Thinking some more about Elsinore
Apr. 1st, 2021 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariThere are a lot of games where one ending is the fulfillment of the game’s themes, and the other is you rejecting the themes and telling the entire game to go screw itself. Normally, the selfless ending is the fulfillment ending, and the murder-everyone ending is the screw-you ending. Elsinore is the first game I’ve played where the selfless ending is the screw-you.
The characters in Elsinore are pretty tightly scripted, on a thematic level as well as a literal, mechanical one. They take their inputs of impending doom and output futile violence in return. There’s a sense of arbitrariness to the whole thing--these characters could live in one run, and die in the next, and it wouldn’t really matter except that they’d stop taking inputs. Ophelia goes from desperately trying to save her father, to accepting that his death is necessary in some runs, to seemingly not caring about him in the many endings where she abandons him to his fate. The closest thing to a selfless, heroic ending is Sacrifice Peace for Survival, which is more of an extended fart noise, like choosing Refuse in Mass Effect 3. The rest of them tend to come down to what makes Ophelia happiest, and even the relatively positive Sacrifice Independence for Peace is framed in terms of what she gets out of it and what inspires her to leave Elsinore behind.
Then you get to the secret endings, and hoo boy, the secret endings. Exeunt All is the fulfillment, where Ophelia decides that no one besides her and Quince even matters. She sets off with him to ruin more lives, as dispassionately as picking the wings off a fly. Everyone besides them is a role played by a doll. And as for what role Ophelia herself might be playing? She no longer bothers to consider it.
Sacrifice Choice for Revenge is the ending where you burn it all down. Literally. But it’s also the ending where Ophelia decides that this is bigger than just her. The ghost was like her, and Simona was like her, and Othello will probably be like her too. Each of the people that Quince hurt mattered, and it matters that thanks to her, he’ll never be able to hurt anyone again.
(The other game where the selfless ending might be the screw-you is Harvester, but I don’t think I’m emotionally equipped to analyze Harvester beyond “That shit nasty, bro.”)
The characters in Elsinore are pretty tightly scripted, on a thematic level as well as a literal, mechanical one. They take their inputs of impending doom and output futile violence in return. There’s a sense of arbitrariness to the whole thing--these characters could live in one run, and die in the next, and it wouldn’t really matter except that they’d stop taking inputs. Ophelia goes from desperately trying to save her father, to accepting that his death is necessary in some runs, to seemingly not caring about him in the many endings where she abandons him to his fate. The closest thing to a selfless, heroic ending is Sacrifice Peace for Survival, which is more of an extended fart noise, like choosing Refuse in Mass Effect 3. The rest of them tend to come down to what makes Ophelia happiest, and even the relatively positive Sacrifice Independence for Peace is framed in terms of what she gets out of it and what inspires her to leave Elsinore behind.
Then you get to the secret endings, and hoo boy, the secret endings. Exeunt All is the fulfillment, where Ophelia decides that no one besides her and Quince even matters. She sets off with him to ruin more lives, as dispassionately as picking the wings off a fly. Everyone besides them is a role played by a doll. And as for what role Ophelia herself might be playing? She no longer bothers to consider it.
Sacrifice Choice for Revenge is the ending where you burn it all down. Literally. But it’s also the ending where Ophelia decides that this is bigger than just her. The ghost was like her, and Simona was like her, and Othello will probably be like her too. Each of the people that Quince hurt mattered, and it matters that thanks to her, he’ll never be able to hurt anyone again.
(The other game where the selfless ending might be the screw-you is Harvester, but I don’t think I’m emotionally equipped to analyze Harvester beyond “That shit nasty, bro.”)
