Encyclopedia + Amnesia??

[Icedkocha]

This has been a great game with great lore and worldbuilding so far but I've been having trouble reconciling how the amnesiac detective has a brain that will infodump about random things when at the same time you also need to find someone just to give you a rundown of the world you're living in.

Wonder if there's an in-game explanation for this or if it's just hand-waved away as selective amnesia or something

[holy-death]

It's not that strange to get flashbacks and bits and pieces when exposed to a stimuli.

The same happens on other occassions, when your Motoric skills remind you of how something feels, or how you can instinctively select a phone number, because spontaneous recovery mechanism kicks in (provided you managed to pass the check).

[War]

On early 2000 there was a police serie called John Doe, about man who has amnesia but, at the same time, knows everything. He can answer any question but hes own life and memories.
This is something like that.

[Du-Vu]

That's actually been known to occur with certain forms of real-life amnesia/brain damage. Different kinds of memory, like episodic memory (you, your life, who you are) and semantic memory (facts and ideas) are stored in different parts of the brain, spatial memory (the city you live in, the shape of a room) and procedural memory (certain skills and repetitive tasks, essentially muscle memory) still others. So the brain kind of healing itself, pulling itself together and you remembering things seemingly out of nowhere, that's all potentially more realistic than it sounds. Though it is still a fairly specific, selective damage.

But, you know, given that the pale seems to snip these things out of people's brains and could potentially be involved in your amnesia, there *is* a handwave, but it seems like something a sequel might actually explain eventually.

[Me]

I mean you could try to explain it, but at the end of the day it's just a game mechanic. It's a convenient way to explain why your character doesn't know anything, to give you as the player an excuse to ask questions, explore and pay attention to expotition. I don't think you should look deeper into it than that.

[HiSodiumContent]

Actually, there is an interesting bit of dialogue eventually.

Encyclopedia interrupts a conversation with some random facts, and you're given a couple of dialogue options, one of which is something like "Okay, how about some other facts, like where I live or what my mother's name was?"

To which Encyclopedia just responds. "Nope, I got nothing."