Incident at Galley House spoilers …
(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.)
ok you know the deal it's gonna be more spoilers and you're not gonna click it until you've clicked both this and this
-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
I don't. Wh. Did they-- did they delete Pope Gregory? Wtf?
more galley house spoilers! see previous instructions! play the game BEFORE clicking the readmore! and if you still haven't played the game why don't you take a nice break from scrolling and watch this video for a minute
You won't believe it, but I made another post, and it has more Incident at Galley House spoilers in it. If you're seeing this post and have that great honor, dignity, wherewithal, and topical ignorance necessary to not click the readmore, send me an ask that just says "egg" and I'll congratulate you and engage you in conversation about your interests before I try desperately to convince you to play the game. if you do, these posts will be a little less annoying. I beg you desperately not to click the readmore, and instead to take the experience still open to you. If you liked the domino cats here's a link for you to click
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 post is very long. I think I should maybe publish it now.
