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I suspect Gula is Lucille the bomber based on her reactions during that room--if she's also the principal's daughter, then we can figure that she bombed the school out of revenge for her innocent father getting arrested. A bit belated, but we can infer some events from the other branch of the upper path based on what happened in the lower one--namely, that Trist went into the church-like room and found the gun, and likely correctly identified Bia as the one committed murder (Ira's reaction basically confirms this, and we know that's not his own crime). He was also raving about how someone's personality type didn't match how they acted, which makes perfect sense if Bia is actually the Helper. It's probably a bit too early to piece anything major together, but I suspect Vidi of being the traitor--he seems to have the strongest moral compass of the group, and if it's a group of criminals, then my thought is the traitor will be someone who's helpful and moral (relatively, at least). Given the nature of the game's structure so far, I'm guessing this is some kind of simulation? The Pandora from the conversations with the dead is trying to learn something, while her avatar "Cora" isn't aware that it's a simulation.
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Sep 22, 2021 14:43
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differentiating posted:I do feel like there's something doing on with Pandora/Cora being parts of a whole rather than Pandora just lying about her nickname. The fact that the game keeps referring to her as Ancora over Pandora makes me suspicious that it isn't as straightforward as we were led to believe initially. There's definitely something suspicious about the way Cora acts, as well. While she knows all the puzzles, she doesn't seem to know enough about the other players for someone setting up this kind of death game. Combine that with elements of the setup that no sane mastermind would implement. For example, why does she die when voted for? She already has a contingency that kills everyone but her when they run out of time--why not do that if they vote for her too? Surely seems better than dying. The loaded gun is also just a very, very bizarre thing to give players as part of a puzzle, especially when you make it clear that as long enough others die they'll get out just fine. If it's not a simulation where Cora is only given a limited amount of information as the mastermind's avatar/viewpoint, then I almost have to assume she's not the real mastermind.
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Sep 23, 2021 20:06
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Well at least Cora isn't being a complete idiot; the only reason for Vidi to want to trade is if he has some idea what the keys were for. We also have zero trust with him, so did he peace out because he decided we're not worth helping? (Another thing worth considering, if this is all a simulation of some kind, what does 'getting out' even mean?)
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Sep 24, 2021 19:18
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Seems like I was right in our lack of trust in Invidia playing a factor. Is this a unique case of the game telling how to proceed? Also my best guess regarding Marco is that he's the one Cora was referring to at the beginning that was helping set up the tech end of all this...though, assuming that's the same Marco as the previous game, that does beg the question of when this is taking place, as Marco was killed even in Ending A IIRC.
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Sep 27, 2021 15:11
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differentiating posted:Yeah - like I get Bia doing it in that one route because she was kind of out of options, but in this case, Luxuria was basically trading a guarantee of not dying this hour for a very high likelihood of being voted out next (or otherwise killed) when she didn't have to. Seems like, if anything, she should've swapped the portraits as a fail-safe but not called attention to it by volunteering herself as a "sacrifice". There was a decent chance she wouldn't be the person voted for, anyway. Maybe Lux had some idea of who Ava was and had a personal grudge against her; there's also the possibility (albeit a remote one) that someone else switched the plates, though Cora noticing Lux tinkering around the voting system seems to suggest that is was indeed them. I neglected to mention this before, but Pandora not seeming to know fully who they are either is interesting. There's a lot that could be read into there, but I don't think we have enough info to do more than spitball guesses based on the running themes.
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Sep 27, 2021 19:46
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So, I want to bring something up that's been rattling around in my mind for a bit now. In the very first update we found a note that said "A FAKE WITH PIGTAILS", but no real context for it. There are three characters with visible pigtails in the game: Bia, Ula, and Lux. Everyone in the game acts "fake" to some extent (they're all criminals in a death game, after all) so I kind of doubt it's just referring to any of them being liars generally, and all three are two-faced to some extent to be sure, but I suspect the specific accusation in play here is that one of them is fake in a way relating to pigtails--that is, they're pretending to be a girl when they aren't. This really only makes sense for Lux for obvious reasons. Also, check out Lux's profile in the second post. To be clear, given the nature of the game I'm assuming/hoping that this is a case of a deliberate deception and not the game being transphobic.
