.

I get that they were trying to say 'not all endings are tidy, not all cases fit together like a puzzle, and not everything can be what you wanted or expected' ... but that doesn't make it good.

Still, an incredible game and I hope we get the sequel they are clearly danging in front of us with the ending.

[Me]

I think the point was that the murderer's identity wasn't who he was, but what he was. As in, he was a communist still figthing his revolution. It was the political conflict of the world that caused the murder, not one person. As such it didn't really come out of nowhere, since that had been dead center through the whole game.

If you have enough Inland Empire to talk to the corpse and ask it who killed it, it will even say "communism".

[Nokturnal]

Any detective plot where the "Who dunnit?" is revealed at the end and wasn't any of the characters you spent the majority of the story talking with is a "Cop Out" hehe

But yea, the ending was pretty bad writing compared to the rest of the game, even the possibilities of the shoot out felt lacking because as far as I know, there's no way to even stop it from happening and have a peaceful solution, no matter how good of a detective you were. On top of having a basically impossible skill check during it.

[Queen Memory]

Originally posted by Nokturnal:

Any detective plot where the "Who dunnit?" is revealed at the end and wasn't any of the characters you spent the majority of the story talking with is a "Cop Out" hehe

But yea, the ending was pretty bad writing compared to the rest of the game, even the possibilities of the shoot out felt lacking because as far as I know, there's no way to even stop it from happening and have a peaceful solution, no matter how good of a detective you were. On top of having a basically impossible skill check during it.

The check is literally impossible. I rolled a 21 against a 20 and still failed.

[ironyuri]

You obviously missed a key line earlier in the game, as Harry says:

Everything is connected to *everything*.

That's what the ending is all about. It was a stereo-investigation.

[ironyuri]

To expand on previous post:

Originally posted by Nokturnal:

Any detective plot where the "Who dunnit?" is revealed at the end and wasn't any of the characters you spent the majority of the story talking with is a "Cop Out" hehe.

The ending was in no way a 'cop out'. If you didn't understand it, you may need to go back to the game and explore more deeply.

The entire game, the structure of the narrative is about the return of the past/the eruption of the past into the present. The problem of forgetting/remembering, living with the past in the present and the contradictions this raises.

What we find at the end of the game is that the past ... you know, that thing we've been chasing after or sifting through during the entire game/narrative: the protagonist's past, or the city's past... continually comes back to haunt the present (the past is never dead).

What we find at the end is that something/someone the world had forgotten was not forgotten but still acting in the present. The past still influences the present and shapes the future.

This is reflected in the narrative as a whole (what happens to the world) and in the individual protagonist's journey/story. His past comes back to haunt him again and again, in dreams, in waking life, and at the end in the closing dialogue with his colleagues. He can't escape his past and neither can Revachol.

Everyone has to negotiate the contradictions of the past in order to make a new reality.

[jack_of_tears]

Originally posted by ironyuri:

To expand on previous post:

Originally posted by Nokturnal:

Any detective plot where the "Who dunnit?" is revealed at the end and wasn't any of the characters you spent the majority of the story talking with is a "Cop Out" hehe.

The ending was in no way a 'cop out'. If you didn't understand it, you may need to go back to the game and explore more deeply.

Yeah, yeah, I get the metaphors but Nokturnal is correct in that making the killer someone you've never met and have no attachment to in the game, nor could have deduced by any amount of careful investigation, undermines the entire 'mystery' narrative.

It's great that the answer was 'communism' and the ending was about the theme of power of the past, but they could have made that same point without flushing the mystery. It would have been an easy thing to have any one of the characters you've come to know reveal a very similar motivation while also allowing you to feel like your actions over the previous days really mattered.

Yes, the realization that none of it was terribly important is part of the 'twist' but not all twists, or hamfisted metaphors, make for a good ending.

Yet, even if you take that in stride, it doesn't solve the other problems with the ending, mentioned in the original post.

[ironyuri]

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre itself.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/nov/20/how-agatha-christie-hides-plot-secrets-the-murder-of-roger-ackroyd

The narrator did it. Roger Ackroyd was murdered by Dr James Sheppard, the very man who tells us about his death. He only admits to his crime in the final chapter, claiming that the whole account leading up to the revelation as “the history of one of [Hercule] Poirot’s failures”. But as with the best Christie mysteries, the clues are there all along, hidden in plain sight.

There is no rule that we must meet the eventual murderer. A detective story can be equally about the detective's failure as his/her success.

And in DE, the clues really are there all along, hidden in plain sight ... just like the eventual murderer who has been hiding himself often in plain sight for decades. The case itself is more a catalogue of your failings than your successes. You succeed in spite of yourself (given you've thrown the case into total chaos in the immediate period before the game's narrative begins), and you can never find a satisfying way to tie all the loose ends up. The reason we expect a clean 'Whodunnit' is because we want to make the same leaps of logic as the protagonist - because those leaps of logic resolve all the contradictions and safely allow us to ignore those things that don't add up.

