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Episode 11 – The Last Door
1.8k Plays8 months ago
In our LONGEST EPISODE YET Roses and Matt take on the monumental task of summarizing all of The Last Door. All 2 seasons. All 8 chapters. We also talk about Roses' birthday, April's amazing adventure game releases, BREAKING GOLDEN BACHELOR NEWS, kneecap tattoos, and an annoying podcast Matt listened to.
Email us! mattandroses@gmail.com
Games Mentioned:
- Botany Manor
- Strange Horticulture
- The Legend of Skye
- Monkey Island II
- The Last Door
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Transcript
Introduction and Breaking News
00:00:00
Speaker
Pushing up roses. Yes. Before we record. Yes. We have a breaking, we have breaking news. We do. In the world of the world. Is this something to do with a adventure game? So this is breaking news. Tell me. Something horrible has happened.
00:00:18
Speaker
Oh my God, what is it? I can't even come up with like a clever scenario. Just tell me, what is it? Are you sitting down? I am sitting down. I'm sitting down and I'm drawing trees. You strapped in, you got your seatbelt on? I can put a ribbon over my lap. Hey, you got your helmet? Dude, I don't wear a helmet. I'm from Chicago. You got your cape? Yes, I always have my cape.
00:00:47
Speaker
Okay, here's the news. That'll help. I know this is gonna, it's gonna be hard to record after this, but I'm just, I'm gonna say it and then we'll start the episode and then, you know, we're just gonna try to put it out of our heads. My anxiety is so high. It should be.
Golden Bachelor Drama
00:01:02
Speaker
All right. Great. The Golden Bachelor Jerry Turner is getting a divorce from Teresa. No! We were rooting for him. We were all rooting for him.
00:01:32
Speaker
You know, I bet it's, what I bet it is, is I bet like, he, she just couldn't stand the fact that he cried every single day.
00:01:42
Speaker
And she was just like, God, I thought it was just for this show. Right. Right. This man does not stop crying. Like that. Yeah, that would bother me. I'd be like, whoa. If my partner was just crying all the time, what do we need to do to like solve this? What's going on? That's what I thought when I was watching the Golden Bachelors. Like, how do we?
00:02:06
Speaker
How do we stop this from the crying? Because it seems to be most of what he can do with his face. Yeah. Shouldn't he be not crying because he found like the love of his life? Like, aren't we beyond the sand? I'm not trying to shame anyone, by the way, for crying is good. That's a good thing. But, you know,
00:02:27
Speaker
First, he was crying because his wife died. Then he was crying because the show was stressful. Then he was crying because he was in love. Then he was crying because he was in love with two people. Then he was crying because he was happy. And it's like, dude, there is a time where you can stop crying.
00:02:45
Speaker
No, every emotion is crying for him. Before, just start crying, you're good. And now he's getting divorced, so this
Podcast Identity and Banter
00:02:54
Speaker
guy is just crying forever. He's gonna cry for the rest of his life.
00:02:57
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to our podcast. Welcome to Save Your Game. We're a podcast about narrative games, like adventure games usually pretty much that. I'm mad on camp. You are? Yeah, that's me. I just learned your name today, amazing.
00:03:19
Speaker
And I am pushing up roses. Hello, everyone. Welcome back. I hope you took the news well about The Bachelor. I hope you're not all shaken because we're just going to start talking about a pretty heavy game. So we're starting with heavy news, hard news. And then we're going to go, what are we talking about today? Actually, first of all, we should talk about what we've been playing. Totally forgot about that second. First, wait, before that, hold on. Before that.
00:03:49
Speaker
day.
Kneecap Tattoo Experience
00:04:08
Speaker
Yes, I look great and I got my I haven't been playing anything because I got my kneecap tattooed and I'm dying Literally dying for every year. Do you get one giant tattoo that makes you want to die?
00:04:25
Speaker
pretty much, but listen, listen. So this was my birthday tattoo. This is what I did for my birthday. And I had this really awkward area on my leg. It was like in between my knee on the side of my knee. And I'm like, for some reason- We all have that. Hold on. We all have that awkward area. You said I have an awkward area between my knee. We all have that area.
00:05:00
Speaker
Oh dear. So I have this blank space and for I, you know, I did it to myself in the email. I said, quote, I don't mind if it goes on the kneecap. Why'd I do that? Why'd I do that? Why did I do that? So I, oh man, I kid you not. This is the worst tattoo I ever sat for. It was my worst sit. Um, he had to, my artists had to have a death grip on me. I was shaking. Um,
00:05:16
Speaker
It's not what I meant, I meant not tattooed, like a blank space.
00:05:29
Speaker
you know, the kneecap is just bone, you know, it's just bone. And so that's so painful. And by the end, like the outline I sat pretty well for. And then by the end, I was, I was making noises to try to help that does help, by the way, I don't know if you guys know that, but if you are in pain, and you kind of like grunt or yell, it gives you like a little bit of energy, it helps. Maybe don't do that, though, at the tattoo power, you might scare people, I don't know.
00:05:56
Speaker
Uh, by the end it was very bad and I almost threw up. So that in essence is like both an adventure and a game. Yeah. The puzzle being how do I not scream and throw up, I guess. Right? I did not throw up. I did. I don't think I cried. Somebody made a good point about crying and I'm going to share it with you guys. Is crying different than like shedding a tear?
00:06:22
Speaker
So for example, for example, if I tweeze my eyebrows, right, there's a sensation there that makes a tear like it makes my eyes water. It makes a tear come down. It's a weird sensation. That's kind of what happened. Is that crying? I don't know. I don't think it is. Huh? No, because you can definitely cry without tears.
00:06:42
Speaker
You can? Yes, you can definitely be crying and then not end up shedding tears, right? You can just, it can just be like that. Right?
00:06:55
Speaker
I've never been able to do that. But yeah, sure. But that's kind of what happened is tears were, you know, a tear came out of my eye, felt bad. And then I thought I was gonna throw up. And I kid you not, the movie that they were playing, you know, that some white guy is picking these movies to show at the parlor was fucking pulp fiction.
00:07:18
Speaker
I'm sorry, good thing there's no scene where somebody gets stabbed really hard with a needle, am I right? Like I had to watch the entirety of Pulp Fiction while being in the worst tattoo paint of my entire life. That I have to tell you something.
Anthropology Podcast Controversy
00:07:33
Speaker
Okay. So I'm in school for anthropology right now and I have been looking for anthropology and archeology podcasts to listen to because I feel like oftentimes if I listen to a podcast on a subject,
00:07:46
Speaker
even if it's out of my depth or even if it's a little boring, like the osmosis, right, helps me sort of absorb the subject a little better and feel like maybe I know some stuff about it that is, you know,
00:08:00
Speaker
some insider stuff, right? Stuff that they wouldn't teach you in school and stuff that, you know, maybe is even beyond what I've learned so far, right? Okay, so I was listening to this anthropology podcast and up till this point, it had been great, right? Because anthropologists are generally pretty smart, pretty socially conscious people, pretty, you know, human forward type folks. Yeah.
00:08:23
Speaker
there was this episode where this guy was giving a lecture on science, like media literacy in science. And he was talking about how to edit videos, how to plan a script, how to go off script when you're in front of a crowd, that sort of thing. It was really interesting, but he kept kind of sneaking in these things. And at one point he was like, he said, so right now I'm using a Shurem57, you know, like a Rogan mic. And I was like, oh, huh.
00:08:49
Speaker
Okay. That's a little weird, okay. That's a little weird, yeah. Okay, he's just referencing something cultural, right? Like everyone knows Joe Rogan, so okay, fine. That doesn't necessarily mean he's like a Rogan guy. And then later he's referencing something he says during a speech. He's like, and it's something that all the great comics do. No, no, no. My favorites are Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. I know both names. No!
00:09:12
Speaker
He says, I don't have some controversy, whatever, I don't care. And then later he's talking about editing film and he's like, you know what, even if you're just doing like a science lecture, you wanna look at the greats of filmmaking. Like my favorite director is Quentin Tarantino. And he says, like the movie Inglourious Bastard, I think it is the greatest film ever made.
00:09:39
Speaker
There's a lot of red flags going on. Holy cow! This man could not be hitting the exact center of his demographic banner.
00:09:50
Speaker
I mean, all he had to say was like, and also, you know, I like everything that J.K. Rowling has ever done. You know, not Harry Potter's singularity, just J.K. Rowling. I really like her. If I kept listening. So it was actually the thing that made me turn it off was he spent like a half hour bragging about how good of a speech he did at his sister's wedding and how the people at the wedding were congratulating him more than they were congratulating them.
00:10:17
Speaker
And I was like, all right, this is, I can't do this anymore. But I bet if I listened to the end, at some point he would have started talking about women gatekeeping sex and how nobody likes a nice guy.
00:10:32
Speaker
Like look man, look, I understand. We all have our problematic faves. We all have them and that's okay. But when everything is like, it was like spiraling out of control. When they're all your problem, every fave of yours is problematic.
00:10:49
Speaker
like what happened here my man like yeah it was it was like a real you know what it was like an anthropology experience for me it was like I was on an archaeological dig and I was just discovering more and more about this man's culture the more layers down I went okay this man is a primitive
00:11:16
Speaker
Yeah, I am not a Tarantino fan, but I do love Uma Thurman. So that's a problem for me. I really love her and she's so beautiful and pulp fiction. And I like the corny way that John Travolta speaks in that film. He's just everything that comes out of his mouth is like inflected very cornyly.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah. I am a middle-aged white man, so I do like Quentin Tarantino, but I think it is a massive, like, shining, like, twinkling red flag if somebody says that he is the best filmmaker that's ever lived. That's ever lived? If they say any Tarantino movie is the best movie ever made, it's like, not only do I know that you've watched maybe
00:12:07
Speaker
three movies off of the AFI's greatest films of all time list. Also, I know that you probably have a really skewed view towards humanity.
00:12:21
Speaker
Also, how can he say that when David Lynch exists? He's the best. And I'm going to bring him up today, maybe a little later because of what we're talking about today. Anyway, that was my segment for what we've been playing is just I got my kneecap tattooed.
Botany Manor Game Review
00:12:39
Speaker
It was terrible. It was the worst pain I've ever experienced. It was so bad. I'm not getting another leg tattoo. I'm not even joking.
00:12:45
Speaker
It's done. This is what your legs look like now forever. This is it. This is it. And I had to watch Pulp Fiction, not by choice. It sucked. I had to watch Major Violence while my bone was getting stabbed. That's what I did this week.
00:13:05
Speaker
Amazing. Matt would have even, hopefully you have played something. You know, actually I've played so much this week. This April has been utterly wild for game releases and I don't know what's in the digital ether at this moment that is making this happen, but there are so many good adventure games that are coming out right now.
00:13:29
Speaker
That's true. I did notice that it seems like everything has been ramping up so much and even even trailers like even because I'm there's like now a point in hashtag for like point and click Friday or adventure game Friday and it's like jeez there's a lot of stuff coming out like a lot. Both games I'm going to be bringing up were released this month which is crazy and
00:13:53
Speaker
They're not even all of the new releases I've played so far, but I gotta dole these out because I have so many. But the first one that I played that I'm gonna talk about is Botany Manor. Yeah, you mentioned that. I remember way back in the day when we started this podcast, Next Fest was happening and that was one of the demos, was Botany Manor. Yeah, listeners might remember that and I was really enamored with Botany Manor. Did you play that one?
