Kiki's Inner Catalogue

(Massive game ruining spoilers actually. This is one you want to try blind. At least go look it up and see if it’s your thing.)

-Katherine being called "Person K" is potentially a reference to one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels, Peril at End House. "Person K" is used in the book to refer to an unknown additional person present in the house where the death occurred, although it turns out everyone knew Person K was there and simply missed adding them to the suspect list (because of a fundamental misconception about the case.) It's a great book and you should totally read it! I think this is probably intentional, just because of how strongly Galley House draws from other Christies, most notably And Then There Were None (it is also vaguely reminiscent of various others but probably not to a point beyond coincidence.) So cool when my favorite stuff references other excellent stuff

-speaking of, the note attached to the pictures mentions that the extra pictures not taken from Galley House are from an inheritance dispute that occurred around the same time. AN inheritance dispute. The unavoidable implication is that Katherine is linked to the inheritance dispute. (So what does it look like when the estates of all the cursed people are dealt with, anyway? Where do these items go? Cause it's not going to be to Martha's or Helen's or Damian's families and I highly doubt there would be any legal precedent for any of their stuff to go to John's ex. Does the inquest assume these are the remaining belongings of Elizabeth Galley and try to find her extended family? Actually what was that inquest even like, damn) Anyway. Not to get distracted. Presumably what happened was that the possessions stored in Katherine's house came under dispute by the family of the previous owner (or a current co-owner). Perhaps her sister and the sister's children are the remaining three pictures? But really we'll never know.

-oh yeah here's something I just noticed, the manual having explicit warnings about how people who use the machine should not be inclined to false beliefs or fantasies, and the two other people on the ID list who were fired before Reya kind of explain each other, no? It seems like only certain people can use the machine safely without long-term risk. (I mean, it doesn't seem like Ervin has used it in a while, and he still suffers the effects.) I am glad Sam kept this technology hidden for four years because It Is Not Ready although I do have to admit it is very useful actually

-Because I've seen at least one other person asking about it-- before Rupert died, the Galleys were expecting John to come, and presumably expecting him to stay the night once the weather set in and they realized they couldn't send him home in this. Because of this they decided to make up the extra bed in the Study. After this Annie arrived unexpectedly and they had to room her in the Attic (obviously the Study is the preferable room, at least pre-unexpected corpse, which is why I think Annie probably got the last option.) When Rupert died, Annie was set up in the Attic already but the Galleys forgot the Study bed was meant for John until it became clear he needed one. I wonder how Annie would have come to realize this and what impression it would have given her, especially after it became clear that Helen's (and then Victoria's and Eddie's) room were also free. The question goes from "why did Martha even put me in here when there are rooms free" to "why did I even decide to sleep in here in the first place" ... yeah I think I might have to agree with Tyllurium's Type Help video on this one, there's something about the curse that means people don't immediately realize these sorts of things once their cache has been cleared. Annie had some other fucking things to worry about anyway

-a mistake I had in the last post regarding Pippa (two more to follow): Pippa uses her antennas to detect codes, but it's also possible to do that manually at least to some degree, which explains why she wasn't needed for the prototype version of the machine at the D&M offices

-Pippa works at the Foughburn Research Centre (not Center) that one's on me

-OH BY THE WAY Pippa has a line in scene 30: "I should have realised... It was only the younger girl that was worried about their mum finding out. The older one must not have known... /// It was the same thing, the same disease..." This isn't in reference to Annie like I thought it was but to Ervin's daughters since Pippa helped with that machine! This confirms Maisie is the younger sister and Tabitha the older (as Maisie thought Tabitha's drawing on the walls would make their mother cross, which was the memory trigger) and therefore that I was wrong about their death order in my previous post. Lucy (3)->Maisie (2, younger sister)->Tabitha (1, older sister). Welp. I kind of love that Ervin is person 4 because it helps emphasize that the curse really did spread from him even if he wasn't the last carrier. He should really not have been sharing Certain Information about the People Getting Deleted When They Are Given Certain Information curse with his Favorite Person. dude.

-sorta tangentially speaking of, one of my favorite things about the game is that we don't get to know or confirm the characters' names, that we don't know what Tony's real name is, that we don't know if Pippa is short for Philippa, that we don't even know if the younger Beaumont sister is named Annie (short for Ann) or Ann (short for Annie) or even Annika, that we don't know for sure whether Victoria and Damian were actually married, all of these details that We Just Can't Find Out. They won't Lock In or be Typeset for us when we discover the truth! What we see is all we get! Nobody is fact-checking us! This is it! It just makes everything feel so ephemeral. This information is just Gone. The machine is incredible but it cannot make up for what was lost from the space of collective memory.

-but mostly I like how well they illustrate how so many of these characters have that fundamental impulse of curiosity and Need To Figure This Out and that's NOT the right thing to do here. But you can't stop yourself. I am that person. I know this thing would kill me. As Reya (for instance) I would have to make myself into a different kind of person to survive and I don't think I could do that scared. I would not succeed. This is my Eurydice. Thanks Roos

-and finally

First, some errata:

-The writer of this game is named William Rous (not Roos, as I spelled it before). Sorry Rous

-I can't count. 11 + 1 + 1 + 8 + 1 = 22. The birthday paradox requires 23 people. 22 people is not 23 people. Unless I arbitrarily decide to count Lucy for no reason at all, this doesn't work. Oh well.

-There was another verse in Mountain that I didn't mention although I really should have. I'd pay the price of sorrow / If I only knew that some tomorrow / I'd find you. Screaming crying throwing up

-I looked further into the date thing and this goes deep, man. The date on the Sunday newspaper, March 14, was actually a Saturday in 1936; in Type Help, we don't get a newspaper, but it's stated that the incident occurred on Sunday, March 7, 1936 (which was also a Saturday). There's no reason for a day of the week to even be provided in Type Help, which reinforces how this is apparently intentional and confirms that it's not just a special edition of the paper or something like that. Ok, but it gets stupider, they aren't on the Julian calendar either, because March 14, 1936 in the Julian calendar is a Friday.

