I’ve played this through twice now, getting first the positive then the negative ending, and some text on the second playthrough has led me to a different theory.
I know the magazine - it’s the one I’d read on the bus to work - the one with the ‘I Saw You’ section.
The thought of how I met him and why I’m here now swallows me up with anger and grief.
I think our protagonist is the ill-fated girlfriend and Cafe Guy is the douchebag suitor. It sounds wild, I know, but it aligns better with the personality we see and it puts a new spin on her desire for him, specifically, to just notice her.
It’s interesting that in a more “positive” playthrough, the PC either doesn’t remember or consciously avoids these memories of “anger and grief.” It also adds extra layers to the good ending where the PC lets him go and makes it to whatever heaven analogue we’re working with here, and the bad ending where it seems that she’s lured him to his death in vengeance and can now “get used to the cold” with him.
When the PC chooses to see the world through a more forgiving or judgmental lens, is she processing or reliving the trauma of the specific circumstances around her death? When she thinks “You should’ve lived longer and been loved better,” is she really talking to herself?
I think this is one of my favorite games of the competition so far. There are a handful of spots that need polishing, but the atmosphere and aesthetic are right up my alley. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
Right, I agree with this. (I don’t think it was stated, but it did mildly surprise me because the Italy flashback would have read more male POV whereas I think in the prologue they call the PC “she,” but I decided I just had the wrong read and that’s the PC’s flashback. The other even less-indicated explanation is that there’s some references in the prologue to like “you know what happens if you mess up,” so possibly Italy was a situation the PC was also sent into as a ghost, but she messed up?)
Yeah, I was unclear about that too. I sort of headcanoned it in the middle (the PC is mostly bringing the issue to the co-workers attention, but she also seems to have some supernatural sense for Jess’s health and maybe in some way is sustaining her or keeping her from dying?)
Okay I hadn’t seen that story before; during the game I was thinking about this one. Someone could submit an intent to enter and only come up with their idea/write the game afterward, right? That story seems too similar to what happened in the game to be just a coincidence…
Oh sure, you could come up with an idea afterwards.
I guess I have a vague recollection of forgotten/invisible employee being kind of a trope in fiction for a while so it didn’t seem so far-fetched to me. And… I don’t know: helping organize summer camp stuff for teens, you put quite a bit of work into making sure you get everybody from one place to another. We narrowly avoided forgetting a kid a couple times because everyone was convinced they were in another vehicle, and it feels like it’d be worse with adults when they might have their own transportation… did everyone just go ha, lucky her, she managed to duck out of this stupid nonsense without the bosses noticing?
You can definitely submit an intent to enter and then come up with your idea and write your game entirely between the intent-to-enter deadline and the submission deadline… not that I’ve ever done that… but given that there were only five days between the incident and the submission deadline, it seems a bit unlikely in this case. Wild coincidence, though!
I like that! It explains how the Cafe Guy plotline fits in and makes the immediate protectiveness of Jess make more sense. Though it does raise the question of why the supernatural entities in the beginning think the PC needs to be more positive.