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Sep 28, 2021 16:06
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So...that happened, and yeah Lux is a terrible person who probably also had terrible things done to him, which is unfortunate but I don't think it does any good to dwell on it. As soon as it was established we had crimes based on the seven sins I figured Lux was not going to be a great person. What I'm more interested in is Cora's line about trusting him, since...why? Did she know him in real life? Especially as we're on the side where Lux swapped the pictures. Given how that all went down, I think we can guess what happened now: Lux swapped his and Gula's portrait, probably trying to kill Gula in revenge for misidentifying his gender. Gula noticed they got switched (or, for whatever reason, didn't want to kill Lux) and so swapped again so that Ava would be killed instead. (I believe Bia has also swapped her and Cora's portraits still, but that ends up being irrelevant on this path.) I had suspected this ever since we got our first look at our blonde-haired protagonist, but between the fixation on the word hope and the fact that Ava knew specifically two people with Ancora's family name, I think it's pretty safe to say that Ancora is one of the twins from the first game (I'd have to go back and look to remember which one was the traumatized one that had been involved in some shady stuff). That makes the Marco connection even more interesting, since he didn't give any indication of knowing her (I'm pretty sure at this point Marco the one she mentioned early on that set up the tech end of all this). Speaking of tech...I suspect Invidia's figured out in this route (or maybe knew all along?) that this is all a simulation, but it's still unclear in what way. Are they all robots like in the last game? Is this a digital simulation? The former would make sense if the reason for the animal mask heads is because they don't have the tech to replicate faces yet, but doesn't really hold up given the time it takes to make the bodies--even if "time" is apparently the true enemy. The latter holds with the way we save routes in the game, and Invidia being called as dead upon leaving the grounds could be viewed as him escaping boundaries of the "level" or something to that effect. It would be funny if it was another case of the first route being the only one involving the real people though, seeing as it ended with all of them arguing until everyone but Cora's head exploded.
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Oct 6, 2021 15:49
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Quackles posted:So does this mean Marco isn’t a cool name? Also, Cora feels nothing when she's attacked while hacking--so she's not just gaining a visual through a helmet's camera, her entire sense is leaving her body (though she doesn't seem to feel what they feel, just hear and see). If she was just a person with a helmet stuck on, being attacked should interrupt the hacking, as she'd be seeing it on her own helmet, but that's not what's happening. Yeah, pretty sure we're dealing with AIs, though it still remains to be seen if it's a full-on virtual simulation, or if it's in a physical space but everyone's secretly a robot. Edit: On the other hand, the first update clearly shows Cora without the helmet on--so if she's a robot the helmet isn't the head so much as an early version of AS's collars maybe. ZCKaiser fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Oct 8, 2021 |
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Oct 8, 2021 16:06
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differentiating posted:With the mention of two students named "Penmill", my new theory is that Ancora and Pandora are actually sisters, rather than being one and the same. That would also fit with a bear and a panda helmet - with the panda likely faking her death in order to do mastermind-y things behind the scenes. Presumably Ancora was partially in on the planning to find the traitor, hence why she knows approximately half of what is going on. I was also wondering if Ancora's first name would be "Hope", given her fixation on the word (and its connection to her nickname), but it being Nico's surname could be explanation enough given the context. I'm pretty sure Ancora is actually H/Hannah from Head AS Code; she's blonde like her, we know she was mixed up in Empty S somehow before the events of that game, she had a twin sister, and she had a strong reaction to the word "hope". (Though, given that game, maybe we're specifically the robot double?) quote:The helmets are probably used to transmit memories somehow a la HASC, which might account for Ancora's "psychic visions", but the fact that they (at bare minimum) restrict what the participants are hearing/seeing would make it easy for a 9th person to exist in the shadows as well. Still pretty sure the pigtails thing was a reference to Lux being male. The question I have is: was Ava always hiding some knowledge, or did Invidia do something when he "explained his reasoning" to her? Also, Ancora not actually being the mastermind is the most sensible reveal thus far. Which begs a bunch of questions, such as who is the real mastermind? Are they even present here? Invidia has some kind of connection, given the route where he had some directive to offer himself up to the vote in the case of a deadlock, but who knows how many secretly have some kind of instruction. Maybe Ancora's not even the only one who thought she was the mastermind; after all, what better way to prevent the players from working together to subvert the system than to convince them all they're both above it and have no one they can trust?
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Oct 11, 2021 16:04
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differentiating posted:I was doubtful of this theory until update 28 and the explicit reference to colorblindness, though I have one change I'd like to posit - if I'm right that Pandora and Ancora are sisters, and you're right that they're G & H in some order, I think Ancora is more likely to be G/Greta than H/Hannah. Hannah was the bossier twin, and therefore the one more likely to actually lead ME while Greta aided on the periphery. I think H was the twin with colorblindness, too, which would rule Ancora out as Hannah. Good point, I realized I had the wrong twin when the colorblindness came up. Greta also has a line about green having once been her favorite color but that no longer being the case, and if I went back to check I imagine she's the one that broke down at the word "hope". I'm pretty sure Invidia is the traitor to my My Emptiness, but I doubt he's the one who usurped the game; I think our Ancora is being used as a proxy mastermind by the real mastermind--Pandora--to draw out and eliminate the traitor. Invidia says that person is Ava, and given that Ancora gets the sudden urge to trust Ava and give her the gun it's worth being suspicious of her, though obviously the we've just been told to suspect Bia as well as a potential victim of a switcheroo. I wonder if Invidia, when he's talking about the cards, is referring to the idea of "God" in the way the previous game used--that is, that as the player we are "God" and what we observe becomes true, therefore he needs to fool our perspective for the duplication to work. Which Bia ruined in the last route by actually swapping the piles, thus ensuring the trick failed.