-ok admittedly I don't actually know very much about this, nor do I have terribly much interest in researching it very extensively, but here's a fun fact about the Gregorian calendar: when it was first introduced, 10 days were skipped (so for instance, there was no date October 5, 1582) because they were trying to fix the drift that had been caused by bad Julian leap year calculations for the last 1600 years, and also make Easter stay in the same general date range. This makes the Galley House (Galliday?) calendar weird because whatever they're using is NOT corrected like this in the same way. Presuming that the calendar reform occurred due to the necessity of a calendar reform becoming more obvious after the death and deletion of Pope Gregory and not because of some other alternate history that happened before any of that... *stops to take a breath* this seems to indicate that the catholic church was somehow less obsessed with the date of easter which is so unbelievable that my only possible alternate theory is that the calendar reform was not instituted by the Vatican. galley house alternate french republican calendar with regular weekdays and some unknowable leap year correction system what the fuck am I on about chat. btw when I said I'm not interested in this I was fucking lying obviously

-no I will NOT be using the terms "thunderclapped" or "memory holed" on this blog, not that anybody has asked me to, not that anybody thinks these are normal things to say. death and deletion please and thank you

ok back to your regularly scheduled feral analysis

-there was an interesting discussion a few days ago on the Galley House discord that ended in a tied 11v11 poll and a statement from one of the devs (Ward) about how he knew what the intended answer was but wasn't going to say it, and then he deleted that message later, and which eventually led to me making this shitpost

which as you can see once you get past the fact that this was my immediate thought and also probably why I worked out that I'd done the math wrong before: I voted no. So I would like to elaborate on why exactly I voted no on this.

-Reason 1: narratively. Great hubris comes with great tragic consequences, or at least I think that's what spiderman said. Ervin's plan is a long shot, and it not only relies on all the acquaintances he's forgotten having worse memories than him but also relies on the emotional connection framework of the curse.

-Reason 2: about that. I am willing to believe that Ervin has done quite a lot more investigation into the curse than Reya, both with the machine and in person. I absolutely think he was involved in the deaths of Jacqueline's circle; I know he has plausible deniability as having taken the items in the bag off the bodies, but I think it's very likely that he's been nudging the curse for a while, using similar events like the Galley House 2011 incident to remove people more peripheral to himself from his memory. This whole situation would have given him the chance to experiment with the curse more, especially were he using the machine to look back on each situation, but even just saying "it has to transmit through emotional connection" is a very vague and subjective criterion, one that would require a lot of experimental evidence for me to get behind and one which is only hammered in as much as it is because Meg is trying to save Reya's life.

-Reason 3: I don't like him and I want him to lose I genuinely think Ervin's character arc is improved if it was all for nothing. I haven't seen anyone talk about it, and I don't know if that's because they think it's too obvious to mention or because they haven't discovered the same reason, but, Ervin is a character motivated by revenge. ("I'm doing this for you.") Behind his bullshit about being a hero who wants to stop the curse from spreading, NO, he wants to KILL the damn thing. He is actually the only character who even uses the term "curse"! (I use it because I can't stand to refer to it as a disease due to the weirdness of the transmission vector, as I talked about in the first post, but I think Ervin uses it in a way that implies some degree of personification of something that, for all we see, is purely a sourceless and mindless phenomenon.) BUT, in the pursuit of revenge, he uses the very curse he wants dead to destroy himself and everyone he has ever known. And I know this already sucks. But it's important to me that, when Ervin uses this curse to such an alarming degree in such a desperate quest to be forgotten... that the curse ends up helping him out a little further than he intended.

I'm sorry, it's just, the story is better if he fails. And even if he's right and the vague implication in type help still holds and it's not a mindless phenomenon but an unknowable memory eating Thing I still like it more than I like him so there's that

-one more thing about the curse before I go on to a different large topic: I wanna talk about how perfect the thunder is. Because I realized recently while working on some fanart that the lightning motif is actually a great representation of what the curse is and how it transmits. It reaches a point of low potential (new victim) and then has opportunities to branch off and progress to multiple people, but one of them remembers first so the curse jumps there and the previous pathways don't continue. It comes from Somewhere, some unknown collective memory space, and strikes you down where you stand. It is sudden and disorienting and destructive. I have no business being surprised about this because everything else about this game's writing is also phenomenal, so, this is obviously also guaranteed to be good symbolism I guess

-so, next, I want to talk about everything this game accomplishes with its opening and framing story (before Lawrence's death). Unlike Type Help, the framing story of which placed the "player character" in a situation so indistinguishable from that of the actual player that you might as well be playing as yourself-- Galley House faces the monumental challenge of aligning the player experience with that of (1) a named character, (2) in a very different situation, (3) that doesn't make any sense and isn't supposed to, because (4) it's a false memory. Of course, Galley House being Galley House, it pulls this off BEAUTIFULLY.

-We know, from how many of the characters talk about their missing memories, that curse survivors tend to have an impression that something has always been a certain way and they've just never properly thought about it. See Eddie's comments in 08-KI, something to the effect of: "I don't know who my father is... I've never really given it much thought". This is the impression the game is attempting to cultivate when presenting the player with Reya's false memories. The player should go along with what is happening WHILE remembering enough of it to come back to it later WHILE not really thinking about it very much. And this is EXACTLY what happened to me when I played!

-Galley House is doing this, I think, by exploiting genre conventions and the limitations of video game mechanics. You see a static 3D model at the start of the game, so the player might not realize the bag and umbrella at the entrance doors aren't Reya's. They'll remember the bag and the umbrella because of the attention drawn to them in the art, and the fact that the cord in the bag, and the umbrella are weirdly not interactable, but they won't think about why they don't see a representation of Reya putting down those items or picking them up and taking them in with her. You look through the window and Reya says, "I can't see anyone inside", and the player's immediate reaction is generally, "Oh, that's what my character sounds like," followed by "What's that diamond thing?" which cements it in their memory well enough for them to later realize they hadn't asked the actually important question, "Who is she talking to??" And then the door is locked but it opens and everyone knows that's weird and remembers that but they have no ability to investigate it because the game is point-and-click. Reya goes inside because she has no reason to be scared, because the door didn't open by itself, and the player goes inside because they know that's where the game is, and they don't really think about it because they can't, they have no context for it yet.

