I really, really wanted to like this game. And as a game, and only a game, it's really good. Gameplay is solid, exploration feels rewarding, and the music is absolutely fantastic. However, I ultimately play narrative heavy games for, well, the narrative.
And the narrative is also really good... at the beginning. The beginning for this game is fantastic. You get extremely likeable, well written characters and one heck of a hook. The dialogue feels realistic and punchy, and even things like the "conclude battle result screen" button being labeled as "we continue" is incredibly thematic.
And then, halfway throuhg this game, this all stops.
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spoilers from now on
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After an act II of mostly nothing narrative-wise, this game does the worst type of reveal, the "it was all a dream" kind. Almost all the mysteries regarding this world turn out to not matter (it is like that because it was just cool to make it like that) or the explanations are nonsensical (like the countdown). And with that, the focal point of a narrative completely shifts from preventing a genocide to... "family is complicated". The family in question being the perpetrators of said genocide, the reason for it being that the pater familias here believes it is the most secure way to deal with his wife who is dying from her coping mechanism for her son's death.
That's it. The reason this one guy is fine mass murdering hundreds of thousands to millions of people is, uh, sick wife. that's... uh...
By the way, the game namedrops the word genocide too (in a journal entry). Make of that what you will.
And for all the remaining runtime of a game, I was deep in denial that there had to be more. There had to be a twist, more to the story, more to... This. I had just seen an entire city, children included, on screen, being melted into nothingness. But there isn't. The other two main characters that weren't in on the whole thing have literally a couple lines (optional. At camp) about being now the endlings of their entire species and also the fact that they were betrayed for the sake of this merry family of monsters. And then they give you one sidequest each. About what? their family, of course.
Everything in this chapter is about family, and specifically, that family. They aren't treated as horrifying people who willingly murder (and in the case of the older sister, torture) others for their convenience and gain, but as a grieving family that we are not only supposed to empathise with, but whose point of wiew we are supposed to adopt.
I went the rest of the game thinking this was a setup. It-it had to be! Even the other characters (whoops my entire species was just wiped away) don't display neither horror nor anger towards this family and their situation. They, too, think like that. It's like their entire personalities got erased sometimes during act II in favor of the new twink mary sue, who becomes the new protagonist. One character's quest about her grief about the loss of her husband and child literally ends with "well but now they will be resurrected after all of this so yeah". It had to be a setup. It had to.
"Your father really believes in you" who the f cares! He melted thousands of children! No one even hints at anything like this. And when they face the father, who did all of this, what are they talking about? you guessed it, family is complicated. The question of "but what about these very much sentient people and beings" comes up exactly once, from the mouth of the "unstable" 16 year old and is dismissed with some nonsense catchphrase.
The end is framed as "escapism vs facing reality". For these four people. at the cost of myriads of lives, children included. I guess it sucks being one of those Lumièrans kids! I'm sorry you did not get to live to adulthood, but you see, you happened to be born here instead of there in a massive mansion inhabited exclusively by rich psychopaths who we are, inexplicably, supposed to feel bad for. It is a way of viewing the world that, in the real world, it almost esclusively adopted by extreme reactionaries. It is such a deranged framing that I don't even know what to compare it to. I can't even properly explain the scale of awful this is because, at least to me, it is self evident.
In the "true" ending, you can see the family grieving over the tomb of the son, with tearful embraces and somber, but hopeful music. A grieving family. Not a mass murderer and his accomplice that got away with everything, and will continue to. A grieving, f*cking family. A family of, frankly, absolute lunatics who are only able to communicate with each other via lying or abuse. This is not how people who even remotely love each other work.
It's not so much that all the story was redundant (if the expedition had failed, the girl would have jsut woken up and the father would have won the war anyway). It's not that everyone dies at the end. it's not that I am supposed to empathise with monsters. It's not that the monsters win and get away with it. It is that this is not shown, even remotely, as horrific. It's that I am supposed to see them as a grieving family who got some needed closure and are looking hopefully to the future with acceptance. It's the fact that the horror at the loss of so many innocent lives is not even remotely aknowledged, not in this ending, not in the other one, not anywhere after the secold half of the game.
"And the other ending?" you get a honest to god jumpscare. It is the one labeled as the escapism one. You also trap twink mary sue there, which in my opinion deserves it, but it is still wrong. Lives of everyone there are also just slightly extended, as of course once the girl's time is up they are getting melted once again, and is also not clear whether their quality of life is any good, or if they are living, so to say, under a spell. But again, their wellbeing is not the focus. The focus is, once again, just the fact that "escapism kills you". Whatever the developers say, the community at large has labeled this one as the bad ending. And it is obvious why. The dichotomy of facing reality versus escapism that literally kills you has an obvious right choice. It doesn't help that this ending has, again, a jumpscare.
In the end, the game's writers just don't want you to approach this narrative in a way that makes sense with its beginning, and what is being objectively shown on screen.
I whole heartedly agree with the popular statement that great art is supposed to be, in some way, disquieting. It is meant to make you ask uncomfortable questions. Unfortunately, I think I already had an answer to the question of the trolley problem with one family of 3 absolute dipsh*ts and one girl on one side, and the entirety of everyone who ever lived in an entire world on the other. And I have a feeling that this game would not like it very much, nor does it want to ask it.
It's worse than a bad story. Because then, I would dropped it. It's a disappointing story.
One last word about the devs: I absolutely don't think the writers are terrible people and/or reactionaries. At all. I have no reason to believe this. I hope my choice of words made this clear, but this is the internet. Game develpment times are long, for a double AA studio they are even longer, and stories can change dramatically from start to end of development. Studios like this one also have multiple writers, so preserving an authorial direction of themes like you would in a literary novel is very difficult. It is possible that the de facto leaders of the writing group changed during development. It is possible that someone had the idea for the city and the expeditions and the numbers, but no idea about the causes yet, so that blank was left to be filled by consensus. It is also possible that the writers simply wanted to talk about different things at some point, and they were unwilling to ditch so much of the story and characters that they had already written. It is possible that they were also really committed to having one ending where the world ends and another were it lingers on for a little longer, like Dark Souls (which was clearly an inspiration), and they needed some way to make this palatable to the player, and who cares if characters act nonsensically for it. The final choice would become really f*cking easier if your friends were pleading for their lives in front of their murderer, wouldn't it? There is one quest that is framed as if it will have consequences, but no. All that talk about trust? It's nothing. It just unlocks a skill. Amazing.