00:14:23
Speaker
Did I start? No, I didn't because you intimidated me with it. Oh, no. Okay. Because you were saying I remember this, you were saying something about the mechanic of like, you mix these things to make this thing to get to get this flower and you it's like research heavy quote, let's put that in quotes, research.
00:14:43
Speaker
All right, so there's a couple elements to this game, but you're walking around this mansion with these beautiful grounds, like a garden surrounding it. I think your name is Arabella Green. That's a pretty name. You're picking up notes and letters and stuff and reading about this woman's story, like you're piecing it together from letters, like in a walking simulator.
00:15:06
Speaker
She's a botanist who, or she's rather, she's an aspiring botanist who keeps getting shut out of the world. This takes place in the late 1800s. And she keeps getting shut out of the world of botany because it is reserved for men. And you discover from these letters that either she's being shut out or her work is being stolen by men. There's a lot on that front.
00:15:31
Speaker
Yeah, but in this at the same time you find a seed and then amongst all these letters about that like reveal details about your life. You also find letters that give you hints as to her research into these plants. You'll find a letter that's like a chart.
00:15:47
Speaker
of different regions of the world and what temperatures they are in certain seasons. And then on another thing, you'll find a book that lists a bunch of flowers and what regions they're in. And then you'll find a letter about this rare flower blooming and a hint as to what season it was in.
00:16:08
Speaker
So then you'll put them together and you'll go, okay, so this flower only blooms at this season in this region, which is this temperature. So you might take that flower, put it in the pot, put soil in it, water it, and then put it by say an air vent that you set to that exact temperature, and then the flower blooms.
00:16:30
Speaker
Oh, that's kinda nice and relaxing sounding. It is so relaxing. So also, let me say the art style of this game is very much like The Witness. It's very bright colors. It's these- I actually wasn't expecting you to say that. For some reason, I was thinking like, I was almost comparing it to some of the stuff from the game Strange Horticulture, which is muted plant-like tones, right? So you've got,
00:16:57
Speaker
these unified colors of greens and browns and neutrals and stuff like so I actually wasn't expecting you to say how you make sense as flowers, right? Yeah, you know, yeah, that makes sense now. But in my mind, I was just imagining this very morbid muted thing. So I did think about strange horticulture as I was playing. But
00:17:19
Speaker
Yeah, it looks very much like The Witness, like it's 3D and it's like these incredibly bright colors and this sort of like 3D models that like, they don't look realistic, but they kind of, I don't know how you would, I don't know how you would describe it. It's just like dream- I understand what you mean.
00:17:34
Speaker
Dreamlike and bucolic and just very relaxing and very beautiful. And again, you're walking around this beautiful manor and it's beautiful gardens and you're just, again, solving these little puzzles to figure out how to make these flowers grow. So this game, again, incredibly relaxing, but I was so in love with these puzzles that I just swallowed this game up. If this game had a hundred more flowers,
00:18:02
Speaker
Okay. I would have been so happy. I finished this game in like two days. That's awesome. I just tore through it. It took me about like four to five hours to beat, but it blew me away. That's great to hear. It looks very relaxing. Yeah, it is very bright colors. It's very
00:18:22
Speaker
I don't want to call it a casual game experience because I feel there are negative connotations to when you say casual for some reason. But it does feel like something that you could play. I mean, you got obviously addicted to it because that's what we do. We binge. That's us. Yeah, that's just us. I don't know if that's you, the viewer, but that's us. It does look like something you can pick up after a little bit. I think I would not call this a casual game.
00:18:51
Speaker
But I do think it has that sort of, yeah, like if you're having a bad day, you could throw this game on, play for a little bit, turn it off. The only thing, there's a couple things that are, there's a couple little negatives about it. Number one, you're relying so much on papers that you pick up and like documents and stuff. And they all get logged in this book that you're keeping. That's your goal. You're writing a book about these flowers.
00:19:18
Speaker
okay and how to grow them okay and oh my god roses if i could tell the feeling of getting it right and one of the roses blooming and then sometimes like that uh not rose flower blooming and then one of those flowers just like taking over the room that you're in
00:19:35
Speaker
It's such an amazing feeling every single time it gave me goosebumps. But you can't pull up any of the documents from the menu. So if you find two related documents that are like five rooms away and you want to reference one of them, you got to run five rooms away to find that document and pick one. So you're saying there's backtracking.
00:20:00
Speaker
Yeah, there's plenty, there's a lot of backtracking. And the one time that like I did, there was one day I played it for like, I played it for like a day and then put it down. Then I played it another day. And that break was
00:20:17
Speaker
actually difficult because it's like oh now I have to read all the notes again and now I have to run around and find them. It took me like 20 minutes to reread all the notes. So maybe that would just be solved by if now that you listeners know this and you roses know this if you just take notes on a piece of paper as you're going that would probably solve the whole thing. Okay that's good to know.
00:20:39
Speaker
I'll also say it has a problem early on where you're only working on one flower. So you always know that every document is a hint towards the flower that you are currently working on. Okay. And that can be frustrating because it's like, okay, well now I know exactly how to, I just need the numbers or what I like. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, but later on there comes points where.
00:21:01
Speaker
you're working on three or four different flowers at the same time. And that gets a lot better. Like that's a lot more challenging because you're like, okay, I have to actually logic this out. What flowers relate to what? I have to find a reference to this flower name. And when it bloomed rather than just being like, okay, all these notes are about wind. So I guess this one needs wind, right?
00:21:26
Speaker
Anyway, Botany Manor, highly suggest checking it out. It is on Game Pass right now, so if you have Xbox Game Pass, you already have this game. So yeah, play it then. Yeah, yeah. Play it. Make flowers. This next one, I'll try to be really short because I know I just went really long about that one. I've still been playing The Legend of Sky. I mentioned that last episode.
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, the kind of adventure-y quest for glory-y. I would say this game is actually very, very much like Monkey Island 2 mixed with a little bit of Simon the Sorcerer.
00:22:04
Speaker
Like I said, last week you're a druid on a mission to save the world, or save the forest, I guess, and thus the world. It's that easy. So you're traveling through this medieval village and there's a lot of anachronistic stuff and silly stuff, which reminds me of Simon the Sorcerer, but the puzzles are very, we talked a couple weeks ago about the adventures of the Black Hawk and how it was trying to be a new age LucasArts game.
00:22:34
Speaker
right and the ways that it sort of fell short yeah i think legend of sky hits the nail right on the head it is clever and cute and the puzzles are hard
00:22:48
Speaker
It's got that thing that a lot of modern point and click game adventures lose, which is you kind of know what, you kind of know, to solve this puzzle, you need an object kind of like this. And once you finally find that object, once you convince a character to give you that object, or you find the right key to open the cage where the object is in or whatever dumb thing, right? You have the object, okay, you just go solve the puzzle, the end. A thing that LucasArts games had,
00:23:18
Speaker
that this has is another challenge will pop up once you have the right object. And sometimes yet another one will. So you're like, okay, I need a wrench to open this thing. And then you get it and the wrench, it's like, okay, the wrench doesn't quite reach. So you need a thing to use on the wrench so it can reach the nut. And then it's like, okay, but now that I'm using this thing with the wrench, with the nut, now I don't have enough strength. So now I need a third thing.
00:23:46
Speaker
you every time that you're like oh i got it it's like oh wait no it's more complicated than i thought yeah it's like the ultimate fetch quest it's like you gotta do things to start even start a fetch quest well i yeah i mean it's like
00:24:02
Speaker
That was a thing about the LucasArts games that was so good is you would have you'd be like Oh, obviously what I need to do is this and then you try to do it somehow it would fail. Yeah and Legend of Sky has that in spades so you really have to think hard about the puzzles and the puzzles are really difficult. Yeah
00:24:23
Speaker
Some of them are a little moonlogic-y. Some of them are a little frustrating. Like, it's like you have a knife in your inventory and you're like, and they're like, I can't open this thing. And you're like, OK, so just use the knife and cut it. And she's like, yeah.
00:24:36
Speaker
She's like, nope, that doesn't work. And it's like, why? Number one, you can tell me why it worked. Number two, why wouldn't it work? I do enjoy games that actually tell you why it's not gonna work. Actually, the game we're covering today does do that for a lot of things. Yeah, it's like, it doesn't work because it's not strong enough. It's not strong enough to work like that, yeah. Yes, very good at anticipating. The game we're gonna talk about today, very good at anticipating your actions. Legend of Sky does that sometimes,
00:25:06
Speaker
often times not, it's just like, she's like, I can't reach it. It's just the disc roll of it all, like, that doesn't work. Exactly, yeah, yeah, she's like, you go to grab something, she's like, I can't reach it, and you're just like, oh, well, I have a long stick in my inventory, so you stick on the thing, and she's like, that won't work. She's like, why?
00:25:22
Speaker
why tell me why I want to know why it won't you know what adventure game does we love to know why these things tell me exactly why so then I can yeah and usually that can be a hint towards solving the puzzle like yeah this I tried to get it with the stick but it just went around the stick I need to write something that'll grab it more firmly like then I'm like okay I need something that'll grab it firmly but like no it doesn't have any of that so
00:25:48
Speaker
A bunch of sky, very good, very LucasArtsy, but also LucasArtsy in the way that the puzzles can be kind of frustrating sometimes. I've had to use the walkthrough maybe like two or three times. That's not too bad. In a way that I never had to use the walkthrough either for Botany Manor or the game that we're gonna be talking about today. Gotcha, okay.
00:26:11
Speaker
I'm just trying to prove I'm no scrub, Rose. I'm just trying to tell these people. Look. Well, we don't want no scrubs. I just don't run to walkthroughs at the drop of a hat. No, of course not. Of course not. We're young. Our brains are sponges. We're 22 years old and we don't need walkthroughs because we're very imaginative people. Again, no shade if you use walkthroughs and it makes your experience better. I'm just a little bit smarter than you.
00:26:40
Speaker
Okay. No, I'm just kidding. But yeah, so Legend of Sky, so the games, yeah, that I played this week, Botany Manor and Legend of Sky, that's S-K-Y-E. So yeah, you have three suggestions. You can get a kneecap tattoo, play Legend of Sky, or play Botany Manor. Tell us which one you did. Yeah, Leah, leave us a comment. Which one did you do?
00:27:08
Speaker
Also, I'm gonna say this, later this month, I think right around the time this episode releases, that fully, that like, what was it, Claymation point and click game? Harold Halibut, have you seen this? No. I only know of like a couple Claymated games and those are the Armacrog and Never, Neverhood. Those are the only Claymated games I've ever seen.
00:27:34
Speaker
I have not played any sort of demo or anything, so I can't guarantee this game's gonna be good, but it looks goddamn beautiful. It's called Herald Halibut, and... I'll look it up. It's one I'm really excited for. Okay, so anyway. Nice. April Rules. I'll tell you guys all about another game that came out in April that, again, just fucking rules next week, but this week... Nice. What are we gonna be talking about?
00:27:58
Speaker
We're gonna be talking about The Last Door, both seasons, season one and season two from respectively 2013 and the last episode was released on 2016, in 2016 rather.