-AND THAT'S NOT ALL! The tutorial sequence pulls this off too! Perfectly! You get inside and see the machine and you remember that it's there already, you don't have to set up the physical components, but you don't think about it because, look, you're being introduced to the gameplay already. "What's that thing?" and "How do I turn it on?" are distractions from the real question "Who set that up?" There are handwritten instructions already on the machine. Oh, this is a tutorial! Let me figure it out. And it's fine that it makes no narrative sense because you're distracted by working out the game mechanics. How does Reya know exactly what buttons she should and shouldn't push? Because those are the only interactable areas. No other reason. Remember it and don't think about it. You watch the list being ticked off and the items being crossed out even though nobody is holding the pencil. And you don't think about it because this is already established video game shorthand for something your character is doing. Don't mind that unlike every other time Reya touches something it's because you clicked on it, and you did not click on that list. Remember it and don't think about it. Notes appear on the machine with handwritten messages on them. This is just what happens when you progress in games, you unlock stuff! Even if you do question it when it happens, there's nothing you can do about it. You get used to it. The power goes out and you turn it back on. There's a coffee cup in the room now. Was that there before? You remember it but can't look at it. It's just set decoration. You train yourself. When the power goes out, go turn it back on. When it, eventually, doesn't work, there's nothing for it but to back out. Oh, it came back on anyway! Well, time to get back to the investigation. So when the power goes out and there's a body in front of you, you go straight back to the generator to restore it. When the ID list comes under the door you don't focus too intently on who left it. You remember everything. And you don't think about it. Until you know better.

-Final thesis on this is that Galley House is banking on the unfailing ability of Obra Dinn players to not remember who mailed them the UI until they suddenly run across it by accident 80% of the way through the game, and also running with the conventions used by some mystery games that don't even bother having a player character or a framing story (Golden Idol for example), but mostly the devs are just knocking it out of the goddamned park with the details of the player experience they've crafted.

This was going to be about half of a post but it ended up being so long that it's going to be almost the entire post: I want to talk a little more about the whole disastrous dynamic between the Dauers, Eddie, and Victoria, both because I like the depth of the already dysfunctional baseline and because I think it's shaped by the presence of the curse in some really interesting ways. So, first, the baseline. (I forgot what I was doing and made the entire thing bullet points... whatever.)

Eddie has a longtime, one-sided crush on Victoria. (He has tried to start a relationship before, or possibly even to propose, but she's not interested. "We've been over this", she says in 17-DI.)

Later, Eddie cares about Eve and is probably in love with her. (I think her saying that he's "pretending" is more reflective of her own insecurities than anything specific Eddie is feeling, although obviously his behavior around Vic is distressing to Eve as well.) Eve returns Eddie's feelings.

However, some aspect of their relationship has been encouraged or kickstarted by Helen, who, unusually, bought Eddie a ring to give to Eve. @\a-casual-egg has already made a great post about this, which is what inspired me to look into this situation further in the first place. you should read the post but essentially the gist of it was that Eve is probably not aware of this arrangement and because of this Helen has ended up having much more power in her daughter's relationship than is healthy. (See 01-BI: "Where did it go... she'll kill me!" Almost certainly Eddie is referring to Helen and not Eve, who is pretty forgiving.)

Rupert invites Victoria and Helen to his birthday party. (Now granted I don't have direct evidence for this but it makes the most sense, and I am almost certain this is what happened. It has been pointed out by other people, I can't remember where, that Helen's nice gift suggests that she's either trying to make a good impression or that she's genuinely good friends with Rupert... but probably the latter given Tony's comments about her not having any close friends in 11-TO. As for Vic, well, keep reading.)

But when Rupert dies, like usual, the characters start subtly rationalizing why they're at Galley House. A great example is in 04-AT, where Annie, who already seems to dislike Eddie, jumps to the assumption that he's invited Victoria there out of spite and/or to make her jealous. This is probably happening with everyone else too!

Eddie thinks Victoria came for that same reason actually-- to show off her new relationship. This explains why he is so sour to her in 02/03 but not in 00. Later, after they talk, he realizes she doesn't have any hard feelings for him, and instead rationalizes that she wanted to see him again, so maybe that means she cares about him in the way he wants.

Vic thinks Eddie invited her in a show of good faith, and because he wants to be friends again. She is particularly excited about this because she thinks his relationship with Eve is confirmation that he's finally moved on.

Eve thinks Eddie invited Vic because he still has feelings for her, which is something she seems to have known about anyway. She and Vic might have been acquaintances already before the party-- it's kind of unclear ("that posh girl" in 01-BI implies that they don't know each other, whereas "she's too good a person" in 06-ED is a weirdly personal thing to say about someone you don't know. Maybe the "posh girl" phrasing is just to keep it vague who she's talking about, I'm not sure.) But anyway she connects Eddie insulting her while complimenting Vic in 00, to her assumption that Eddie must have invited Vic, and has the completely natural response of getting drunk and messy about it. Granted, Eddie obviously needs to get over Vic and the way he treated Eve in 00 was very rude and dismissive, but his intentions were not quite as bad as she thought, and he does probably love her.

This is probably what Helen saw in him originally, and she clearly cares about making sure their relationship works out. ("You know how easy it is for young lovers to throw out what they've got before they've even started," or whatever it is she says in 09-TO.) With Rupert's absence, though, she now figures she's at the party exclusively To help this work out, and to support Eve. With which objective of course Eddie is not helping in the slightest.

Now this is all resolvable for Eddie and Eve (at least while she's alive), because she's a forgiving person and he really does care about her, but also because (as I've talked about before) he has an All Better Now mindset (no not the goddamn Neal Shusterman book I knew I recognized that phrase from somewhere. eddie thinks that once all the problems have been fixed everything can just go back to how it was.) Once he's brought her cocoa and Eve has said she still wants to be engaged, he's immediately ready to move on. And as for Eve, she underestimates how others value her (01-BI and later 03-KI where she talks about Eddie "pretending" to care about her, but also 06-ED where she's worried about what Vic thinks of her too.) and so when Eddie shows her genuine affection she apologizes, even though I really don't think she ought to have had to do that, and they can make up.

But nobody knows this has happened.