The ending is also abrupt and unexpected because, as the game has been telling us all along: life can be abrupt and unexpected. "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." In this case, there is a week in which decades of unresolved contradictions begin to unravel themselves and tensions explode. But beneath it all, the motives that set everything in motion remain human.

If your perception is high enough, you find the bullet. If you uncover the old arms cache you infer that it was an old military grade rifle. In the secret backroom you find the bootprints that don't belong to any known suspect, and they're recent. On the balcony you find the white flowers, which Harry constantly mulls over -- an old monarchist and later revolutionary symbol. The case constantly points away from any of the known suspects, none of the loose ends are ever tied up. Nobody heard the gunshot. Etc. etc. etc.

The ending may feel unsatisfying because the writers were clever enough to obfuscate the true motives: (2) The character and motives of the criminal should be normal. In the end, the killer's motives are purely human and mundane. They have nothing to do with high politics, the machinations of the Union or the company, they aren't part of some illicit drug ring with ties to a big city mob boss in Jamrock, it's not some international conspiracy hunting down an ex-corporate spy or a false flag to initiate a massacre. It is pure human jealousy.

[sircul2]

Originally posted by jack_of_tears:

Yeah, yeah, I get the metaphors but Nokturnal is correct in that making the killer someone you've never met and have no attachment to in the game, nor could have deduced by any amount of careful investigation, undermines the entire 'mystery' narrative.

It's great that the answer was 'communism' and the ending was about the theme of power of the past, but they could have made that same point without flushing the mystery. It would have been an easy thing to have any one of the characters you've come to know reveal a very similar motivation while also allowing you to feel like your actions over the previous days really mattered.

Yes, the realization that none of it was terribly important is part of the 'twist' but not all twists, or hamfisted metaphors, make for a good ending.

Yet, even if you take that in stride, it doesn't solve the other problems with the ending, mentioned in the original post.

Except you could have deduced it. There were hints throughout the entire game, from investigating the body, to investigating the window in klaassje's room, to the encounter with Ruby. There was always something off about the case that even Kim picks up on. It isn't as if the ending came out of nowhere, the signs were there from the start.

[Du-Vu]

Eh. It's not a classic resolution of the formulaic murder mystery, but that's really pretty far away from the intent at that point. It's a man with no memory adrift in a world he doesn't understand, throwing himself into one posture or another in an attempt to find meaning, when really, at the end of it all, he's just another loser who couldn't make it with a woman. That's the deserter, that's you, that's Lely, Titus, Rene, and maybe Ruby too.

The story is all about two groups of people ready to go to war over something that they *know* is a lie from the very beginning, punishing whoever they can reach because they have no idea how to really get any kind of actual justice. What does that really sound like?

Meanwhile, if they'd really ever stopped to look, they'd see the horror of the pale, or the wonder of the phasmid, both just hiding in plain sight all this time. Trite? Remote? Sure. But if justice boils down to Titus and his posse or the mercenaries and their 'tribunal', maybe we're all just fooling ourselves that we're fighting over something more important than those little things.

The mystery you're solving by the end of the game is about a lot more than who killed Lely, a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it's pretty hard to care about. Instead, the killer, the union, the phasmid, the 2mm hole -- those things are all connected, and the mystery of *how* is what you actually end up solving. To paraphrase one of the great murder mysteries: murder was just a red herring.

[kirill-busidow]

It was lame that murderer was not one of list of suspects and just came out of nowhere in end. You dont even meet him untill end of game.

[general ripper]

Technically the murderer's identity doesn't just come out of no-where.

With high enough hand/eye coordination you can complete a red check to catch some flowers left by the murderer on Klaasje's roof terrace. Even simply encountering the flowers but not catching them (they get blown away by the wind or something if you fail the check) is enough for your character to make the connection when meeting the murderer finally.

[Sisyphus]

As yuri said, there isn't any real reason a murderer has to be around in plain sight. That just leads to ♥♥♥♥♥♥ "gotcha" writing, or plot twists a player would feel annoyed about if they happened to predict it.

The ending was great and wrapped the various thematic threads together in a clever way, totally disagree with people who didn't like it.

[Chicago Ted]

Well, the Phasmid was certainly way out there. I definitely wasn't expecting that.

[Air Raider]

Sure, the bug affecting the guy with pheromones was a factor, as was his "crush" on the girl (see: the flowers he left on her roof), but I think the biggest factor was his role as Edgar's hitman. During that conversation, you find that Edgar is the one pulling the Union strings, not Evrert. The killing of the mercenary was almost certainly a task from Edgar to set up the "war" the Union so desperately wanted. Hell, he admits to others right then and there though he tries to be coy about killing the previous Union leader. When you bring this up to the old commie, he clams up real quick and refuses to "snitch". Kim mentions something like, "oh well, we'll figure it out later when he's in custody".

Sure, it's not explicitly laid out, but there's enough there to go on. I felt satisfied with the ending.