00:28:12
Speaker
We talked about these a couple weeks ago and- Yep, because that's what we were playing, remember? Like that's kind of like in the genre of like, oh, what have you been playing? Well, I picked up this because it was recommended to me by you guys. Yeah, this was recommended by listeners. So, hey guys, again, feel free to keep recommending us stuff.
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, I actually do listen. Literally all of my Murder, She Wrote episodes are from suggestions or from comments. Oh, that's awesome. Yep. So yeah, it's by The Game Kitchen and we're going to be doing a deep dive into it today.
00:28:45
Speaker
I can't wait. What a ride that game was. Oh my god. You are not wrong. I am not wrong. That's the game I played out of order. It's okay guys. I know what I'm talking. I know what I'm doing. It's fine. I've righted the situation and played it in order.
00:29:03
Speaker
I'm glad that you know what you're doing because this game, there's so many things about this game that baffled me. It's a rough one. It's a rough one. Hopefully you can put me on track. Let's talk about The Last Door.
00:29:37
Speaker
Hey everybody, we're back. Pushing Up Roses here with my co-host, Matt Aucamp. How was your break, Matt? It was good. I drank a lot of water. So there's definitely going to need to be a pee break because there's a lot to talk about with these games. I'm not going to get through it. Oh, I want to play the game during our break. That's what I did during the break. I went and played it.
00:29:58
Speaker
It was a long break. I was going to ask. I was going to ask what took someone. I'm just saying, yeah, our our discussion is going to outlast my bladder for sure. That is fine. We allow that here at the Save Your Game podcast. We respect a bodily function and just raise your hand and I won't see it, but raise your hand and I will let you go to the bathroom.
00:30:23
Speaker
Okay, thank you. You might be, I mean, this is a horror thing. You might be so scared, you might have to pee. Has that ever happened to you in real life? Like one time. Oh my God, really? One time, yep. I didn't like pee my pants or anything, but it gave me like, I was so scared. It gave me the sensation, yeah. I have never either laughed so hard I felt like I needed to pee, nor have I gotten so scared I needed to pee, and I kind of thought both were myths.
00:30:51
Speaker
No, it really does happen. A lot of people, the laughing thing especially. I definitely have, and I will of course not name any names, we're not here to embarrass people, but it's actually very normal. And it does happen. Wait, meaning you have made somebody laugh to the point where they pissed. Not me, but I've been in a group where we're just laughing at something. And somebody's like, ah! Oh! Oh! Oh!
00:31:22
Speaker
Yes, exactly what happens. They just make a weird face like a baby who's shitting. And the baby goes and stands behind the couch and you're like, what do you do? Oh. Oh, OK. You're shitting in your diaper right now. It's not uncommon that that happens. Anxiety is another one. For me, I have a lot of anxiety. And that will make me go to the bathroom. I don't know why. I don't know why it happens.
00:31:49
Speaker
Peeing is weird. And I don't know why this is the segue into the last story. I mean, getting ready for like a comedy show often would move my bowels in ways that they don't otherwise. Nervousness does that. And there's some like startle scares in this game that kind of
00:32:14
Speaker
There's some jump scares. I was more startled, I'll say that. But I think there are some that we could define as jump scares. And man, that'll get your poop going, man. Whoa! Yeah, that doesn't, jump scares don't do that for me, but whatever you like, I guess, roses. I'm just saying, it startles your nerves, it startles your, you know what, shut up!
00:32:45
Speaker
I think there were a lot more jump scares in the first game than the second game. At least that was my experience. Or we just got used to it. But I think I leaned towards agreeing that there were more. I couldn't tell because at some point when you're playing a horror game for a few hours, you do get a little desensitized to... And you do have to piss.
00:33:08
Speaker
What? And you have to piss. And you have to piss, yeah. It's just, that's the way bladders work over time. You're gonna have to piss eventually. Eventually. And maybe you'll just always assume it was the last thing that happened to you that made you piss.
00:33:24
Speaker
Like hiccup cures. Yeah, it was a jump scare in the last door, and that's the last thing that made me go to the bathroom. Like hiccup cures, right? Like your hiccups are going to go away. And you're just going to be like, whatever the last thing you did, you're going to be like, oh, that did it. But it's like, no, it's just... I pet my cat, and that cured my hiccup. But it's like, that's the way it is with this. Like, oh, I have to piss. It must have been this.
00:33:51
Speaker
Or it could be because you drank a gallon of water, like Matt did. He's very hydrated. I'm very hydrated. Special boy, extraordinary boy, unicorn boy, Matt Aucamp, very hydrated. Unicorn boy. That's how you get to be so special. That's like a major special. Yeah.
00:34:10
Speaker
any of you guys out there want to be special just drink just stay hydrated just stay hydrated doesn't take much my bar is so low anyway let's let's get into the last door now that you've been uh prompted by the startle scares and jump scares and you know
00:34:32
Speaker
Matt, please, that doesn't work over sound. That only works in person. It actually does. I am more scared by the people in my life than like jump scares in media. So last door, last door. Just like stop coming into my house. Honestly, that's one of my like fears. We should we should talk about fears sometime that spark from from video games. I think that would be an interesting topic as well.
00:34:58
Speaker
But yeah, let's let's jump into this. So this game was kickstarted on in 20. I don't know why I keep saying on on the day the first day of 2013. It was kickstarted on 2013 and had a lot of backers and a lot of hype. And it, it is a game that is set in two seasons that comes out in chapters. So
00:35:22
Speaker
In season one, that was its own game, had four chapters that I believe came out over periods of time. And then the last chapter that came out was in 2016. So this is a game that developed episodically from 2013 to 2016, fully crowdfunded.
00:35:40
Speaker
by Kickstarter. It is described as a Lovecraftian game, uh, inspired by, by him and Edgar Allan Poe, but I think it has a lot of, I think it actually has a lot of horror inspirations that we'll talk about. And we talked last time when we brought up this game, the idea of calling things Lovecraftian when they're just kind of sticky, but after playing season two, this game is very, very Lovecraftian.
00:36:06
Speaker
Yes. And I will also I will bring up some of the other inspirations that I found also in the game that are not going to be HP, Lovecraft and underground. Because, you know, works of art, they don't just have one inspiration. It's always a combination of a million things, whether you know it or not, you know, some of those things can be subconscious. So I'm going to try to just give you guys a little bit of a plot synopsis here.
00:36:30
Speaker
And I had to read the Wikipedia to get my thoughts correct, because if I just try to explain it, I'm just going to go off. I'm going to be like, it's not going to be great. So there is a group of four friends, and they have this in college, they have created this secret society. It's very, it's very dead poet society, but not innocent, like dead poet society. It's not about poetry. It is about philosophy. They create
00:36:58
Speaker
a philosophical group where they're interested in tapping into the unknown tapping in to this other side, which they call the veil. It's like this supernatural setting territory called the veil, and
00:37:15
Speaker
uh throughout their time in college they try different things to try to reach the veil they try one of the characters tries creating a serum that can maybe like hallucinate them into getting there yeah such a such a unique uh such a unique idea is kids try drugs in college yeah
00:37:35
Speaker
Yeah, so there's drugs. Another another way they tried to do it was to instill what they call primal fear into the person. And that will help them to get to the other side. If you can instill primal fear, you will get to the veil, which I'm like, what? OK, one of the things I think I understood by the end of the game is that the serum was meant to like the serum. The goal of the serum was to instill primal fear.
00:38:04
Speaker
Okay. They were using the serum to instill primal fear. Does that sound right to you? I was thinking that too. But at the end, I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure if because there was a doctor in this or somebody who wanted to be a doctor. So this group of young boys, they had different majors. One was philosophy major, one was more of a literature type of a person.
00:38:27
Speaker
they all had like these different roles in their group. So one of them, who went the more like medical route, he made that serum. And I wasn't sure if there was another character who wanted to do the fear thing. But you could be right, the serum could induce like such hallucinations, that it instills fear and that fear. And this is this is not a unique idea. I like this idea. I like this concept of fear.
00:38:53
Speaker
pushing you almost into another dimension. And that's what they wanted to do. That was their goal. And over time, something went wrong. One of the characters was so traumatized that he developed amnesia and couldn't remember any of the events that happened during his time when he was with this group trying to get into this veil.
00:39:18
Speaker
And it'll be a spoiler to say what character that is, but I don't think if we're not spoiling who the character is, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that that character ended up being the person who sparked the whole, like that ended up, we find out that that is the founder of this society. That was supposed to be the twist. Yeah, that's the person who set them down this path to begin with. And you learn about the amnesia about
00:39:45
Speaker
10 minutes before you learn about this person being the founder so i don't think again i don't think one spoils the right yeah yeah um i don't know i think you do you do seem to i think you can determine that he has amnesia
00:40:01
Speaker
earlier or something happened to him because in the first season, we are trying the whole point is we're trying to figure out what happened here. We're trying to almost look at the shadows of our former past, right? And figure out what this we're friends did in the first in the first season, we're a guy named Jeremiah Devitt. Wait, wait, before we talk about Jeremiah Devitt. Yeah, the the game actually starts with a man named Anthony Beechworth.
00:40:31
Speaker
Oh, right. Every chapter has a cold open that is chilling. It's chilling. You play a different character each time, and you are playing the cold open. It is interactive, I should say. And in the very beginning of the game, you're named Anthony Beechworth, and you are writing to your friend, Jeremiah Devitt, something kind of very cryptic. And he's kind of...
00:41:00
Speaker
coaxing him to investigate the things that they did in college. She's trying to get him to, to look into things. And in this scene, it's very chilling, it's very uncomfortable. And this will be a little bit of a spoiler, but maybe it's a good spoiler to put down. You move this character to suicide, he hangs himself.
00:41:22
Speaker
The very first thing I noticed about that whole scene was it very much reminded me of the attic in Alone in the Dark and I was terrified. I was terrified. Addicts terrify me. I'm just going to put that out there. Go ahead.
00:41:38
Speaker
I think it's very shocking. And it gives you this sense of like, oh, I don't want to do this, but I can't not. I'll say there's another game that does this exact same sort of cold open. I don't know if you've played it, but it is at the beginning of Burnhouse Lane.
00:41:59
Speaker
Again, not a spoiler because it's the first two minutes of the game. It starts with a scene like this, but where in this you're just kind of clicking on a thing and you don't really know what's happening until the last kind of second.
00:42:16
Speaker
I'll say in Burnhouse Lane, if anyone's played it, it is very obvious what you're about to do. And you, I think you even get an achievement for trying not to. Because as a player, you're just like, I don't want to. Please, I don't want to do this. And it is the only way to move forward. But in this game, it's kind of just like, you click on the only thing available and you're like, oh,
00:42:41
Speaker
Uh, oh, uh, I didn't know that that's what I was having him do. Yeah. At one point I've, I realized what was happening and I'm like, Oh no. Yeah. Oh no. Like I don't know. I don't want to do that. Um, so for some reason, this, this, this character, and we don't know much about him, you know, at first, uh, he does take his own life and right before that he writes a letter to his friend asking him to look into
00:43:11
Speaker
the things that they that they were not studying but kind of experimenting with in college this wanting to know the truth the ultimate truth the ultimate philosophies the the things that are unknown beyond what this game calls the veil that is the supernatural setting that they're trying to get to and yes
00:43:32
Speaker
It's very effective then because then you are this character, Jeremiah Devitt, and you are digging through this man's mansion, and you know as the player what is waiting in the attic, right? You know what you just did.