I have somehow not talked about Eddie and Vic very extensively so I will do that now. By the second day, both of them are rationalizing the holes in their memory with what they want to believe, to an even greater degree than before. Eddie believes he is finally accepting his feelings and sharing them with Vic, who must have come and who must have stayed because she cares for him, and given the psychological episode he's in the middle of, him keeping those feelings to himself is just another Problem he has to Solve, after which things will be Fixed. Vic is having a much harder time justifying things without Damian; again, she is not interested in a relationship with Eddie, but when trying to give a reason why not, she has to remember him. (I have seen it very acutely pointed out that the thing she cannot rationalize away without remembering is her pregnancy. "I can't marry you... I'm... There's someone else.") This whole situation obviously causes both of them to have massive breakdowns, Vic's fatal. The whole situation is Upsetting. but more on that in a minute because

we have to make room for something that is Somehow Even More Upsetting and New to me and which I Just Realized which is. uh. helen. helen's the reason this post is probably also gonna be tagged #ouuuuughhhhh

see, as established previously, Helen has had a much larger hand in Eddie and Eve's relationship than she probably intended. I bet she bought that ring for Eddie because she thought it would make him more committed to his relationship with Eve, which puts a lot of her frustration about the actual outcome of the situation into context. ("I give you a ring and it just makes you more jealous than you were before..." (01-BI only "I buy you a ring to give my daughter and it just makes you more indecisive than you were before.") So now she feels like she constantly has to be on Eddie's back to stop him from ruining things for her daughter. She must be frustrated with herself, too, especially when she starts rationalizing herself as there to protect Eve and when the amount of money and time she feels she's put into this failing relationship is compounded by her loss of one of her few close friends and her actual connection to this family, (and also her having just blown a lot of money on a nice watch she doesn't know why she bought.)

and remember, even when Helen knows who Eve is again, she doesn't know Eve and Eddie made up. So as soon as that memory comes back, all the frustration and worry and sunk cost comes with it, only for Eddie to respond in the way he does and for Helen to realize with total horror that of course this man she barely knows, a man whose relationship with Eve she strongly encouraged and whose house she visited with the goal of protecting her daughter, has killed that daughter. That, in her own mind, this was fully the result of her own actions. She pushed for this. She doesn't know the Galleys! She encouraged this. She could have gone and talked to Eve herself earlier! And she didn't. She was supposed to protect her daughter and she failed.

So tell me now that 18-VI hurts worse.

ok and remember how I was talking in that earlier reblog about how I can look into a new character at any time and within the first few layers of genuine analysis find something VERY upsetting? but also subtle? Yeah. I am going to honestly say I have never seen character writing like this anywhere. The degree of depth which these characters have, all of which is there for players to piece together in what few scenes they may feature, is astonishing. And the ability of each character's individual tragic arc to dovetail with every other character's individual tragic arc and also the larger plot is completely fucking unbelievable. How am I still digging? Where am I going? Was this all here already? Am I making this up? I need to make Some kind of analysis project that is not just a sequence of tumblr posts, but I wouldn't know how to even begin to organize it.

And a few other things that were sitting in drafts before I thought of all that:

-There are 12 place settings at the table. You could explain this away with Harry planning to come up and eat dinner at some point after the guests, or with the fact that the visualizations aren’t supposed to be fully accurate representations of events, but I have a more interesting idea: What if there was another guest planned, who forgot Rupert while they were still on the way there, and therefore who turned around and went back home? Things to consider…

-the other names on the ID list, the redacted ones which I referred to as having been "fired" in an earlier rb, are actually labeled as "not hired". This doesn't change the soundness of my point there at all actually, but I figured it was worth mentioning just because it was on my mind from some Discord server discussion about whether one of the names could be Type Help's Richard Longley. Yes, this appears to be theoretically possible given the length of the names and Meg's general disinterest in the standard name formatting, but I am not in favor of it because the list of contradictions between the Galley House framing story and the Type Help one just go on. I care a lot about the technology being different, actually. And Reya can't burn down a house that's already been destroyed, so

-would like to address a minor point in the galley house #words of the uninfected (mostly a joke post), somebody asked why I was implying that Pippa shooting the seance gun helped the situation in any way. well. i don't know. when I saw that reblog I couldn't remember why I'd said that, so, it was probably someone else's idea, best not to think about that. in all seriousness I do now actually stand by that it was helpful, because I think it's likely that the only reason Meg was able to convince Ervin to save Reya's life was because he was already in a fragile mental state from the noetic booster. Situation Helped! although this was probably something like my initial read too, given that writing the multiple choice question "which of the following helped this situation in any way" required me to find any way in which either Galley House incident could have been worse (since only then could I find what had helped it not be worse). The only thing I could think of was, Reya could have also died. I am pretty sure this is what I was linking to the use of the booster, although I know it wasn't quite spot-on because at the time I made that post I was not yet well versed in how exactly Meg had saved Reya, so, messy answer basically. sorry.

-on that note actually, if you want to talk to me about this game I theoretically can't stop you from putting your answers in the tags of an empty rb, but if you do that my response will probably be buried five reblogs deep under a readmore at the bottom of a giant wall of text, and not addressed to you. I know full well that I am the one using tumblr wrong, but I'm gonna keep doing it anyway. I'm pretty allergic to using reblogs for anything except long and rambling additions to posts, and you will very rarely see me responding to anything in other people's tags unless I think it's particularly important. So If you want to talk to me about this game And Please Do! you are welcome to use the comments of this post or of any of my posts, I WILL respond, or send me DMs (but not asks because I can't hide those spoilers behind a readmore) or materialize on the galley house discord and I will find you, I turned notifications on for that today.

Look I’m not saying that M*lwish expansion isn’t a problem because it OBVIOUSLY is, and Almighty knows I’m sick of people assuming I’m saying otherwise, just, I don’t understand how you think you’re making any actual progress here by giving Shalash’elin a hard time. I didn’t like the havah but I did actually quite like the statement it was making, connecting the essence of Foil with a thin representation of what narrow protection our planets have and a symbol of what might destroy us, and even despite that protection our culture and traditions are being eroded anyway, as represented in our clothing!! The title was a subtle way to critique our own leadership which we don’t get much of a chance to do except when offworld, so, maybe you just don’t get it.

(Massive game ruining spoilers actually. This is one you want to try blind. At least go look it up and see if it’s your thing.)

