Just finished a few playthroughs of this one! Full review to come, but for now, I was curious what other players (@mathbrush?) made of the ambulance flashback. I assume the implication is that it’s Jay’s mom, Lori, who was the drunk driver who died? So it’s revealing that she was struggling in some way at that time? But if that is the implication, it’s so vaguely gestured toward that I feel like the revelation doesn’t add much to the story. I also don’t know what to make of the possibility of choosing wrong within that flashback (by picking “gun it” instead of “yield” at the intersection) and getting the ambulance itself into an accident, and then Jay waking up, falling back asleep, and re-dreaming it…
Now that there’s a thread for this game I’ll link my review:
As for your post…
That’s definitely the impression I had. I didn’t know about what happened if you made the ‘wrong’ choice. But yeah, if it is the mom, there’s another flashback where she’s pregnant with you. Was she pregnant in the accident? Or is this just a year ago before the dinner? Right, I swear somewhere it said the mom died recently. So I’m not really sure what we’re supposed to learn from the flashback, except maybe how sad it was?
Ah, if I remember correctly, I think Uncle Jimmy says something like “I know you were just a baby when your mom died” (during the convo in the garage).
Right, he’s been having anxiety and panic attacks lately (you get a flashback of his if you stay at the table and talk to him rather than helping Aunt Mary serve the pie), but I don’t think it’s connected.
cross-posting my separate review. As mentioned there, the other reviews were, errr, important to me this time so thanks!
My views are obviously suspect, but
I think the implied reason for the xanax is that it’s implied the mom died around this time of the year (but many years ago). Jimmy seems to tie it to the season
Re: veganism, the lime pie is vegan, it’s just bad tasting, so the PC doesn’t want to eat it despite it being vegan (at least this was my read). Whereas the pecan pie is non-vegan but delicious, and thus why the PC eats some anyway . . . I admit I was confused on the cycling links if we were actually changing something or if they were always both true. I.e., the vegan one was either “I’m vegan” or “I’m trying to look like the other guys in LA” (not verbatim), so it wasn’t clear to me if those were always both the case, or whether the position we left it in determined whether the PC was vegan or not?
In the dream, I did managed to get in an accident by gunning the ambulance. Tabitha described what happened next–you wake up and go back to sleep again and re-do the dream (this time without the option to gun it). This was definitely not textual but I had the vague sense in that scenario that the car you get in accident with is also the mom’s car, so it’s sort of two dreams about her getting in an accident for the price of one (or maybe just foreshadowing that car accidents are a topic).
I also found the confusing and/or slightly unsatisfying stuff folks flagged earlier in the thread confusing and/or slightly unsatisfying, but as an LA person I can say that the vegan thing rang true to me – there is definitely a genre of person who tells everyone they’re vegan out of an aspiration to be a healthy trend-setter, but whose attachment to actual veganism is spotty at best (this is signposted early on with the link shifting “You’re vegan” to “You’re trying to look like the men in LA” – I interpreted that to mean the former is what you’re saying but the latter is what you mean).
Did you see the part that revealed Jimmy is actually Jay’s dad? That was wild in its own right haha, but it did make this moment make more sense to me (even if it still didn’t really hit emotionally).
Oh no, I completely missed that – I did see a flashback scene where everybody was playing minigolf together and things were oddly awkward, but that’s it. Do you remember what choices trigger that sequence? It does seem like that would be a plot element that could have tied some of the more disparate elements together, so seems odd to make it missable (or possibly I just wasn’t reading carefully and failed to pick up on that, I suppose!)
I think you only learn it in the cat’s flashback, which I missed on my first playthrough, but you can see it while Jay is washing dishes toward the end.