00:43:54
Speaker
And so there's this tension that's going along as you're solving the puzzles where you're like, you are interested in figuring out like the mystery, but on some level also, you know, okay, but when I'm done, like the final thing that I'm going to discover is my dead friend hanging in the attic. Yeah, terrifying. Honestly, a very terrifying tense,
00:44:20
Speaker
play through knowing that knowing that even somehow more frightening than say if it was ambiguous for some reason it's like I know the terror it's kind of like um there's a lot of Hitchcockian things I think in this thing but it was it kind of reminded me of like dialogue for murder I don't know if you've seen that but the the viewer already knows what happened in that movie they see it
00:44:43
Speaker
And it's just such a tense watch. And so I felt the same way about this game. I already knew what happened and I felt so tense. Yeah.
00:44:52
Speaker
And as soon as you start playing this game, as soon as you go to Anthony's Mansion, you just know there's gonna be some paranormal shit happening, even though it could have gone either way, right? It didn't have to go so heavy on the paranormal because there wasn't a reason to yet. But in the first chapter, you are already seeing paranormal things.
00:45:19
Speaker
This I think this is why it's it's Lovecraftian or why people refer to it as Lovecraftian is you don't know when your character is hallucinating or not. To be honest, you don't actually know if some of these things are really happening. You know what I mean? There are moments in this game that are not natural.
00:45:40
Speaker
that you don't expect, and they don't necessarily hurt your character. So that being said, if your character's not being hurt, what are the things that are really happening here? Are we hallucinating? Or is there something cursed in this house due to their past, you know, experimentations, due to their past wanting to get beyond the veil, you know? Because we learn how dangerous it actually is.
00:46:06
Speaker
It took me a while to understand that some of the things I was seeing weren't true. I believed wholeheartedly as I was playing the beginning of the game, everything I was seeing, I just took a face value. I was like, yeah, OK, all these things are happening. And it wasn't till one of the later chapters where I was like, wait, this is still in season one. Like maybe that chapter didn't happen. Yeah, you could interpret it that way for sure. And there's a lot of
00:46:36
Speaker
There's a lot of harrowing things that happen in this game that are unexplained and I really don't know if they happened or not. And the game does imply that because these
00:46:49
Speaker
Because these forces were kind of tampered with and released that there are forces making horrible things happen, right? So people are disappearing. People are dying under mysterious circumstances. I think some of those things are true. But I think some of the hallucinatory things
00:47:09
Speaker
maybe are not true. It's really interesting because in each chapter, there are these characters that have their own little stories going on. And you cut you know, you do fetch quests and you kind of help them. And it progresses the story. But I'm thinking mostly of season two. Yeah, maybe we'll get to that
00:47:29
Speaker
to get to that later because it's season one, you're playing Jeremiah and you are, like I said, you're trying to figure out what you did in college. So you go to, you go to Beechworth's mansion, you figure some shit out, you go back to the boarding school that you were, that this has all happened and you have some insane hallucinations there and nightmares. And- That's what I mean about there, it's like,
00:47:57
Speaker
So we're going to spoil a couple of things, I think, as we go, but we'll save some of the ending spoilers for, I guess, like their own moment. Yeah, this is a deep dive. I think spoilers are going to happen. You know, right. There's a scene at the end of that one where you get buried alive. Yeah. Now, like in the next episode,
00:48:23
Speaker
you are in a very strange, you come out of a coffin in a very strange place. And it's very confusing. And that is the scene where I'm like, did this chapter happen? Yeah, yeah, you are buried alive and you wake up in London.
00:48:44
Speaker
which apparently is very far and your character Jeremiah has no idea how he got there. I did try to clarify that for myself and some people say that you were at the boarding school when this happened. Some people say that the nuns actually saved you.
00:49:05
Speaker
but I'm like, but we're not saved though, because we're still in this coffin that we have to get out. I don't understand. But later on, okay, so why don't we jump back a little bit in episode?
00:49:20
Speaker
One, you're looking for your friend who's missing Anthony Beechworth. You find him eventually hanging in the attic. And along the way, you find all this kind of supernatural stuff and a lot of bird imagery. And you know something about somebody trying to look beyond the veil and Anthony Beechworth was tortured by something. That's basically all you know.
00:49:43
Speaker
Not season two. Episode two, you're walking through this boarding school. That's kind of when you find out about the society and philosophy club that you work in. That's also when you find out about a serum and you meet Father Ernest.
00:49:59
Speaker
Ugh, horrible, horrible, some horrible scenes in that episode. Yeah, father, so you're in a boarding school that has since become like an old school mental health asylum, like a sanitarium.
00:50:15
Speaker
It's like less mental health and more, because there is a mental health asylum in season two, it's like nuns taking care of the sick. That's kind of what it is, like little refuge. And yeah, some of the characters are mentally unsound. I hear you, yes, yeah, that's true. Yeah, so it's more like these nuns are taking care of the ill. But what you find out is that none of these patients are getting better and patients are dying
00:50:43
Speaker
more rapidly than maybe they should be. Yes. And they're very calm about it for some reason. Yeah. Everyone's so calm. No, no one's allowing you to see, I guess, what was your old teacher, Father Ernest? Yeah. And you don't know why.
00:51:05
Speaker
Well, the nun basically said that he's just so sick that he doesn't take visitors. That was the initial, we don't know if that's the reason, but that's the reason given to us.
00:51:15
Speaker
And then I guess we'll just spoil the end of this one, this segment, because again, we're only two episodes into eight episodes. So at the end of this, you eventually find Father Ernest, and he tells you all about the secret philosophy club that you were in. You find out that like Father Ernest has been
00:51:46
Speaker
How do you interpret this? Either Father Ernest is killing people, or the groundskeeper is killing people and scapegoating Father Ernest. How did you take that?
00:51:59
Speaker
I took it as the groundskeeper, which honestly was one of the scariest things in the game for me. And it's not even a jump scare. And I'll go ahead and I'll kind of explain. There's a groundskeeper for this. And you find him around digging graves and upkeeping the boarding school and things like that. And there is this patient that is just being tortured.
00:52:29
Speaker
And he asks us to actually end his life, to euthanize him, basically, because no one's listening to him. He's in pain all the time. Did you do it? Yeah. And we agreed to do it. I didn't do it. Well, here's what. Oh, you didn't. No.
00:52:45
Speaker
Okay. So I agreed to do it. I'm like, it's going to be tough, but I want to have mercy on this patient who was just in pain all the time. So I go and I find some morphine. I don't know why they have it. It's in a nun's room. She's at some, I mean, they're nurses too. So I don't know, but I found some morphine and I had to go to a completely separate part to go get this morphine. I couldn't pick it up beforehand. I had to go get it.
00:53:10
Speaker
When I came back. That is a thing that frustrates me in this game. There is a lot of stuff that you run. If you solve a puzzle before the game thinks you should have solved the puzzle, there's a lot of times that things just don't work. You can't pick up an object until the game has told you you need the object. You can't. An object doesn't work.
00:53:32
Speaker
until the game has told you why the object works, which can be frustrating if you've, again, if you are ahead.
00:53:41
Speaker
of the puzzles in that way. For this one it makes sense though that I couldn't pick it up beforehand. Because you didn't have a need for it until the guy asks you to put it down. But also I needed to leave to come back because when I come back he is not in his bed, but there is a note on his bed that says over and over again, kind of like the Shining,
00:54:05
Speaker
that the groundskeeper is lying. Just that's what it says sentence by sentence over and over again. And it scared me. I felt chilled in that moment. So interestingly, I said no. Okay, I didn't know it would actually, I knew there was an option, but I didn't know it would actually let you. The same thing happens.
00:54:25
Speaker
okay you come back and he is missing and that note is there so i guess it only matters towards like your achievement so yeah and and to be clear the nuns are clearly not in on this they are saddened by this as far as i can tell um i wasn't even sure if father earnest
00:54:51
Speaker
if he was even involved in this or if the boarding school is so cursed by the things that have gone down there, that the groundskeeper, again, is pulling a Jack Torrance and killing people. It's scary, man. It is very scary. Here's what I think. I think that the priest is overseeing this. I think the priest is
00:55:19
Speaker
party to the experiments happening and maybe turning a blind eye as to where the people that are getting experimented on are coming from. And Baldwin is the one who's just kidnapping people or, you know, kidnapping patients and killing patients. And I think the
00:55:36
Speaker
nuns know something weird is happening and they don't want to ask too many questions. Yeah, that is my understanding. Another very, I think that's a very good theory. I do. I wasn't sure on Father Ernest because he was so out of it. He's completely delusional and has lost his mind. I don't even know. So like I could, for me, I could go either way.
00:55:57
Speaker
I even wondered if Father Ernest, because he was somehow involved in these experiments, he's called one of the witnesses of these experiments, if he has just cursed this boarding school, and then just his presence alone, you know, is kind of affecting it in this supernatural way. Another thing that scared me, and these are subtle things, honestly, that are very chilling,
00:56:25
Speaker
There's a nun there who is so deeply saddened by the deaths, and she doesn't know what she's doing wrong, and she prays to God, and she just feels so hopeless. So we play a little music box for her, a little song in a music box, and she feels brightened. And she- And you feel good about that as the player. You're like, oh, I did. Finally, I did something good for somebody in this game.
00:56:48
Speaker
It seemed that way at first. And so this nun decides to leave. I'm like, cool. So I find her on the beach and she's just watching the sunset. I'm like, that's cool. That's nice. What a lovely, what a lovely little thing. Good job. So, and by the way, you can totally miss these. So I recommend if you're playing this game to recheck locations, this is a game where things change.
00:57:13
Speaker
in those locations. You won't lose the game, but they are frightening and you'll get achievements. And there's a thing in season two where I missed something. I did too. And it made the game wildly harder and I had to, this is in the final chapter and I had to restart chapter eight, but yeah. Oh shit, okay.
00:57:34
Speaker
That's not what I missed that way. We're talking about two different things. But so when I so I leave her alone, you know, I was like, she's you know, she's lost in thought looking at the cliffs. She's on the on the beach. See is lovely. I come back later.
00:57:49
Speaker
And her habit is there, and her walking cane is there. Because she uses a cane, she's an older nun. And I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified. Because you know she's not, what, did she drown? Like, did somebody do something to her? She can't get anywhere without her cane, her clothes are there? Terrified. Honestly. My interpretation was that she volunteered. Yeah, I got it.
00:58:21
Speaker
My interpretation was that she voluntarily walked into the sea. I think she found peace. I think she knew what was happening to the people in the hospital. And I think, yeah, you gave her some semblance of peace and she decided to take that and end her life. That's how I interpreted it.
00:58:48
Speaker
I did think about that and I was sad. I was very saddened by it. I found it chilling. Those are very subtle changes in settings. They're not egregious, right? They're not gratuitous, violent scenes, but they're frightening. They're frightening to think about. Like I said, I was chilled when that patient was gone. And there is a theme of people going missing either by their own volition or we're not sure. We're not sure where they went.