-Katherine being called "Person K" is potentially a reference to one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels, Peril at End House. "Person K" is used in the book to refer to an unknown additional person present in the house where the death occurred, although it turns out everyone knew Person K was there and simply missed adding them to the suspect list (because of a fundamental misconception about the case.) It's a great book and you should totally read it! I think this is probably intentional, just because of how strongly Galley House draws from other Christies, most notably And Then There Were None (it is also vaguely reminiscent of various others but probably not to a point beyond coincidence.) So cool when my favorite stuff references other excellent stuff

-speaking of, the note attached to the pictures mentions that the extra pictures not taken from Galley House are from an inheritance dispute that occurred around the same time. AN inheritance dispute. The unavoidable implication is that Katherine is linked to the inheritance dispute. (So what does it look like when the estates of all the cursed people are dealt with, anyway? Where do these items go? Cause it's not going to be to Martha's or Helen's or Damian's families and I highly doubt there would be any legal precedent for any of their stuff to go to John's ex. Does the inquest assume these are the remaining belongings of Elizabeth Galley and try to find her extended family? Actually what was that inquest even like, damn) Anyway. Not to get distracted. Presumably what happened was that the possessions stored in Katherine's house came under dispute by the family of the previous owner (or a current co-owner). Perhaps her sister and the sister's children are the remaining three pictures? But really we'll never know.

-oh yeah here's something I just noticed, the manual having explicit warnings about how people who use the machine should not be inclined to false beliefs or fantasies, and the two other people on the ID list who were fired before Reya kind of explain each other, no? It seems like only certain people can use the machine safely without long-term risk. (I mean, it doesn't seem like Ervin has used it in a while, and he still suffers the effects.) I am glad Sam kept this technology hidden for four years because It Is Not Ready although I do have to admit it is very useful actually

-Because I've seen at least one other person asking about it-- before Rupert died, the Galleys were expecting John to come, and presumably expecting him to stay the night once the weather set in and they realized they couldn't send him home in this. Because of this they decided to make up the extra bed in the Study. After this Annie arrived unexpectedly and they had to room her in the Attic (obviously the Study is the preferable room, at least pre-unexpected corpse, which is why I think Annie probably got the last option.) When Rupert died, Annie was set up in the Attic already but the Galleys forgot the Study bed was meant for John until it became clear he needed one. I wonder how Annie would have come to realize this and what impression it would have given her, especially after it became clear that Helen's (and then Victoria's and Eddie's) room were also free. The question goes from "why did Martha even put me in here when there are rooms free" to "why did I even decide to sleep in here in the first place" ... yeah I think I might have to agree with Tyllurium's Type Help video on this one, there's something about the curse that means people don't immediately realize these sorts of things once their cache has been cleared. Annie had some other fucking things to worry about anyway

-a mistake I had in the last post regarding Pippa (two more to follow): Pippa uses her antennas to detect codes, but it's also possible to do that manually at least to some degree, which explains why she wasn't needed for the prototype version of the machine at the D&M offices

-Pippa works at the Foughburn Research Centre (not Center) that one's on me

-OH BY THE WAY Pippa has a line in scene 30: "I should have realised... It was only the younger girl that was worried about their mum finding out. The older one must not have known... /// It was the same thing, the same disease..." This isn't in reference to Annie like I thought it was but to Ervin's daughters since Pippa helped with that machine! This confirms Maisie is the younger sister and Tabitha the older (as Maisie thought Tabitha's drawing on the walls would make their mother cross, which was the memory trigger) and therefore that I was wrong about their death order in my previous post. Lucy (3)->Maisie (2, younger sister)->Tabitha (1, older sister). Welp. I kind of love that Ervin is person 4 because it helps emphasize that the curse really did spread from him even if he wasn't the last carrier. He should really not have been sharing Certain Information about the People Getting Deleted When They Are Given Certain Information curse with his Favorite Person. dude.

-sorta tangentially speaking of, one of my favorite things about the game is that we don't get to know or confirm the characters' names, that we don't know what Tony's real name is, that we don't know if Pippa is short for Philippa, that we don't even know if the younger Beaumont sister is named Annie (short for Ann) or Ann (short for Annie) or even Annika, that we don't know for sure whether Victoria and Damian were actually married, all of these details that We Just Can't Find Out. They won't Lock In or be Typeset for us when we discover the truth! What we see is all we get! Nobody is fact-checking us! This is it! It just makes everything feel so ephemeral. This information is just Gone. The machine is incredible but it cannot make up for what was lost from the space of collective memory.

-but mostly I like how well they illustrate how so many of these characters have that fundamental impulse of curiosity and Need To Figure This Out and that's NOT the right thing to do here. But you can't stop yourself. I am that person. I know this thing would kill me. As Reya (for instance) I would have to make myself into a different kind of person to survive and I don't think I could do that scared. I would not succeed. This is my Eurydice. Thanks Roos

-and finally

First, some errata:

-The writer of this game is named William Rous (not Roos, as I spelled it before). Sorry Rous

-I can't count. 11 + 1 + 1 + 8 + 1 = 22. The birthday paradox requires 23 people. 22 people is not 23 people. Unless I arbitrarily decide to count Lucy for no reason at all, this doesn't work. Oh well.

-There was another verse in Mountain that I didn't mention although I really should have. I'd pay the price of sorrow / If I only knew that some tomorrow / I'd find you. Screaming crying throwing up

-I looked further into the date thing and this goes deep, man. The date on the Sunday newspaper, March 14, was actually a Saturday in 1936; in Type Help, we don't get a newspaper, but it's stated that the incident occurred on Sunday, March 7, 1936 (which was also a Saturday). There's no reason for a day of the week to even be provided in Type Help, which reinforces how this is apparently intentional and confirms that it's not just a special edition of the paper or something like that. Ok, but it gets stupider, they aren't on the Julian calendar either, because March 14, 1936 in the Julian calendar is a Friday.

