Part 17: Ending 2: A Lesser Evil (?)

Hi, this is the last part of Resonance, in which we explore the other alternative ending. Click on the image to watch the video.



So this ending seems to at first make things better, but then the world more or less regresses back to where it was, with Eleven guys at large. I'm going to lave it up to you to figure out which of the 2.5 endings we saw is actually a good outcome! The one interesting thing is that here we don't get a choice whether to publish the article or not.

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Well, that's the end of the game and the end of this LP. It was fun for me, and hopefully for you too.

As for the game itself, I am kind of torn. It has many good points, but in the end, at least to me, it feels a little half-baked. Most importantly, even though it's not super short (when you add up all the videos, it comes probably to a good 5-6 hours), it somehow feels short, like there is in the end, not a whole lot to do in it. It's kind of weird, because to me, Anna always felt like the central figure of the story, but then she gets killed about 2/3 of the way through and the rest just seems like going through the motions a little bit.

Interestingly enough, the game actually has a developer's commentary option where as you play you can hear occasional insights from the author Vince Twelve and also Dave Gilbert from Wadjet and a few of the voice actors. As I have mentioned before, the game was largely a labour of love of one person (Vince) until Wadjet stepped in to help finish it out with Dave Gilbert's wife helping as a developer. Overall I have to say that technically, the game is quite good for its genre/type with nice music and voice acting and good graphics too. Not to mention the interesting game mechanics like memory and managing multi-person team which both work quite well I think.

To me it always seemed a bit like the game was cut shorter that it was supposed to be, but it seems not to be the case based on the commentary. The scene in the vault was always meant to be what it is now. In fact, the game was intended to start there and then flash back to the beginning, but ultimately it was decided that it would be too much for the player to digest all that after just starting the game so they changed it around. In a way, up until the vault, it feels like a really exciting prologue to a big story, but then it kind of doesn't end up going much of anywhere with it. I feel that there's a bit too much random stuff in the game that just falls by the wayside as the story goes on--for example the computer guy that keeps popping painkillers, we never see him again. A few other things, but most importantly the Eleven foundation, which seems just a collection of random elements that don't really seem to fit together very well. Like, what's the deal with the Japanese lady? Turns out, Vince's wife is Japanese and they lived there for quite a while. In fact she even voices that character. There doesn't seem any other reason for her to be what she is.

And then there are just plain plot holes, if you ask me. Like the whole mainframe thing--would they really just have all of that on one mainframe and no way to recover it if gets destroyed? I am sorry, but that's a bit too much to swallow.

In the end, as I've said, the game is quite topical with its themes of government surveillance and secret databases and so on, even though it does predate the whole NSA scandal by about a year. And it may seem that I am really unloading on the game right now, but in fact that's only because it has so much potential that it can't help but feel a bit unfulfilled at the end.

All right, I've been talking enough, I will leave you here and probably see you soon in another thread with something COMPLETELY different than this! Once again thanks to everybody for watching and participating!