00:59:17
Speaker
So, um, I do want to get into season two because this might not be, uh, a common thought, but I actually like season two better. I don't know how you feel about it. I do. I like it better. I think I like it better. Well, I think we should, we should wrap up our talk about season one. Um, you should just speed it along a little more because we are going along.
00:59:41
Speaker
So, okay, so then he wakes up on the streets of London, and then he's, you're sort of wandering around, it's a very dream-like streets of London, you're following a mysterious man, he leads you into- He seems to be guiding you, yeah.
00:59:53
Speaker
Yes, he leads you into the mist and in the mist you discover men in masks. And like a play that's happening. And then the next chapter, chapter four, you find yourself on the estate of a friend. And that's what I'm wondering like, did chapter three even happen? Because it's in that fourth chapter,
01:00:22
Speaker
I think that's where somebody mentions that you were saved by the nuns at the last minute. And so, you know, did you just hallucinate all that while you were recovering?
01:00:34
Speaker
That's a very good question. That's very sanitarium-like, where maybe your character is so traumatized, and this can happen in real life too, that your brain concocts a little bit of a hallucination for survival. And the game is very good at making you wonder
01:00:53
Speaker
Is this character hallucinating? Is he dreaming even? Is he just in a dreamlike state? How far are his nightmares going kind of a situation? I think it can be interpreted either way. I think you can speculate that he was at the boarding school and maybe some of these things didn't happen, but maybe he was there at some point.
01:01:14
Speaker
It's really good. Another thing that starts happening here, and you see it in cut scenes, is that your psychiatrist, Dr. Wakefield, is in these conversations with a friend of his called Dr. Kauffman. Kauffman, yeah. And they're sort of following Devitt's steps, and they're incredibly worried about it. Right, because he goes missing. And they're sort of, yeah, they're wondering how far they should go to try and find
01:01:47
Speaker
And Kaufman seems to know a little bit more about what's happening than Wakefield does, but it's very mysterious. Kaufman doesn't outright say anything. He's just kind of like, I think you should be worried about your patient.
01:02:02
Speaker
Jeremiah Devitt, we are not playing him any longer in season two. He is gone. He is missing, as far as we know, perhaps in the veil, but we're not sure. The first season tells you very, very little. The second season is where it's gonna be explained. So yeah, in that final episode of the second season, you're walking around the state of your friend, Alexandra Dupree.
01:02:31
Speaker
Dupree or something. I was so scared though, for real. All these estates so scare me.
01:02:39
Speaker
Well, yeah, a lot of these games are just you're exploring a haunted house, basically. Yeah, it's a lot of haunted mansions. And again, you don't know if you're dreaming or hallucinating. And that is like, it's that unknown thing where it's like, oh, God, I don't even have any inkling of what's going to happen. Right. So you find that Dupree has become basically unstable.
01:03:03
Speaker
I would say almost catatonic. He's in a wheelchair in his bedroom and he's mumbling. He's mumbling a lot about the bird awaits you. And he's almost not with us. And there's a reason for that that we'll go into in the next chapter, but he seems to be very far away. You find out that Dupree or somebody on Dupree's estate has been doing experiments with some kind of serum and on an ape.
01:03:32
Speaker
Oh, was it? I actually didn't, I didn't clock that, so nice job. Old Mike is an ape you find in a grave, and... That was an ape? Yes.
01:03:44
Speaker
I thought it was a fucking cat. I gotta re-look at that scene, because yeah, that scene scared me. I'm like, what am I looking at? I know what scene you're talking about too. This chapter was really hard for me to understand. It's a rough one, yeah. You're basically just walking around reading letters. Yeah. And.
01:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, discovering that something really weird is going into it on an Alexander's. Alexandra's house. OK, I'm looking at the screen cap and that is definitely not a cat. I don't know what I was thinking. I must have blacked out is certainly not a. You know what, I think because maybe because I already saw a cat in the game and there's like cats and birds and I don't know. I just did. I don't know what happened there.
01:04:39
Speaker
But my brain had a little fart there.
01:04:42
Speaker
I think this is the first time we see, I might be wrong here because there's so much going on, but I think this is the first time we see a name for the land beyond the veil, which is, do you know how to pronounce it? Oh no, I have no idea how to pronounce that. Xylethal, Xylethal. I thought Xylethal, yeah, we're butchering that for sure.
01:05:09
Speaker
Or maybe that's the space between the veil and our world? I think that is the world. I think that is what's beyond the last one. That's beyond the veil, yeah. It's xylethal. Xylethal. And there's other, yeah. Again, very Lovecraftian. It's just made up words that are not meant to be pronounced. Pronounced. And then I think this is the first time we see, again, I might be wrong about this, but I think this is the first time we see the,
01:05:40
Speaker
of this philosophy group, which is verite ne quisciat. I swear we see that in the first scene. Verite ne quisciat. In the first scene of the whole game? I thought Beechworth said it. I could be wrong there, but yeah. You might be right. This is where I maybe first clocked it. It is Latin for? Tell no one.
01:06:08
Speaker
So yeah. Which we are, it's the only rule of this group and we are expressly breaking that rule right now. Booping me, you know. There's some heavy stuff happening. We can't keep this to ourselves. But also, you know, since we're playing, since Jeremiah, he's, you know, we don't see him in the second season.
01:06:36
Speaker
Now we're playing Dr. Wakefield and we don't have to tell no one, we're not a part of this. Not my rule, this is not my problem. But yeah, so the second season is what really gripped me, I think. Don't get me wrong, it all gripped me. The second season, there were some very terrifying parts to that season that are not gonna be spoilers. There's a lot of parts where you find yourself in the dark, in the dead dark.
01:07:05
Speaker
That terrifies me. I am always afraid of that. And you can still move, but you're just in the dark. Oh, let's say two things that happened at the end of season two. That happened in the last chapter of season two, that'll become important. Number one, Alexander thinks he's being stalked by something. Right, yep. And number two, at the very end, Devitt does inject himself with the serum to try and look behind the veil.
01:07:33
Speaker
right yes yep and he's in he's in some like deep dark basement right yeah and like a pit yeah in a pit okay all right anyway so season two um yeah now we are
01:07:45
Speaker
Now we're now we're Dr. Wakefield and we are Jeremiah Devitt's psychiatrist and our patient has gone mission missing. And you know, we don't know how how close these these people are. But for whatever reason, our mentor, another psychiatrist slash doctor named Dr. Coffin seems to know a lot about the occult.
01:08:04
Speaker
And it's kind of insisting that we look into this disappearance and that we follow some leads on where he could be. And so now we are playing Dr. Wakefield, totally different character. And we're trying to figure out what happened to Jeremiah, kind of figure out his past so that we can determine where he could be now.
01:08:27
Speaker
And this is where we start in a, like a sanitarium, like a, I think they call it, I think they specifically called a lunatic asylum in the game. But yeah, keep in mind, this was, this was like late 1800s. It's set in the 1800s. Yeah. Yeah. So just so. Right. Yeah. They're not caring for people very well.
01:08:50
Speaker
And what we're trying to do is we're trying to track down Alexandre Dupree, because when they were they know that Devitt was last seen in, what's his name's manner, not Dupree, but the guy who hung himself, Beechworth's manner. And then Beechworth had written a letter to Dupree and that
01:09:11
Speaker
is why they go to try and find Dupre. And he was, was he the one that stayed, he had to stay in the asylum, right? Yeah, before Devitt meets him and he's kind of catatonic and in the wheelchair, just before that he had had to stay in the asylum.
01:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, so basically we go there to interview people and this asylum is falling apart. It's not a quote. It's not what it used to be. There's only a few. There's only really a handful of patients that you can talk to. But interestingly, all the patients seem to have an understanding or memory
01:09:52
Speaker
of Dupree and the things that have happened. You know what I mean? Like, they seem to be involved somehow. They seem to, yeah, they have a memory of Dupree that disturbs them. And they all seem to know about this thing called the playwright. Yeah, which is W R I G H T playwright. And you don't know what that is. But not yet. No.
01:10:15
Speaker
So you're kind of tracking down Dupree. You eventually find that the institution has boarded up or bricked up his old room. And somehow you get led to a sea captain who had- Yeah, Captain Skid.
01:10:36
Speaker
Captain Skid was a sea captain. He was like in the Navy as a military man that he's now in the asylum because he feels like a failure, a coward, not a failure, specifically a coward. But the secret society, they kind of hire him because they believe allegedly that he had gone past the veil and had survived and knows how to do it.
01:11:01
Speaker
I'll say this, wait, just one second. The person that we meet that feels like a failure is Sergeant Cong Hill, who was with Captain Skid. No, that's fine, who was with Captain Skid. Yeah, you're right, you're right. It gets very confusing. Yeah, it does, but yeah, you're right. But Skid is also super traumatized and has been spending his time in opium dens. Yeah.
01:11:29
Speaker
Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I remember now. Sorry. There's a lot of locations in this game, you guys. We are led to many, many, many locations. And one of them is an opium den named the Crimson Den. And you you go there and you become overwhelmed with the smoke and you have a hallucination.
01:11:51
Speaker
where people are, so all throughout season one, you see people wearing these crazy masks and these robes. And a lot of times they're on this stage with a red curtain. So you see some characters, I believe they're in the same robes, right? Yes, they are. And they are on this red stage, but they have animal masks. One is a snake, one is a bird mask, one is a wolf mask. And they're putting on a play where the wolf catches the bird and the snake in bed together.
01:12:21
Speaker
And the wolf is angry because the bird is his wife and was cheating on him. And the wolf challenges the snake to a duel.
01:12:36
Speaker
and we have no idea what the hell that means. No clue. There's definitely a great emphasis on animals and folklore, I would say, very much in the vein of Hobbs Barrow and very much in the vein of the Wicker Man, which we'll probably talk about very shortly. Oh my God, yeah. And we will see these characters with animal masks again, but I'm not sure that it explains what's happening in this scene.
01:13:05
Speaker
It does not know. And it goes to say like, when are we hallucinating? And when are we, you know, are we hallucinating for the sake of narrative? You know, like maybe the character, maybe this is just trying to help us. Maybe it's helping the character. I don't I don't actually know. Right. But yeah, like I said that one of the things I really like about these chapters is that
01:13:29
Speaker
There are other characters in these games that we're helping that are not, they're not related to that. And I'll go more into that kind of later game, but especially in the Ellis Moore game, which is where we're taken to Ireland at some point. And that honestly has its own little storyline going on, my friend. You do meet Devitt.
01:13:56
Speaker
in your opium haze. Yeah. There's also a scene early on where you have a nightmare about a person asking you for something that somebody took, and then that happens to you in real life, and they're looking for something that Alexander de Prey took that you find in his room. It's very strange. I don't think that's ever explained either. No, there's a lot of things. There's a lot of things that are not explained. And this is kind of where the game
01:14:22
Speaker
does have some surreal and kind of abstract thinking here, you know, weird things happening to make the atmosphere, I think, and maybe you're not even really supposed to know, you know, there's a lot of scenes in in the wicker man that are not necessarily explained, we don't really know what they mean. But they are weird occurrences that happen to
01:14:43
Speaker
enhance the atmosphere. Same thing with The Shining, right? I think The Shining and Stephen King is a really good example. Because you don't know really what things are really, really tangibly happening here, you know? And there's just these weird unexplained things, you know, that are even like, even like in a Shirley Jackson novel, right? You have like Haunting of Hill House, right?
