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I took this opportunity to finally play this game and it was unbelievably good. I was so smug about figuring out the chinese topmen and their shoes and basically all the times the game asks you to differentiate between people with the same given name, and the purser just looking like a goddamn nerd, and for ever just looking at the justice at sea sketch, but also for minor stuff like right at the beginning of the game, in the first memory, I looked at the guy and then at the manifest and I was like "this is clearly the first mate", and this was of course confirmed a few minutes later but it felt like a little triumph at the time. My big lingering confusion at the close is the exact status of the shells and in particular The Chest at any point in time. It seems to me like opening the chest makes some things happen that are very bad news but then why didn't Nichols get ark of the covenant'd after he went poking around in there? Lots seems to hinge on whether the shell is in or out of the chest; the theory I like is that the top compartment being full of mercury acts as a damper and prevents the shell acting as a beacon for the entire collective wrath of the sea. I can only assume that in Ch2 Nichols took it out, and in Ch4 Beng put it back and in doing so incapacitated some more mermaids but then Nichols went and brought them all (along with two more shells) back to the ship. Then a bunch of poo poo happened and I guess the captain killed two of the mermaids and threw their shells overboard, neutralising them, but I guess at some point before that Dahl went and took the third shell out of the chest and I guess the captain didn't notice it, so the krakening continued until Perrot came in to try diplomacy. I like this theory. It all tracks, except, it does not explain why Nichols was able to frame a guy for murder instead of, say, writhing on the floor in burning agony. The shell had to be in the chest before, otherwise the ship would have been right hosed from the get go, but also it needed to be out of the chest by the time of Ch4 so Beng could dramatically put it back. What am I missing here? E: Now I check again, at the point Nichols did his murder the shell was in the bottom drawer of the chest and not the top bit with the mercury. So, what's the deal with the bottom drawer? Why is it even there? Was the shell in there from the start of the voyage? Was the shell just always not properly contained? If it wasn't, what the gently caress were the Formosans thinking? If it was, why isn't Nichols short an arm like Beng and Dahl? Fedule fucked around with this message at 12:55 on Oct 22, 2019 |
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Oct 22, 2019 12:15
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Interesting suppositions but ya probably should spoiler this, because, well. I never got the sense that the shells ever really messed with people's heads all that much? They just act as a magnet for sea horrors, and the resulting fear, paranoia and cascading betrayals are all just humans being our cool wonderful selves. The box definitely has two compartments and one of those is definitely filled with mercury but it seems as though all the big dramatic things that the box does hinge on the top compartment being open and someone touching the mercury. Specifically, I got the sense that while out at sea Beng opened the box and put the shell into the mercury, which is what did the whatever that incapacitated the mermaids, and that Dahl later took the shell out, and in both cases this proved fatal. When Nichols is doing his murder, we see the shell situated in the bottom drawer of the chest, with the top locked. It seems to be the case that the shell was always in the bottom drawer, because like I said before if Nichols had taken it out of the top drawer he would be notably minus an arm. But, neither the bottom drawer providing any shielding nor the bottom drawer not providing any shielding seem to make any sense. If it does, then what's the point of the mercury bowl and how did the mermaids find the boat crew during Nichols' big stupid kidnap stunt when the only time the shell even briefly left the chest was during the murder? If it doesn't, why didn't the mermaids show up before the ship reached the Canary Islands, since they're clearly able to operate in British waters, and why wasn't the shell in the mercury compartment, and, again, I cannot stress this enough, what the gently caress were the Formosans thinking bringing the unshielded shell on a sea voyage? While I'm here, here's another question: did the captain ever actually figure out what the shells were doing? I keep thinking that he just didn't notice Dahl was holding the third shell, but maybe he did and just didn't care because as far as he knew they were just some pretty baubles the mermaids didn't like having stolen from them. Maybe this is why he hesitated in telling the first mate "they're at... the bottom of the sea"? Okay, one more; it's not clear exactly when Paul Moss and Davey James set the last mermaid free, and thus how many people were still on the boat at the time, but it seems unlikely that they could have carried her the whole way from the lazarette to the top deck without anyone noticing, right? I wonder if anyone else was in on the bargain. At that point, the official story seems to be that the captain scared the last mermaid into calling off the kraken and that the shells were all gone (see: "A third shell! Captain didn't throw them all overboard!"), and yet even after James, Evans and the ladies made their escape (so, unquestionably post-Bargain) Olus Wiater was still scheming to "trade wretched fish and shells for gold", so I have to wonder who exactly knew, told, and believed, what. This sure is one of those stories you linger on for a while, isn't it. Fedule fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Oct 22, 2019 |
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Oct 22, 2019 18:01
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