I am describing my experiences here in hopes of comparing them with others’ and figuring out how much of this is by bad design and how much is my own fault. I have not read anything else in this forum section yet, just in case there might still be spoilers – I’m half expecting other people have asked the same questions already; if I can find answers without spoilers somewhere, please direct me.
I was ready to blow up the bleeder and couldn’t find anything else to do anymore. I did have some suspicions that letting C.W. go on with his plans might not be the best idea, but since he urged me to do it, I hadn’t seen any conclusive arguments against it, and most importantly there was nothing else to do, I went ahead and did it. And indeed, there was the bad ending. Bummer. So I started over from the saved game and spent hours re-exploring every nook and cranny of the four spheres, re-read all the texts I found, but still didn’t gain any new insights nor find anything else (other than two clues to earlier puzzles that I was glad I had missed the first time around, because if I had had them, the puzzles would have been much too easy). Still the only thing left to do was blow up that bleeder, which didn’t seem right not only because it had led to a bad ending but also because of the fire it had started (was there no less violent way of switching off that machine?). What I would have liked to do was enter the chambering area, where apparently the pods were being thawed (judging from the steam), and talk to Farley, who seemed the most knowledgeable and trustworthy person around. But that area was closed off and all my attempts at reopening the doors failed. So, finally, out of frustration at not finding any alternative, I went ahead and blew up the bleeder again, this time pulling the battery plug before, even though I didn’t have high hopes that that would change anything, because surely C.W. would just plug it right in again before starting his machinery. And lo and behold, that was the good ending. Meh. How could I have known?
Was there any way I could have known
- that activating the tree with battery power would swap the sphere back into the same time as we see outside of Mofang (which is clearly undesirable)?
- that C.W. would not check his plug on the way to the tree?
- that letting the tree activate without battery power would swap to a good place/time? And all four spheres together, at that?
I could have guessed at all those with some probability, but was there a way of learning for sure that I missed?
I would have liked to end this game with a sense of achievement, of having correctly applied everything I had learned and having made the right decisions. Instead I didn’t get to make any decisions (there was only one thing left to do – with a possible small variation that seemed insignificant), and all I got, even in the best case of hitting the good ending first, was a sense of luck of having made the right guesses. Surely that can’t have been Cyan’s intention?
Also, I still have some rather large questions on my mind that I was expecting to get answers to before the end, but didn’t.
- Why are the Mofang attacking their neighbors?
- How are they attacking? (Is the dodecahedron that I disabled in Maray a bomb and the attack consisted of swapping these into the neighbor spheres? I still need to try what happens when I approach it without disabling it before. Probably a very bad ending. I do want to try that Mofang seed-swapping device though, it looks much more elegant than the human and Villein ones…)
- What happened on the day of the expected attack? Apparently things didn’t go as planned, but what was the plan and what happened instead?
- How long ago was that? (Probably C.W. told me some time and I forgot.)
- Where are the Mofang now? I didn’t see anyone in Mofang. Were they killed by a part of the “return to them whatever they send to kill us” plan that had worked?
- Was the destruction on Earth outside Mofang the Mofang’s doing? (Probably not, I don’t think they had a way of leaving their sphere, otherwise we would too. It was probably the humans’ doing, and what the abduction collectively saved us from.)
- Where did the swapped Mofang parts in Kaptar and Maray come from? I didn’t see any Kaptar or Maray parts in Mofang.
Again I can make some vague guesses at all those from the information I have (except the first, which remains a big mystery), but is there a way I could have learnt any of this from the game with certainty? (If the answer is “yes”, please don’t say anything more specific than “yes” to any of them, I would like to find it on my own.)
Would C.W. have told me any of this if I had visited him more often? I deliberately avoided talking to him for most of the game (between before unlocking the cell membrane and before blowing up the bleeder), because I suspected he would give me hints on what to do, and I didn’t want any hints, I wanted to figure out stuff on my own. And when I did visit him at the end, all he did was urge me to blow up the bleeder. I’m going to try this next time I play.
While I’m ranting, another minor thing that confused me was that I have no idea how I opened the door behind the injured Villein. I could find no way of opening it, and then suddenly at one point I returned and it was open. The Villein had said “222” to me and I was not sure what to make of that. I did at one point verify that pod 222 contained Josef, as recorded in the notebook (he had not been abducted by the Mofang to construct their Fake-Josef). Was that what opened the door?
And speaking of him, what, from an OOC, game-design point of view, was the point of Fake-Josef? The existence of his video messages would have made sense if later I had had to make a decision whether to trust him or not, but there was no such decision. And he didn’t give me any useful clues either. Was that one of the parts of the game that was planned but removed?
Okay, now this all probably sounds very negative. That’s not what I want to express, don’t get me wrong. I did enjoy the game, it is for the most part awesome and of the Cyan quality I was craving for. I’m just confused by how my first play-through ended, and, to get some sense of closure, trying to get that confusion cleared up. Writing it down already helped to some extent. Maybe some things will clear up on their own when I play it a second time, which I will certainly do, if only because I want to play it in VR after playing it on the screen.
. But I did go through the manifest to look at a few things. I mean, Rand was in there! And yes, a few were labeled "book". So I checked them out. There really was no need to actually view the associated pods (although I did), but the manifest clearly points out that some were used for storage, as well as saving everyone but the Mofang.