01:15:05
Speaker
You don't know what's going on inside Eleanor's head and you don't know what's actually a haunted house. But from either explanation, sometimes there's just spooky shit going on. And it's just meant to spook you out as a reader. It's not necessarily meant to be correlative with a very with like,
01:15:27
Speaker
whatever one of the potential explanations could be. It's just, this is just to spook you out. This is just to say that when spooky shit's going on, coincidences happen more often and things begin moving between the veil of the unknown and the world of the known, right? I think is what it's trying to say. It's just like, when you open that door, things come through it and not all of them have to do with the journey you're on.
01:15:57
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. But so at the end of this chapter, you wake up and Kauffman is there. He says that one of the women, the woman that you were talking to, the one that was most afraid of the playwright and you mentioning Alexandra Dupri went missing from the asylum. Right. Yep. Because so our search was in vain. We didn't find anything. Or we didn't find him rather.
01:16:23
Speaker
So then we move on to the next episode, episode two of season two, where we are traveling to find, for some reason, I don't know what brings us here, but Adam Wright is Kaufman's mentor. And he is also another doctor. And I think he's also fluent with like the occult.
01:16:47
Speaker
And he lives in, what is it? Wickport. Wickport. And we're just going to see him to like talk to him about this. Yeah. And as it turns out.
01:16:57
Speaker
Wright is way like super crazy involved in this whole conspiracy, which I don't know, does that put suspicion on Kaufman? Like why don't we say right now, the playwright is the name of the philosophy society that was founded by the four boys and the priest in season one. Is Kaufman a part of it?
01:17:21
Speaker
I think that is something to be speculated. I never thought he was truly involved, but I do think he knew more than what he was telling our character. I think he was maybe on the side of being interested in these things that are happening. Or maybe he knew that Professor Wright was somewhat involved with this.
01:17:46
Speaker
Because he keeps encouraging us. Yeah, he keeps encouraging us. And then just coincidentally, his mentor is part of the group. Yeah, I would say that there are that these things are connected, but it is very ambiguous. Kaufman's role especially is very ambiguous because he comes with us and I feel like we do all the work.
01:18:08
Speaker
Koffman's just like, all right, I'll just stay in this room, I'm gonna talk to my friend. Every time we find something, we're like, oh, I gotta show, I gotta show Koffman this. And it's just like, what? He's like, good, go do more. Go do more, I'm like, why me? You do more. You go to see Professor Wright, and he's just, he's very much like Dupre, he's just sitting in a chair.
01:18:35
Speaker
Yeah. No, he's laying in bed. He's in bed. Staring out a window. And once again, you explore a manor.
01:18:44
Speaker
like a fancy rich man's manner that's full of spooky stuff. This one has a bunch of like ravens in it. There is a inscrutable puzzle in this one. The map puzzle. How did you feel about that puzzle? I couldn't figure it out. I looked up a thing. I couldn't figure it out. I didn't look it up, but I tried it like seven times and eventually got it. And I was like, wait, this doesn't correlate. You get a map that has a bunch of areas you can press in.
01:19:13
Speaker
and then you get directions that are like you start in the desert you move west till you hit the ocean and then you get turned around by the king so you go backwards and you head south and it's like there's definitely like an order it's like an order puzzle but i couldn't really decipher it so i it yeah there is a point where you have to go north and east and yeah neither of those are in the directions
01:19:37
Speaker
It's just a poorly written clue. The solution is not part of the clue and it drove me crazy. I've circled like seven times here in my notes. There's nothing that tells you to do the final two steps of the map.
01:19:55
Speaker
We kind of already talked about the puzzles in a previous episode, but they are for me hit and miss. Some of them are great and I love them and they make sense. Some of them are like, what? I'm like clicking everything on everything because that's what I got to do. Now, if you play, I don't know if this is on the computer, but if you play on PS4, there is a hotspot button you can press that at least shows you where you can look. It at least gives you hotspot hints.
01:20:20
Speaker
which is helpful because this is very chunky pixels and everything looks a little abstract. I think probably when you're closer to the screen, like you are in PC, it's easier to see those pixels. I didn't feel like I was pixel hunting, even the way technically was, because the pixels are so chunky and most of the time the thing you need to find is white or red or blue and it's sitting on a field of brown or black or
01:20:49
Speaker
you know like or gray so it always everything you need to pixel hunt stands out really hard yeah but if you're a little bit farther back from the screen it might not as much
01:20:58
Speaker
So in this episode, we are able to actually hypnotize Dr. Wright because we learn that in this mansion, because all of these mansions have very strange things, like in them, very strange secrets, there's a tunnel in which there is something horrible and this tunnel that we find is blocked off, but we need to get in there.
01:21:24
Speaker
You realized that the cold open that you played here, you were Professor Wright and you were blowing the tunnel up. Yeah. So it is completely, you cannot get in there. So we have to hypnotize Dr. Wright. It's interesting. It kind of goes into an interactive fiction kind of game like Zork.
Twin Peaks and Game Mechanics
01:21:41
Speaker
It's like, tell us where you are. You can go left. You can go right. I like what is happening. I think I started taking notes because I think the map correlates with something later in the game. It's very Twin Peaks, honestly. So we hypnotize him and we're able to get him to give us better directions, hints to where we can get into this underground tunnel.
01:22:02
Speaker
Now, this was very frustrating to me because once you do this, the mansion becomes closed off to you for a section of time. And it's still the same chapter, but you end up in a bunch of different new locations. And I had solved a puzzle that you don't need to solve till later, and I didn't know that a location opens up again, so I thought I missed some sort of secret. There's a puzzle where you have to get a bunch of statues to take their masks off, and then they drop something on the ground.
01:22:32
Speaker
I had decided to go visit right before I picked the thing up off the ground because he was on the way. Then suddenly I'm sitting through three cutscenes and the mansion is closed off. You can't go back.
01:22:45
Speaker
And I'm like, oh no, what about that puzzle that I spent that time solving? Turns out. Luckily, there's no one winnables in this game. So I thought it was like a secret that I found. But turns out you go back to the mansion and it just, I was ahead. So whatever.
Lovecraftian Themes and Confusion
01:23:01
Speaker
Now is where it gets very Lovecraftian because now you talk to another sea captain.
01:23:07
Speaker
who has met a bunch who has heard a bunch of weird voices under the water and keeps referring to quote unquote him speaking in a language he doesn't recognize but somehow understands yeah and then you find another person who was I guess a fisherman and you find him past a cemetery standing on the lookout
01:23:29
Speaker
Like a lookout, yeah. And he talks about a strange subhuman creature that he's seen moving around the rocks and looking upon the creature could drive you insane. But now he is obsessively standing on the cliff waiting for the creature to show up again to kill him. And it's like, both of those are Lovecraft short stories. Like 100%. I mean, those are like straight out of.
01:23:52
Speaker
The sea stuff, absolutely. The sea stuff, the inhuman horror, the causing of obsession, the language that you don't know but can somehow understand, those are all things that come directly from Lovecraft. So how did you interpret the end of that chapter? Because this is one of the times I was very confused by it. I'm still confused by it. OK. My suspension of disbelief is not working on this chapter. I don't know how we went from the end of that chapter to the beginning of the next.
01:24:21
Speaker
uh because we find ourselves in a situation where we do get into that tunnel yes and it's implied that we find this creature and it's also implied that we're attacked by it there's a thing in that and it's not the creature you'd expect okay so there's there's like a piano that's been playing you can hear it in the mansion it's traveling through a bunch of gold pipes uh eventually you find the room where somebody has just been in this tunnel playing the piano
01:24:48
Speaker
I'm guessing that thing that was supposed to be playing the piano is this creature. Yes it is, yeah. You get attacked by a spider basically.
01:24:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's a weird looking bit. And then after going through a maze, which was annoying, you get attacked by a spider. You find a thing that says, you find a body, right? And then you find a note that says somebody named H-A was down here, or had entered the veil, I guess. And then you get attacked by a spider and the chapter ends. You expect to get attacked by a crow, and I still, now that I've finished the game, I still don't know why we didn't get attacked by a crow.
Exploring Eilishmore Island
01:25:27
Speaker
I don't either. I I'm a little I don't know where the spider came from. There's nothing else in any of the games about a spider. Yeah, it's almost like alien esque looking spiders, not a normal looking spider, but we do not die. We unfortunately, something terrible happens to our colleague. Oh, yeah. In in all this, in all this, yeah, at some point Wright dies and then eventually, yeah, after
01:25:54
Speaker
We get attacked by the spider and Kauffman also dies. And prior to die and again, mysterious circumstances, but implication that is the forces unknown that are maybe intervening with these lives.
01:26:08
Speaker
But before he dies, he writes us a lovely letter that encourages us to keep going, to figure it out, and to not stop. And this is our quest now. We gotta do it for our mentor. We gotta do it for Dr. Kaufman. And this leads us to, I think, my favorite part of the game. I was terrified the whole time. I'm not gonna lie. I wasn't expecting anything terrible to happen, but I was scared the entire time. You start out, yeah, in the dark.
01:26:37
Speaker
Yeah. Is this what you're talking about? And you just hear breath and running. Brett. Yeah, there's many. So in this next chapter, we find ourselves
01:26:49
Speaker
They're basically we're on chapter or basically episode three of season two. So we're on basically chapter seven of eight right now. Yeah. Coming towards the end. Yeah. So we are led there and we are, we get a lead that it's like, this is a very supernatural place. It's called Ellis Moore. At least I think that's how it's pronounced. I'm not really sure. Eilish Muir.
01:27:12
Speaker
It is Irish, but it is Irish. And it's just this little- Yeah, it's one of the islands around Ireland. Yeah, islands around Ireland. That's correct, yes. And I want you all to honestly think about- Elish more. Yeah, because somebody spells it phonetically later in the game. Oh, that's nice. And it's Elish more.
01:27:33
Speaker
Alishmore. Okay, so it's this little, if you can imagine, an Irish kind of grassy, almost dreary area with a little town, a lighthouse. Like the Hebrides. If you know the Hebrides of Scotland, it's like that.
01:27:50
Speaker
I also want people to think of Somerset Isle from The Wicker Man because that is where this is going. It's a very strange island where absolutely there is something wrong here. I mean, we find a giant hole in the ground.
01:28:09
Speaker
It's not explained. The characters are off. The characters are very, very off. And this is one of the scariest things that's not explained. And maybe you have an explanation for it. Maybe the viewers have an explanation for it. Do you know where I'm going? Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Where are you going?
01:28:25
Speaker
There is a child that goes missing. Oh, no, you're right. I do not understand this. This is when I started to think of this game as a series of short stories, right? Like there is a through line, but it seems like each episode is a story about one aspect of this journey. And they're all connected, but they could each be...
01:28:45
Speaker
if you're okay living in mystery, they could each be extracted. And like the last one was you trying to figure out what was wrong with Wright and get to his basement. This one is- And honestly, I really love that. I love that in this chapter, I'm almost getting, it's related, but I'm also getting a different story with it. It's kind of like a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories, right?