-ok admittedly I don't actually know very much about this, nor do I have terribly much interest in researching it very extensively, but here's a fun fact about the Gregorian calendar: when it was first introduced, 10 days were skipped (so for instance, there was no date October 5, 1582) because they were trying to fix the drift that had been caused by bad Julian leap year calculations for the last 1600 years, and also make Easter stay in the same general date range. This makes the Galley House (Galliday?) calendar weird because whatever they're using is NOT corrected like this in the same way. Presuming that the calendar reform occurred due to the necessity of a calendar reform becoming more obvious after the death and deletion of Pope Gregory and not because of some other alternate history that happened before any of that... *stops to take a breath* this seems to indicate that the catholic church was somehow less obsessed with the date of easter which is so unbelievable that my only possible alternate theory is that the calendar reform was not instituted by the Vatican. galley house alternate french republican calendar with regular weekdays and some unknowable leap year correction system what the fuck am I on about chat. btw when I said I'm not interested in this I was fucking lying obviously

-no I will NOT be using the terms "thunderclapped" or "memory holed" on this blog, not that anybody has asked me to, not that anybody thinks these are normal things to say. death and deletion please and thank you

ok back to your regularly scheduled feral analysis

-there was an interesting discussion a few days ago on the Galley House discord that ended in a tied 11v11 poll and a statement from one of the devs (Ward) about how he knew what the intended answer was but wasn't going to say it, and then he deleted that message later, and which eventually led to me making this shitpost

which as you can see once you get past the fact that this was my immediate thought and also probably why I worked out that I'd done the math wrong before: I voted no. So I would like to elaborate on why exactly I voted no on this.

-Reason 1: narratively. Great hubris comes with great tragic consequences, or at least I think that's what spiderman said. Ervin's plan is a long shot, and it not only relies on all the acquaintances he's forgotten having worse memories than him but also relies on the emotional connection framework of the curse.

-Reason 2: about that. I am willing to believe that Ervin has done quite a lot more investigation into the curse than Reya, both with the machine and in person. I absolutely think he was involved in the deaths of Jacqueline's circle; I know he has plausible deniability as having taken the items in the bag off the bodies, but I think it's very likely that he's been nudging the curse for a while, using similar events like the Galley House 2011 incident to remove people more peripheral to himself from his memory. This whole situation would have given him the chance to experiment with the curse more, especially were he using the machine to look back on each situation, but even just saying "it has to transmit through emotional connection" is a very vague and subjective criterion, one that would require a lot of experimental evidence for me to get behind and one which is only hammered in as much as it is because Meg is trying to save Reya's life.

-Reason 3: I don't like him and I want him to lose I genuinely think Ervin's character arc is improved if it was all for nothing. I haven't seen anyone talk about it, and I don't know if that's because they think it's too obvious to mention or because they haven't discovered the same reason, but, Ervin is a character motivated by revenge. ("I'm doing this for you.") Behind his bullshit about being a hero who wants to stop the curse from spreading, NO, he wants to KILL the damn thing. He is actually the only character who even uses the term "curse"! (I use it because I can't stand to refer to it as a disease due to the weirdness of the transmission vector, as I talked about in the first post, but I think Ervin uses it in a way that implies some degree of personification of something that, for all we see, is purely a sourceless and mindless phenomenon.) BUT, in the pursuit of revenge, he uses the very curse he wants dead to destroy himself and everyone he has ever known. And I know this already sucks. But it's important to me that, when Ervin uses this curse to such an alarming degree in such a desperate quest to be forgotten... that the curse ends up helping him out a little further than he intended.

I'm sorry, it's just, the story is better if he fails. And even if he's right and the vague implication in type help still holds and it's not a mindless phenomenon but an unknowable memory eating Thing I still like it more than I like him so there's that

-one more thing about the curse before I go on to a different large topic: I wanna talk about how perfect the thunder is. Because I realized recently while working on some fanart that the lightning motif is actually a great representation of what the curse is and how it transmits. It reaches a point of low potential (new victim) and then has opportunities to branch off and progress to multiple people, but one of them remembers first so the curse jumps there and the previous pathways don't continue. It comes from Somewhere, some unknown collective memory space, and strikes you down where you stand. It is sudden and disorienting and destructive. I have no business being surprised about this because everything else about this game's writing is also phenomenal, so, this is obviously also guaranteed to be good symbolism I guess

-so, next, I want to talk about everything this game accomplishes with its opening and framing story (before Lawrence's death). Unlike Type Help, the framing story of which placed the "player character" in a situation so indistinguishable from that of the actual player that you might as well be playing as yourself-- Galley House faces the monumental challenge of aligning the player experience with that of (1) a named character, (2) in a very different situation, (3) that doesn't make any sense and isn't supposed to, because (4) it's a false memory. Of course, Galley House being Galley House, it pulls this off BEAUTIFULLY.

-We know, from how many of the characters talk about their missing memories, that curse survivors tend to have an impression that something has always been a certain way and they've just never properly thought about it. See Eddie's comments in 08-KI, something to the effect of: "I don't know who my father is... I've never really given it much thought". This is the impression the game is attempting to cultivate when presenting the player with Reya's false memories. The player should go along with what is happening WHILE remembering enough of it to come back to it later WHILE not really thinking about it very much. And this is EXACTLY what happened to me when I played!

-Galley House is doing this, I think, by exploiting genre conventions and the limitations of video game mechanics. You see a static 3D model at the start of the game, so the player might not realize the bag and umbrella at the entrance doors aren't Reya's. They'll remember the bag and the umbrella because of the attention drawn to them in the art, and the fact that the cord in the bag, and the umbrella are weirdly not interactable, but they won't think about why they don't see a representation of Reya putting down those items or picking them up and taking them in with her. You look through the window and Reya says, "I can't see anyone inside", and the player's immediate reaction is generally, "Oh, that's what my character sounds like," followed by "What's that diamond thing?" which cements it in their memory well enough for them to later realize they hadn't asked the actually important question, "Who is she talking to??" And then the door is locked but it opens and everyone knows that's weird and remembers that but they have no ability to investigate it because the game is point-and-click. Reya goes inside because she has no reason to be scared, because the door didn't open by itself, and the player goes inside because they know that's where the game is, and they don't really think about it because they can't, they have no context for it yet.