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Oct 18, 2021 15:25
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Regallion posted:Invidia looks 200% like Marco, down to the piercings.... would that make Ava Jasmine? Unlikely, unless the bit that gave us her real name is lying to us. Honestly there being actual humans under the helmets is way more of a twist than there not being, hahahaha. I wonder...with these mystery directives, can we somehow go back to the very beginning and hack the panda helmet before they're killed? Edit: Also, yeah, Invidia appears to be Marco, or at least someone with the same facial features. ZCKaiser fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Oct 21, 2021 |
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Oct 20, 2021 14:09
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. . . We've never actually been Ancora, have we? Edit: Specifically, we've been riding along in her helmet, and maybe somehow influencing her decisions. But the narration periodically switches between first and third person seemingly--most noticeably, the hacking segments seem to be in first person narration, but whenever something is physically happening to Ancora it's described in third person. So either this game can't keep its tenses straight or, more likely, the narration has never been coming from Ancora. This is why Ancora acts so confused sometimes, and why she's still fully subject to the rules of the game: Ancora is not the mastermind. We, Pandora, riding along in her helmet, are. Double Edit: Also, in the voting segment, didn't it seem like Superbia didn't know the portraits were switched? Maybe there's some merit to the idea that someone swapped and took her place. ZCKaiser fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Oct 22, 2021 |
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Oct 22, 2021 14:16
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Quackles posted:There's also the 'what's the point' of why bother with such a duplication in the first place? The point is they need a certain amount of cards to escape, an amount that it increasingly feels like is outright impossible to get without cheating in some way. So, we're playing back into the idea of the last game as a way to summon and manipulate the perceptions of "God"--in this case, Pandora. Pandora thought they were in charge of this game, tasked with finding the traitor and hiding the fact that they're the mastermind. In fact, however, Ava is the mastermind and Invi is her assistant (and also some iteration of Marco, it seems). Given the talk that Ava is much older than they remember, it's likely this is still happening across periods of time. The grand "why" is still a question. In the first game, the original experiment was done in order to summon God and thus ensure that the world existed by being observed--the subsequent loops were Emily trying to manipulate God's perceptions in order to get the happy ending she wanted. Were I to hazard a guess, this game's goal is to try and manipulate the world by manipulating God's perception outright. The card duplication isn't just useful, it may well be the goal of the game: to be able to materialize whatever they want by manipulating God's gaze. That may be the point of the helmets, now that I think about it. By giving the illusion of "hacking", they allow God to switch perspectives, something that wasn't possible previously. Of course, there are still some differences. Invi can communicate with Pandora, which calls into question whether Pandora is "God" in the same way the player was in the first game. At the very least, I do find one bit amusing: in the first game, Emily was actively counting on God's desire for a happy ending to drive them coming back and observing the additional loops. Here, that same trait seems to frustrate Ava and Invi. Or maybe it doesn't frustrate Invi. Maybe Invi's still the traitor--except maybe it's Ava he's a traitor to, not us.
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Oct 27, 2021 15:34
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Voting is disabled, only one person can go in each room, and now there's no removing items that aren't expressly meant to be removed. So at least the chances of someone getting shot have gone way down. I don't think things will be quite so easy--Pandora still has to get everyone to listen to her, and it's unclear whether this is part of Ityne and Marco's plan or not. Also hahaha, ME basically confirmed there was no way to get the full amount of cards and that it was expressly for the purposes of the Sally-Anne test gambit.
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Oct 29, 2021 15:04
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There would need to be more than two instances of the game though, right?
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Nov 5, 2021 15:15
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Quackles posted:WELP. I made an early guess to that effect when it was seeming like Greta and/or Hannah were involved, but now I'm wondering what's going on, because this Emily is clearly older than the one at the start of Head AS Code. Perhaps this isn't Emily but her mother or something? Either that or there's still a whole lot we don't know about her.
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Nov 9, 2021 15:38
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Is it too long or something?
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Nov 16, 2021 16:39
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"Zachary" was supposed to be Gula and Ira's father, right? The innocent principal? Something's up here, and I don't think it's that he had some more kids. Could this be some kind of memory bleeding over (like how a bunch of them thought their name was Marco)?
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Nov 24, 2021 16:24
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I'm getting very strong "creator is doing the best they can with what their patrons have given them" vibes.
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Dec 1, 2021 15:52
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I'll throw in a vote for female as well.
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Jan 13, 2022 20:29
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Mix. posted:bold of you all to assume this is entirely heterosexual My vote was definitely with the assumption that it definitely wasn't. If both protagonists' "routes" are arguably canon, will you be showing off both of them eventually?
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Jan 14, 2022 15:18
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