01:29:11
Speaker
yeah like in this one yeah we're trying to find a missing boy in the first one we're trying to uh understand what happened to alexandra to prey so like you could see each one as and even in the first season you're trying to escape a weird uh london uh a slum or you're trying to
01:29:33
Speaker
figure out why your friend invited you to this mansion and where your friend is, right? Like each one is its own little short story and there's like a sort of a beginning, middle, and an end to each chapter.
01:29:46
Speaker
Yeah, and I really like that. I think it's good world building. I think it keeps it grounded. Right? Because it's not I think the problem with a lot of Lovecraftian games is it goes too hard. And it gets a bit much, right? It's not it's, it's not that this is a realistic story. It's not it's very supernatural. But there needs to be some grounding elements here.
01:30:08
Speaker
even even wicker man had grounding elements of of these characters even though they're not great but but you know if what if what you were saying was this is your favorite chapter i agree this is this was my favorite chapter yeah yeah so this is the chapter where yeah it does feel like a short story where on this island there is a reunion happening of what appears to be i guess you could call them spirits and everyone's kind of
01:30:38
Speaker
Everyone's kind of prepping for this festival. Again, very much like Wicker Man. And there are Wicker Man everywhere on this island. They're terrifying. Yeah, they're all prepping for this night of reunion or something. Yeah. It's like a festival of reunion. Yeah. And they all are wearing animal masks, which you will remember from the play. Yeah.
01:31:07
Speaker
in, I think, episode one of this season. Yeah. At the same time, this boy went missing. Yeah. Which, again, that feels, again, very Wicker Man, because we're the... I mean, we're not there to... It is not our job to find the boy, unlike Wicker Man, where we are tasked to find a little girl. But it did remind me of that.
01:31:31
Speaker
We're trying to find a, yeah, we're trying to find the, uh, Cronmedon. Cronmedon. We're trying to find it, and it's this, this place that supposedly can offer you access to the veil.
01:31:48
Speaker
Right. What do you think about the missing child though? Because for me, a lot of things seem to have even a vague explanation, right? So for example, the guy who went missing in the nun house in the boarding school, we can kind of imply, we kind of know what may have happened to him because of the groundskeeper.
01:32:09
Speaker
I am terrified is a chilling thought to me that this little child went missing in this kind of supernatural place, where there is a Cthulhu type monster that can grant you access to, you know, the veil to another another setting. I actually think it's a very, very impactful part of the game, where they had a child go, it's very Stephen King, they had a child go missing, and he doesn't come back. And it's it's chilly.
01:32:40
Speaker
Here's what I wanna do. I wanna really quickly run through the plot of this one because I think there are questions that might help us answer that. I think there are other questions that might help us answer the question of what happened to the sun. So they're all getting ready for the festival of reunion while you're looking for this crone meeting and more
Supernatural Mysteries and Puzzles
01:33:00
Speaker
and more of them disappear and as you get closer, and you find out that this boy has been,
01:33:07
Speaker
drawing pictures of the hole and writing about this guardian of the hole, which sounds very much like at this point, you also know what the crow that you keep seeing seems to be like the guardian of the veil. Yeah.
01:33:24
Speaker
So you can sort of make the connection in your head. Like there's a monster that Kieran knows something about that lives in this deep, dark hole that they think is the passage to another world or whatever, very similar. And the raven has a name and it's Sirmog? Smirmog? I am butchering that so hard. Simurg, Simurg. Simurg, Simurg, yeah. Simurg, Simurg is like a bird demon that guards the veil.
01:33:53
Speaker
um nobody's out nobody outright says that till chapter eight but right you should know it by now you can you can put it together there there is a lot of emphasis on raven court covered uh type of birds which is great um those kind of birds always have a lot of folklore behind them i think it makes sense you know they're
01:34:16
Speaker
they lead people to death, they lead people to other dimensions, you know, just other places, they're meant to do that, they're travelers almost, you know? Right, so as you're trying to track down this boy and trying to find the current meaning, you realize that they're kind of like,
01:34:34
Speaker
They seem to be connected, so you're following these paths as they're converging. And as you're doing it, the villagers start disappearing. They stop being anywhere. And wicker men start showing up outside of where you are. And basically, every time you solve a bigger puzzle, one of the wicker men lights on fire. And we don't see that happening, by the way. We discover them and somebody is following us. Yeah.
01:35:01
Speaker
You do stuff like you repair a lighthouse, by the way, roses. There's a point where you need to charge a battery. However, I did too. This is the one place that I looked at a walkthrough. Because I didn't know you could pick up the battery and take it with you. However, you know why you have to charge the battery? Because the man, the lighthouse keeper, lost the crank.
01:35:30
Speaker
A loose crank somewhere on this island and we don't even get to find it. We lost the crank. This is a lost loose crank my friends. There's a loose crank in this game that we don't even get to see. I feel ripped off.
01:35:50
Speaker
All right, so- Oh, so you're telling me this man can't charge a battery? I'm sorry, like, you can be a lighthouse keeper if you don't know how to maintain stuff, but- Well, yeah. I mean, he's not- That reminded me of- He's not a pointy island, by the way. Right, he's not a point and click character who can think, like, oh, if I just take it, take the battery out and bring it to a bicycle, and then fix the bicycle, and then run the bicycle, it'll charge the battery. Like, that's just such a point and click logic. Well, I missed this. That was so confusing to me.
01:36:20
Speaker
But you do discover, whether it's the person who's been lighting the wicker man on fire or not, you do find somebody that's been following you. He's wearing a scary dragon. Very scary mask, yeah. That is reminiscent of what Kieran, the boy missing, has been drawing as the guardian of this pit.
01:36:43
Speaker
And you chase him to this like really eerie clockwork playroom that's supposed to be Kieran's playroom. He runs into the back of the room, you chase him.
01:36:56
Speaker
He basically leaves you, I forget what he leaves you, but it's like the last thing you need to get to the end of the chapter. He takes off his mask and underneath the mask is something that you needed. You're right, I can't remember the item. And man, the sound design in this game? Fucking brilliant. Because you don't see what's under this mask, but you can hear him sniffling and like
01:37:18
Speaker
And you can see his shadow as he's pacing in the dark and he's like this hunched over kind of deformed humanoid creature. And you refuse to go closer to him. Until you take the thing and you leave, you go to the bottom. Thank God, because I didn't want to go closer to that. Are you serious? No way.
01:37:37
Speaker
you go to the bottom, you end up in the bottom of that pit. I can't remember how. How do you get? So in the game, you get somebody who is living on the island has left kind of like a legacy of hints, somebody whose house was burnt down.
01:37:56
Speaker
somebody tells you that there is a mural on a specific wall and that actually leads you into the pit. And there's a series of puzzles that you need to figure out to get to this pit. So yeah, you don't just fall into the pit. We're skipping over most of the puzzles, like all of this is gated by puzzles. And again, like we've said, some of them are good, some of them not so much. A lot of them in the first season relate to opening up doors, a little less of them in the second season. Yeah, so many keys.
01:38:24
Speaker
But the second season puzzles are way better than the first season. Anyway, I agree. Yes, I very much agree with that And I I would like to actually not talk about the final chapter because I want people to play this game
01:38:36
Speaker
interesting yeah but i do want to speculate on and like i said on some of these things so what did you think i do want to talk about hold on because i do think we have an answer to work here it is so we go into this pit we open a coffin something in the coffin the thing in the coffin is like
01:38:56
Speaker
you expect it to be some woman who has been referenced a couple of times. Instead, it's like a half human, half creature, right? Half bird. And then you discover you're at the bottom of the pit because somebody pushes a big stone slab over it and you're trapped down there.
01:39:19
Speaker
Now, there's two mysteries here. Who was the deformed creature? There's a couple mysteries. Who was the deformed creature in the dragon mask? That ran into Kieran's playroom when he needed safety? Where did Kieran the boy go? And how do people in this town turn into deformed creatures?
01:39:47
Speaker
It is my assumption that the deformed creature wearing the dragon mask is the boy Kieran. Because just like all the other characters in the game who become obsessed with the other side, they end up either dead, insane, or transformed in some way.
01:40:09
Speaker
Yes, and that that is told to us almost verbatim in one of these parts is that if you go to this veil, it's not that you die necessarily. You are just a changed person. So I was I'm struggling with the Kirin thing because I guess this I mean, if he's like very deformed, I guess I thought that that was an adult character in there.
01:40:36
Speaker
Yeah, but we also come across other children that were Kieran's age and they're our height. Okay, fair. Yeah, fair. Fair, so. Yeah, no, that is a very good theory.
01:40:50
Speaker
I just don't, I would go with that theory. I'm still a little unsure because it is so scary to just have a child disappear. And it wouldn't be the first time that something awful has happened in this game in these chapters.
01:41:06
Speaker
The boy is obsessed with knowledge the same way, again, all the people who were destroyed throughout this game were obsessed with knowledge. He wanted to glimpse beyond the veil. He didn't quite know that's what he was doing. Oh, okay, wait, a thought, a thought. It is formed! Okay, the last place that Kieran was found
01:41:26
Speaker
was in a house or a woman was was talking about the veil, essentially, like tapping into, there was a woman that lived on this island that was kind of also obsessed with knowledge and obsessed with the portal. And her name was Marie, I think, and she wanted to see it. And she had discovered this mural. The last place that Kieran was seen was at that house.
01:41:47
Speaker
Did he discover the same stuff we did about the mural? Did he get behind the veil and then became deformed? And that's why nobody saw him ever again, you know? Right. I think that might be the case. And his father didn't want to talk about it with anybody and had withdrawn from public life. So yes, it's possible that his father even knew what happened to him.
01:42:12
Speaker
It's possible. Yeah, there's a very mysterious again, very wicker man as very mysterious.
01:42:18
Speaker
owner of the land or noble of the land. It's hard to tell. There's clearly a conspiracy and a cult on Eilishmore, but it's hard to tell whether they are complicit in the things that, whether they are complicit in things that are happening to you or whether it's Kieran or whatever that creature was. I can't tell. I can't tell how complicit they were.
01:42:42
Speaker
I can't either. Because you do get a little bit of narrative from the lighthouse owner who is very grounded in reality. He thinks it's all a farce, you know he he tells us like yeah they're doing this reunion thing and everyone's really superstitious but it really is a bunch of nonsense.
01:42:57
Speaker
And I think there is a moment where somebody says, and I might have been the light keeper, that if you choose not to see it, then it's not there. You know what I mean? So he's implying that people are making up stuff in their head almost, which is an interesting thing to bring to the table considering all of this hallucination.
Bleak Tone and Symbolism
01:43:19
Speaker
kind of abstract thought and unexplained characters and uh yeah it was just very interesting to me that we had this grounded character who is absolutely certain that this is all nonsense you know
01:43:33
Speaker
Right. Yeah, it is nice to have a character like that because it felt like finally we had sure we were like we were standing on solid ground Exactly, but yeah, that was my favorite chapter. I was so engaged with that chapter It's very a folk horror heavy
01:43:55
Speaker
And that's why sometimes I do struggle to call this game completely Lovecraftian because it is so many forms of horror in here. You know, there's a very heavy occult and cult aspect. Let's be honest here. The society that we talk about could be considered a cult. Right.