-AND THAT'S NOT ALL! The tutorial sequence pulls this off too! Perfectly! You get inside and see the machine and you remember that it's there already, you don't have to set up the physical components, but you don't think about it because, look, you're being introduced to the gameplay already. "What's that thing?" and "How do I turn it on?" are distractions from the real question "Who set that up?" There are handwritten instructions already on the machine. Oh, this is a tutorial! Let me figure it out. And it's fine that it makes no narrative sense because you're distracted by working out the game mechanics. How does Reya know exactly what buttons she should and shouldn't push? Because those are the only interactable areas. No other reason. Remember it and don't think about it. You watch the list being ticked off and the items being crossed out even though nobody is holding the pencil. And you don't think about it because this is already established video game shorthand for something your character is doing. Don't mind that unlike every other time Reya touches something it's because you clicked on it, and you did not click on that list. Remember it and don't think about it. Notes appear on the machine with handwritten messages on them. This is just what happens when you progress in games, you unlock stuff! Even if you do question it when it happens, there's nothing you can do about it. You get used to it. The power goes out and you turn it back on. There's a coffee cup in the room now. Was that there before? You remember it but can't look at it. It's just set decoration. You train yourself. When the power goes out, go turn it back on. When it, eventually, doesn't work, there's nothing for it but to back out. Oh, it came back on anyway! Well, time to get back to the investigation. So when the power goes out and there's a body in front of you, you go straight back to the generator to restore it. When the ID list comes under the door you don't focus too intently on who left it. You remember everything. And you don't think about it. Until you know better.

-Final thesis on this is that Galley House is banking on the unfailing ability of Obra Dinn players to not remember who mailed them the UI until they suddenly run across it by accident 80% of the way through the game, and also running with the conventions used by some mystery games that don't even bother having a player character or a framing story (Golden Idol for example), but mostly the devs are just knocking it out of the goddamned park with the details of the player experience they've crafted.

(Massive game ruining spoilers actually. This is one you want to try blind. At least go look it up and see if it’s your thing.)

-Katherine being called "Person K" is potentially a reference to one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels, Peril at End House. "Person K" is used in the book to refer to an unknown additional person present in the house where the death occurred, although it turns out everyone knew Person K was there and simply missed adding them to the suspect list (because of a fundamental misconception about the case.) It's a great book and you should totally read it! I think this is probably intentional, just because of how strongly Galley House draws from other Christies, most notably And Then There Were None (it is also vaguely reminiscent of various others but probably not to a point beyond coincidence.) So cool when my favorite stuff references other excellent stuff

-speaking of, the note attached to the pictures mentions that the extra pictures not taken from Galley House are from an inheritance dispute that occurred around the same time. AN inheritance dispute. The unavoidable implication is that Katherine is linked to the inheritance dispute. (So what does it look like when the estates of all the cursed people are dealt with, anyway? Where do these items go? Cause it's not going to be to Martha's or Helen's or Damian's families and I highly doubt there would be any legal precedent for any of their stuff to go to John's ex. Does the inquest assume these are the remaining belongings of Elizabeth Galley and try to find her extended family? Actually what was that inquest even like, damn) Anyway. Not to get distracted. Presumably what happened was that the possessions stored in Katherine's house came under dispute by the family of the previous owner (or a current co-owner). Perhaps her sister and the sister's children are the remaining three pictures? But really we'll never know.

-oh yeah here's something I just noticed, the manual having explicit warnings about how people who use the machine should not be inclined to false beliefs or fantasies, and the two other people on the ID list who were fired before Reya kind of explain each other, no? It seems like only certain people can use the machine safely without long-term risk. (I mean, it doesn't seem like Ervin has used it in a while, and he still suffers the effects.) I am glad Sam kept this technology hidden for four years because It Is Not Ready although I do have to admit it is very useful actually

-Because I've seen at least one other person asking about it-- before Rupert died, the Galleys were expecting John to come, and presumably expecting him to stay the night once the weather set in and they realized they couldn't send him home in this. Because of this they decided to make up the extra bed in the Study. After this Annie arrived unexpectedly and they had to room her in the Attic (obviously the Study is the preferable room, at least pre-unexpected corpse, which is why I think Annie probably got the last option.) When Rupert died, Annie was set up in the Attic already but the Galleys forgot the Study bed was meant for John until it became clear he needed one. I wonder how Annie would have come to realize this and what impression it would have given her, especially after it became clear that Helen's (and then Victoria's and Eddie's) room were also free. The question goes from "why did Martha even put me in here when there are rooms free" to "why did I even decide to sleep in here in the first place" ... yeah I think I might have to agree with Tyllurium's Type Help video on this one, there's something about the curse that means people don't immediately realize these sorts of things once their cache has been cleared. Annie had some other fucking things to worry about anyway

-a mistake I had in the last post regarding Pippa (two more to follow): Pippa uses her antennas to detect codes, but it's also possible to do that manually at least to some degree, which explains why she wasn't needed for the prototype version of the machine at the D&M offices

-Pippa works at the Foughburn Research Centre (not Center) that one's on me

-OH BY THE WAY Pippa has a line in scene 30: "I should have realised... It was only the younger girl that was worried about their mum finding out. The older one must not have known... /// It was the same thing, the same disease..." This isn't in reference to Annie like I thought it was but to Ervin's daughters since Pippa helped with that machine! This confirms Maisie is the younger sister and Tabitha the older (as Maisie thought Tabitha's drawing on the walls would make their mother cross, which was the memory trigger) and therefore that I was wrong about their death order in my previous post. Lucy (3)->Maisie (2, younger sister)->Tabitha (1, older sister). Welp. I kind of love that Ervin is person 4 because it helps emphasize that the curse really did spread from him even if he wasn't the last carrier. He should really not have been sharing Certain Information about the People Getting Deleted When They Are Given Certain Information curse with his Favorite Person. dude.

-sorta tangentially speaking of, one of my favorite things about the game is that we don't get to know or confirm the characters' names, that we don't know what Tony's real name is, that we don't know if Pippa is short for Philippa, that we don't even know if the younger Beaumont sister is named Annie (short for Ann) or Ann (short for Annie) or even Annika, that we don't know for sure whether Victoria and Damian were actually married, all of these details that We Just Can't Find Out. They won't Lock In or be Typeset for us when we discover the truth! What we see is all we get! Nobody is fact-checking us! This is it! It just makes everything feel so ephemeral. This information is just Gone. The machine is incredible but it cannot make up for what was lost from the space of collective memory.

