Warning titangraph ahead but with a game like this I enjoy sharing the thoughts.
Finished the game last night and really enjoyed reading everyone's takes on the story and their reasoning for picking the ending they picked.
I think that's what great story writing is about. Eliciting emotional and logical responses from the viewer.
Numbered systems for ratings often do a disservice to the work done by the team, but if I had to give the game as a whole a rating I'd go with a strong 9/10.
The game is being critically acclaimed for all the right reasons so I won't rehash every thing I liked about the game in detail because for the most part we all agree, the gameplay, graphics, music, pacing, the story, characters, enemies, the world, etc. all of it, was just top tier bar raising stuff.
Where the game falls short of perfection to me is in 2 things.
1. Lack of map inside the actual "stages" or POIs (for lack of a better way to put it). Not the end of the world of course, but a bit more than a mild annoyance especially in some areas where it was a little less than clear where you had to go and what areas were available to explore.
2. The story (which is really the point of this thread and I'm glad to see so many great takes on the options each person went with).
The story is amazing, however, with a story this great, the gaps are a bit easier to spot. Quite a bit of critical narrative information is tucked away in the expedition journals and even still it isn't right on the nose as you would hope it to be. A couple key plot points felt rushed; The plot twist itself - revealing that we are essentially in "the matrix"of sorts, was a bit jarring, which was never fully remedied since they didn't spend time fleshing out what the outside or "real" world was really about. It introduced a ton of narrative questions like - Who are "the writers"? Why are they at odds with "the painters"? How in the world do the painters have magical special powers? Do the writers have powers? I don't feel like the gommage itself was properly explained- sure we learn that it wasn't the paintress actually killing everyone, she was actually warning everyone of what Renoir was doing, which he was triggering the gommage as a way to try and force his family out of the painting, but even knowing that, why did he tie the gommage to be yearly? Why did it effect people sequentially and not randomly?
For the ending specifically, I enjoy that there is no "canon" ending, and the fact that neither choice leaves you full happy with how everything ends. I chose Maelle's ending but that was after staring at my screen for at least 10 minutes weighing everything that happened with the possibility of what would happen if the painting was destroyed. Neither decision felt 100% right and I'm cool with that. On one hand, as a father, I felt like the right thing would have been to reunite the family at all costs and say "screw the matrix". On the other hand, I thought, this fake existence has been the only thing that has brought joy to Maelle and in the real world, her mother is dying, her father is old, her sister is ready to go to war, so what quality of life will she have anyway? My thought was, she might be in the real world for a little bit, just to suffer and die anyway. The saddest part to me was honestly Verso. With him, I empathized the most. He felt caught in the middle and regardless of your choice, Verso was either going to die a quick death, or suffer in a phony existence where his only function is to ease Maelle's pain. In either scenario, Verso loses himself, and never truly gets to rest in peace. Seeing him sadly play the piano at the end was actually tough to watch. It really did make me second guess my decision.
" doesn't math at all