01:44:14
Speaker
I think there's a lot of Stephen King, I think there's Hitchcock, and I think it's very, very heavy Edgar Allan Poe. There's a bleakness to this to this game and a depression almost to this game. Even even the like other NPCs and the characters, nobody is actually like having a good time. There's not like a fun, bright character in in this game. You know what I mean? Right.
01:44:39
Speaker
There's a couple, well, yeah, I mean, there's the tavern owner, but. She's kind of like snarky and yeah, you know, and over it because everyone's falling on a hard times, you know, like in a Lovecraft story, everyone has fallen on hard times. This game has basically no humor. I'll say that, too. That's true, which is interesting for a point and click adventure game.
01:45:03
Speaker
Right, and I mean no humor. There are not jokes in this game. This is a drama, a thriller. You know what? It's a psychological thriller in my mind. So what were your questions? So you had some questions. So there's the final chapter where a lot of this stuff is revealed, but some of it's still sort of vague. I will want to ask you one spoilery question before we leave. Go right ahead. What are some of your questions that you had, one of some of the theories?
01:45:33
Speaker
I think you answered it. I was I've mostly wanted to theorize about Kieran. Because there are so many characters, you're just not really, they seem to have a horrible end. But you're not sure if they have a horrible end. Like we're speculating right about the nun who maybe sacrificed herself to the sea.
01:45:54
Speaker
it's interesting because if that theory is true that means she chose that for herself as opposed to some of the other characters who were kind of maybe exposed to the portal you know like here in like he didn't choose that necessarily he got there he didn't choose it so i it's just interesting to me that some of these characters are just not explained and like what about the guy
01:46:19
Speaker
who was asking for something that was stolen like what was I mean that's the chapter that you speculated that did that even happen because some of these characters are so unrelated to anything that you gotta that you gotta kind of wonder but I think you kind of nailed my question because it was mostly about Kieran that was the one place where I really wasn't sure if that creature had anything to do with it if he was burning
01:46:49
Speaker
the wicker men, if he was on our side even. But like you said, and like the game says, if you see the veil, if you are exposed to these things, you will come back entirely a different person. And I don't want to give too many spoileries about spoileries. Well, and not, yeah, not everyone comes back from the veil, but most people do. And all the characters that we've met that we find have been to the veil and have come back.
01:47:18
Speaker
But they're like, they are they are transformed in some very negative way. What do you think about the theory, though, that so Alexander Dupree, for example, we find him in a strange state.
01:47:30
Speaker
Do you think that part of him is in the veil in his other part of him? Like his consciousness is in the veil? Yeah. Yeah, I mean. Yeah. That occurred to me because, like, again, I don't know some of the things that I don't know if they happened or not. I wonder if it's like they didn't happen in our world, but maybe they happened in the veil. Maybe maybe, for example, the chapter in The Slums of London was a debit in the veil.
01:48:01
Speaker
that whole time while he was unconscious and recovering from being attacked by the janitor. Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, I think.
01:48:15
Speaker
We find out, you know, we find out who started this whole thing. We find out who's involved and who's not. Well, no, we don't find out who's not. We just find out some people that are definitely involved. We find out who did it wrong. And then we make a choice at the very end. That's the thing that I want to know what you chose. But yeah, we can talk about that. I mean, but there's so many other questions like what was the snake? What was the bird? And what was the wolf? Yeah.
01:48:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, the wolf I'm not sure on. They do sort of talk about the snakes. And there's bird imagery, there's snake imagery, there's one point where you see a wolf head mask. And there's one point where it says you can never know the entire aspect, and this is in episode four, it says something like you can never know the entire aspect of your own truth, and then says something terrible will happen if you bring the snake and the bird together.
01:49:10
Speaker
That makes it me think that they are supposed to be metaphors for some part of, again, your quote unquote own truth. So is it like, fear and curiosity combined? Cause fear is like a big thing here. And clearly curiosity is a big thing because that is,
01:49:35
Speaker
both Devitt and Wakefield's entire motivation is curiosity. But- Like the truth and philosophy and yeah. Right. The thing that pushes you into the veil is fear. And that's the thing that other characters are trying to induce in you or have been trying to induce in other characters to get them beyond the veil. But the wolf
01:49:59
Speaker
is generally a symbol of anger when you see it in media. Like that's just the semiotics of seeing a wolf in something and the wolf shows up angry in the play when he catches the bird and the snake in bed together.
01:50:23
Speaker
So that is those are extremely yeah, I'd have to like dig really deep into like thinking about the metaphor for that because I think wolves can also represent like a pack and loyalty and like hunting and maybe that goes back to the play where somebody was unloyal to the wolf and that is why he was so angry.
01:50:46
Speaker
So yeah, so I mean, loyalty is angry that fear and curiosity are mixing. That doesn't make sense. And neither does anger is confronting fear and curiosity. None of the ways that I can straw that metaphor makes sense. And I mean, honestly, this is what I was talking about when the first episode that we talked about this is there's a little bit of like writerly weirdness.
01:51:11
Speaker
in these games where it's like they're going off on some poetic tangent where everything's a metaphor and you get this big feeling that either this only makes sense to the writer or this doesn't even make sense to them. And it's just poetic flourish. Because here's the thing, semiotics is supposed to be innate, right? When you weave a symbol into your work,
01:51:40
Speaker
It's supposed to speak to something in the reader or viewer or player that they might not even consciously pick up, but they instantly know
01:51:54
Speaker
something else about your story without you having to communicate it. If you show a person on a cross, you instantly know that person is a martyr. If you show a person wading into the ocean and then stepping back out, you know that that person's trying to wash off some sort of sin or guilt or something from their past. There's things,
01:52:19
Speaker
that you just know. And I think this game is full of symbolism that is not coming through. That's fair. Yeah, that's fair.
Audience Participation and Conclusion
01:52:30
Speaker
In that way, I kind of almost compare it to like Twin Peaks, where some of these things, they're almost meant to be felt.
01:52:41
Speaker
and maybe not understood fully, but felt, you know, almost this abstract feeling, you know? Well, but then it's like the developer of her story, Sam Barlow said, you know, you don't have to reveal all the answers to your questions, but you at least have to know the answers to your questions. Do you get the feeling? Do you feel satisfied after playing these two games that the writers knew the answers to all their questions?
01:53:08
Speaker
I do. I think the writers are satisfied. I do get that idea. I don't know if the players are and maybe that's purposeful. Maybe this is an American psycho type of thing where there are things up for interpretation. I'm a little more doubtful. I know they want things to be up to interpretation and I know they want us to think through and interpret
01:53:31
Speaker
what some of these things are, but I don't exactly know that there's an answer to who is the guy who asked for the thing that was stolen. I don't exactly know that there's an answer to what is the snake, what is the wolf, and what is the bird. I don't know that we know who, this is from chapter four, so be vague about it. I don't know if we know who the trembling child is.
01:53:51
Speaker
Like I don't know if all of those have, I don't even know if the developers have legitimate answers to that because again, even if they do, it's not coming through. And it's not even coming through in a way where I feel like I could make some guesses.
01:54:11
Speaker
I mean, if we have listeners that feel like they have a stronger handle on some of these questions than we do, feel free to write in. I would even be down to read some reader interpretations, like just do a segment where we read emails where people tell us what their interpretations of some of these weird things are. I would love that. I love to read about theory on more vague stuff. So I would love to hear some of your interpretations. If you write in.
01:54:38
Speaker
keep it to a paragraph or two, don't go crazy, if we're gonna be reading it. But yeah, if you played The Last Door and you have theories, or you think you can answer questions that we didn't answer, and that maybe me and Rose's can debate a little bit about whether we agree or disagree with your interpretations, that might be fun.
01:54:58
Speaker
Yeah, that would be great. I would absolutely love that. And obviously we have gone way over time. Yeah, this is our longest episode by far. And I knew that would happen because this game there's just a lot of talk, there's just a lot of talk to you about. I'm gonna ask you a spoiler question and then let's get, then let's say goodbye. Okay, ask away. Did you save Devitt or Wakefield? I saved Wakefield. I saved Devitt.
01:55:27
Speaker
Why'd you save Devitt? Because that was our whole goal the entire time. And Devitt specifically asked us early on in the game, he challenged us. He said, are you actually trying to save me? Or are you just looking to sate your curiosity? And I wanted to prove, no, I'm actually trying to save you. You are my patient. I am an ethical doctor. And I am trying to save you. This is not a quest for ego. Sure. What was your reason to save Wakefield?
01:55:57
Speaker
Um, I, I was more in line with, I thought that Devitt had to kind of live with his consequences of what he has done. And I actually wanted to like keep them in there because if, if I believe
01:56:14
Speaker
that devit dies in the veil. And so I guess I guess I just didn't have a lot of sympathy for devit. I think that's where my mind went. And I wanted to protect like the greater good of the world.
01:56:29
Speaker
from this ever happening again versus Devitt who I don't trust now. I actually don't trust anybody in the society at this point. I don't think they have good intentions. We know something about Devitt that we didn't tell the listeners, but if you're listening to this, this is a mega spoiler.
01:56:50
Speaker
I won't say it, because you didn't want us to, but we do. I'm just reiterating that I did not feel that that debit necessarily earned it. And I don't think anybody in this society necessarily earned redemption. And so my whole thing was I wanted to protect more of the world from this supernatural versus letting, saving somebody who I don't trust.
01:57:18
Speaker
And I know I went off mission and I know I didn't get that. I did to my credit. I did watch both endings, but I did choose to save Wakefield. OK.
01:57:31
Speaker
Well, everybody, thank you so much for listening. Yeah. It was fun. It's fun. This was a long one, so I really appreciate you guys hanging in there with us. We really like to do these deep dives. If you have a game that you would love to hear us do a deep dive, let us know. We're not going to say yes to all of them, but it might be.
01:57:52
Speaker
But this game came from an audience suggestion. So please keep writing in and write in if you have any other questions. The more interesting the question, the better. We're gonna do another Q and A episode soon. What do you have to say, Roses, before we go?
01:58:12
Speaker
I just want to say that I can talk a lot more about this game. We're not going to, all right? Unless you guys write emails. Unless you guys write emails, yeah. But I just want to say this is probably one of the best psychological horror games I've played in a while. Okay. Where it really didn't have any humor. It really stuck to what it was trying to do.
01:58:36
Speaker
And I felt that it was one of the most well written games. Like you said, it got a little poetic, it got a little flourishy. It does, it does do that. But I'm coming at it from an artist perspective. And that's why I think in the end, the writers know what they're doing. And they're just they're coming across as so artistic that I fully believe that they have lore like down the up the wise in this game.
01:59:00
Speaker
But I super recommend this game. You guys, I really, really enjoyed it. It's really high up there now. And I think I want to do a review on it for the channel. And I will just end it there.
01:59:12
Speaker
All right, that's great, yeah, and guys, again, email us, matinroses at gmail.com, write reviews on all the platforms, recommend this show to your friends, and yeah, we'll see you guys next week. You wanna say our catchphrase, Roses? Do I get to say it? Ooh, I'm gonna say it. Podcast is art, and art is suffer, and kneecap tattoos is suffer, and also art.