Postmortems for dead cats and dead duelists

The other side of a file size limit is that if there are 50 x 50Megabytes entries, it will be a 2500Mb (2.5Gigabyte) comp download.

That doesn’t really seem like a problem in the year of our lord 2015.

I think erring on the side of “accessible to more people” is fine and dandy.

Ok, I replayed the game, carefully read what Matilda said and interrogated Dmitri a bit more… major long spoilers, minor confused thoughts: [spoiler]key interrogation words were Onegin, vendetta, fool, countess, me, Matilda, love…

First, Matilda. She was killed at the last masquerade ball, I guess last year. Perhaps she said something, perhaps she was raped. Perhaps Onegin did it, and that’s another reason why I (the character) hate him. (just one reason, there are more, as we have a vendetta against him)
She’s a ghost now. It looks like she’s been a ghost for a long time, but yet she had to be a real human before, she was killed at the last masquerade after all, she was a friend of the countess.

Onegin: he’s bad, even Death says it: “Onegin does sound like a bastard”. He’s dressed as a sort of Devil tonight, “skin painted red from head to toe, wearing horns and bat-wings with his cock hanging out”. Enough said. Maybe he’s the one Dmitry talks about in his entry about love: “…nobody’s in love with anyone. Some people just think that they are. I won’t name names, but I will say it makes them look… foolish. And I’m not just talking about you either.” Does Onegin believe he’s in love with the countess? Maybe. But everyone is in love with the countess (me included) and everyone is foolish tonight.

Dmitri himself: he can’t wake up, he keeps going to sleep. He’s the opposite of me since I can wake up at will… or maybe he’s just like me and by waking up, I’m actually going to sleep every time… Maybe he’s my conscience/alter ego. In any case, it allows him and I to talk.

Ferdinand: a mystery, even according to Dmitri. Maybe not too important.

The countess: she’s kinda like a fairy. Anyway, there was this rumour… and her throwing the glove was premeditated… and Onegin is the one who spread a rumour about me… maybe he spread the rumour that I did something with Matilda and that she killed herself because of that. That would be enough to explain her thirst for ‘revenge’ as she calls it.

About a few things:

  • Dmitri’s entry for ‘me’ or ‘fool’: he says he tried to change people but they remain the same, that trying to change people is a “fool’s errand”… perhaps he tried to make Onegin be nicer… perhaps he’s immortal, and like Death he’s a bit blasé of people…
  • Dmitri’s entry for the countess: so the child that she raised… he still eats rats?? Well, like Dmitri says, people don’t change, he used to eat rats so that’s his nature. I notice that rats are also mentioned in Matilda’s speech (her parents saw her as a rat)…
  • the book (story of the cat and the monkey): I’m not seeing much connection there… this story, and the curtain’ story, are about distrusting appearances, but appearances are not what have gotten me getting challenged by the countess… or did they? Did Onegin told the countess to challenge the person dressed like me, but the countess doesn’t know me at all, so I’m the victim of my costume?[/spoiler]
    Anyway, I feel superficial in my analysis so far. But now I’ve got enough of a feeling about the characters, and that it’s totally OK that I cannot know more. It’s a “slice of life”, after all. However, if there were deeper layers, I would like to know, before closing my eyes from this adventure. This has been the best IF game I’ve played since Galatea, 2 years ago. A part of me really would like everything, including the cheese moon with the giant, Death, …etc, to all have other meanings…

But I’m not longing anymore for a love story and I’m statisfied. Perhaps I grew up.

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Thanks again for the comments! It’s great to see how people are reading the game.

Are there deeper layers? Well, that’s hard to answer. As I mentioned earlier, I tried to write this game in such a way that it would give players back what they put into it. It’s designed so that if players just want to skim the surface, that’s fine; in fact that’s built into its themes, into its premise. But if players want to digest the material more, that should be rewarding too. Hopefully it has enough in it to keep people thinking, if they want to, for as long as a good book would.

So in that sense, there are deeper layers. But if you were asking whether it’s possible to dig deep enough into the game (by asking Dmitri the right thing, for example) to find some text that will tell you how you’re supposed to interpret the story, I can say that there’s nothing like that hidden anywhere. I wanted to leave it up to the player to figure things out. In my mind, this process is an important part of the game.

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