LogFAQs > #978752563

Before we get to that, today's first route is with D team. Phi is stuck in the incinerator, somehow. This is a particularly easy room but I like the idea of splitting the team in two for the puzzles. At the end of the puzzle, Zero recites their favourite tale of the dead woman and the snail, and helpfully points out that 6 total people were killed (the same that we need to be killed in this game! That had passed me by). Or 6 billion, whatever. Diana has to decide whether to shoot Sigma or not, and Sigma spends an awfully long time explaining the very simple odds to say we should shoot him. I do, and he dies, and Diana is so horrified she commits suicide to be with him. Oof! Poor Diana.

I notice on the flowchart it specifies this end as Shot: Live, so instead of not shooting I go back and do it again... and what do you know, it's a blank! (Please don't tell me this means I have to do that 99.5% probability one hundreds of times >_>) Then we suddenly all collapse with that poison, until Gab comes to the rescue (walking as slowly as possible, I might add) with the antidote from earlier. Phi takes this opportunity to be an absolute idiot, saying we maybe shouldn't take the meds in case it's a trap. Sigma eventually points out that uh we're dying anyway Phi why the fuck would we not take this. I know she doesn't trust people but this was a very silly sequence for Phi, come on now.

We take the antidote, live, and Phi reveals her hair is naturally red. In most other games this would be a light piece of fluff but in this one I assume this will be crucially important later on.

That ends this route, and team Q's next destination is... Zero's office? That Eric stumbled across? I'd be suspicious of him but I don't think he has the capability to lie. Cool place! Q's memory is briefly triggered by the innocuous question 'do you like to read', I'm noting this for later. It certainly seems like he does! I like the weird faces on the wall from the status screen, this is the first time we see Q's and I enjoy the comments. Also probably relevant that since team C is linked to guns and we've had the gatling guns in the rec room, team Q should look out for arrows and D for acid.

After the puzzle, we are in a standoff. I choose to kill nobody of course, and Eric responds by shooting an unarmed child at point blank range with the heavily powered grenade launcher that we just used 5 minutes ago. Eric, man, you've got to stop killing Q if you want me to like you. It's your biggest flaw. Eric and Mira survive unscathed and walk to their freedom, until Mira gets frustrated and kills him. Honestly, not even upset.

I try a few other names in the kill screen- interestingly trying Q prompts the game to tell me to type Q's real name, so there's a bookmark for a later time. Typing 'myself' results in a message that I can't commit suicide, though, so I dunno what that's about. I decide to type Eric, assuming it's a quick game over, but this somehow leads to a full ending. Maybe I should go back and fill in the blanks of other fragments that I assumed were empty game overs!

Mira reveals her psychotic backstory. She has never known emotions, and after taking her mother's words too literally, she decided to start stealing hearts to understand emotion and experience joy. Mira is the serial killer we heard about previously, and she's been with Eric as she's convinced there's gonna be something special about his heart. OK, her design works better when she's a soulless murderer covered in blood. I wonder if she killed Eric in that other ending because he revealed the truth about his smiles, and she had nothing left to learn about him. I find it sweet that his final words were to forgive her, almost makes me want to forgive Eric for the repeatedly-murdering-a-child thing.

We get another X-pass from Eric (poor), and Carlos (fight) though we don't get one for Q in either of the other endings where he dies (I try killing Mira after this but Eric dies again). Mira and Q live happily ever after, or something like that.

I, uh, am surprised by this. We've had reasons to think there's something off with Mira, to put it mildly, but I didn't think the game would reveal something this big this early. If Zero is so obsessed with that woman's death, surely Mira is the one they'd be trying to hurt? (I'm assuming the first woman she killed is the woman from the snail story) But of course, she's incapable of being hurt emotionally, so what is all this for? The story of the deaths is likely just a metaphor then, not a driving motive.

The truth is invisible, indeed.