-but mostly I like how well they illustrate how so many of these characters have that fundamental impulse of curiosity and Need To Figure This Out and that's NOT the right thing to do here. But you can't stop yourself. I am that person. I know this thing would kill me. As Reya (for instance) I would have to make myself into a different kind of person to survive and I don't think I could do that scared. I would not succeed. This is my Eurydice. Thanks Roos

-and finally

And he IMMEDIATELY fell in love with Ati

And he IMMEDIATELY fell in love with Ati

For starters, in a game where a huge mechanic, quite literally *THE* mechanic and objective of the game, is to identify everyone in order to keep track of everyone's movements and solve this mystery, we don't know a character's actual name. When Tony's standing over Martha's dead body and Annie's looking at the list, we learn that Tony is not his real name. Specifically, he says "My real name's not Tony. People just call me that after my father.". Now, we never learn his actual name but let's hold onto this line for a moment. Specifically the bit about his father.

When Helen and Vic are talking in the living room, we learn that Helen found out she was expecting again shortly after the war broke out. (And that apparently her second pregnancy was so much worse than her first) This would mean she was expecting Tony, and she was expecting that everything would get back to normal after the war. But then her husband never came back, and she was left alone, with two little children to care for all by herself. Now that's going to be tough for anyone but I imagine it especially took it's toll on Helen, and I think her grief of her husband is partly why Tony is like that.

From a young age, he'd (like Eve) have seen his mother in pain and I think, given stereotypical gender roles, he decided, as "man of the house", given he'd be the only male in the house, that it was his job to protect her (and Eve). So I think he starts seeing everyone outside of the family as a potential threat, which then feeds into paranoia. And I think those things together are big factors into why he reacts to Hobbes the way he does, by other-ing him and stealing the pocket watch to keep it out of this stranger's hands, it's all a desperate and confused attempt to keep his mother out of harm's way.

But back to his father. Now we don't know what Tony and Eve's father looks like, but it's possible the Tony we know is a spitting image of his father, or somewhere close, but I think with Tony (and Eve) as the last thing she has connected to her husband, Helen starts seeing him in everything Tony does. Y'know maybe they stand the same way, or use the same product to style their hair, or make the same kinds of jokes, but whatever it is, Helen sees the resemblance and what would've been something nice to laugh about if his father was still alive, becomes painful. "You're just like your father." becomes less a lighthearted comment about the men in her life and more a reminder of her grief. But I think it continues, not in a way that she can't separate the two or anything, just that she thinks about them together so much that there's been multiple times where she slips up and calls her son Tony. Then I think it just kept happening to the point where he had to accept it as a nickname.

Now, even sharing his name, Tony has no idea what the man was like. Helen even says herself that "Tony's never known his father" so all he would have to go off of are stories from his mother and potentially from his sister. And I think that makes him feel very lonely (much like everyone else in the Dauer family) and so I think he starts to cling to everything he knows about his father, desperate for some sort of connection that he feels he was robbed of. So I can see him, either consciously or subconsciously, taking the trajectory of his father's life as a road map for his own. Especially since his mother is putting pressure on him (and his sister) to essentially be the best man he can be (aka become rich and wealthy and well-respected so he (and Eve) never have to suffer like she did when raising them). So he models himself off the man his mother holds in the highest esteem, his late father, and starts doing what he did, including joining the army.

Which I know, according to Eddie, he says he joined for fun. But him saying he joined the army "for fun" sounds like an answer you'd give if you know you can't admit your actual answer, be it because you'd get in trouble or, the more likely reason, because you don't have the level of emotional maturity or comfort being vulnerable to actually admit it to anyone.

(Spoilers as usual. if you have not played this game, go away. the cut I put here is not manifesting for some reason, so, game link I guess to fill space and encourage you to not scroll down?)

and I had it in my notes! I had this idea in my notes!! (went and checked and it's not in my notes) ok but at some point I wrote down a character who uses a curse to their advantage, and then I read alcatraz and was like oh that's not what I meant but I guess it's fun, but THIS. THIS DOES IT. SO WELL. and at some other point I wrote a short story about a functionally invisible character and that was before i read the schwa was here and this is actually one of my favorite tropes but this is the best one. this is absolutely the best one. endorsing dark one forgotten as the best functionally invisible story

went on coppermind to find the actors and coppermind forgot about them tooooo chris and sophie don't even have coppermind pages wtaf why did no one listen to this

i think its rachel jacobs and sophie oda and i can't find much info about either of them but they were boht fucking amazing. dear god thank you rachel jacobs. the number of times you said the other actors were really good and then you completely blew them out of the water. you made me tear up at least twice and the other time it was sophie oda so points to all of you

the story. can't even explain waht thsi is. true crime horror mystery fantasy? and I don't even like the first half of that sentence but I don't care because the story punched me in the gut and I didn't even need to understand the worldbuilding. chris asked questions and consulted experts and ran experiments and she got my heart. skeptical about sophie but she was there the entire time. not her project, not her obsession, not her responsibility, but she stayed, and she helped. chris and sophie said they weren't a couple and I was immediately like "yeah if they weren't both women(, bitch) that would be foreshadowing" and IT WAS FUCKIGN FORESHADOWING istg. This. This is also the best romance. And I hate romance I'm arospec lmao but dear god this got me. the sheer dedication to stare at somebody for eight god damn hours straight and then the music box scene. the music box scene. I got to it and I knew it was going to happen as soon as sophie asked but it still blew my mind and broke my heart that she did. because sophie is the best person in the world.

I have not been making sanderson reread update posts, and I read rithmatist and all of reckoners, but I'd already read most of those and there's nothing notable about lux except the plot holes and they didn't hit me hard like fucking dark one forgotten did. i barely knew this existed. It came out during the year of sanderson and yet nobody includes it in the book count. (There were 8 books/stories released, cowards, not 5.) but also I feel the need to mention that I thought dark one was quite good as well, but also that it feels like only the first chapter of a story so I can't say much else as of yet, I guess? I need more dark one. now. anything mirandus. why is nobody talking about this thing

2. I apparently misremembered or misunderstood the degree to which the text implies that they’re gay (yes, that reading is there, but I would call it subtext.) although to be fair, listening to the exchange “I love you!” “I love you too!” “Okay, are you ready to smash it?” was extremely funny with that misapprehension

3. two years later there is still no mirandus. I would not call myself a rithmatist fan I think this is actually a different and even more pathetic level of desperate