#evermore rambles

If anyone has not seen the Mask Ending, it’s revealed in it that Shadow is a future/split off timeline version of Sam wishing to be one with their original self.

I’m really not a fan of this, not only because it takes all of the fun mystery away from Shadow away, makes the world of the game feel so much less expansive, and turns a very interesting death cutscene into selfcest, but it also doesn’t really make sense??

First, why I’m upset about the Shadow being made less mysterious! Prior to 2.0, everything about the Shadow was a gigantic mystery, which was what made the Shadow so interesting. What was it? Was it human? Did the Visitor have anything to do with it? Why did it interact with Sam the way it did? The 1.5 update introducing the note on Audrey only added to this mystery, and this made people theorize more, come up with their own explanations for this impossibility of a creature!! Then… we got an explanation. An explanation for the character who may as well exist to be a mystery. In a genre that is defined by not explaining things. It bugs me more because Look Outside is normally excellent at not over-explaining why characters exist!! Like, why does the hellcar exist? Why does it go to hell? Why did a bus crash into the lobby and why was it full of blue hand people? Why is there a weird alternate meaty version of Sam’s apartment? Why is floor 1 infinite? Why does the Visitor exist? These questions never got answered, as far as I’m aware of, and they never needed to be!

Second, why I think the Shadow getting this new lore takes away from the world. The thing with Look Outside, is that while it only takes place in one apartment building, you never get the feeling that the plot is contained to the physical map of the game. Plenty of the characters aren’t, and never were, residents of the building, we hear quite a bit about the world outside the map from dialogue and see a little bit of just how much the world has changed on the roof and during many endings, etc. It doesn’t really feel like we, as the players, are the main characters because we’re experiencing anything much more exceptional than everyone else. But when you start to take characters like Shadow and change them from something that could be from anywhere and have latched onto anything, to something that its only existence revolves around Sam, you start to close off the game’s scope from the expanse of the greater world, and make Sam more of a main character rather than the Just Some Guy he’s supposed to be.

Third, I’m sure I don’t even need to go over why I don’t like the switch from Shadow as a separate entity leaving a rose for Sam and wanting to lovingly assimilate him, to Sam giving a rose to a second Sam. This game is too good at actual horror to need to rely on selfcest to get a reaction out of people.

Finally, I just want to talk about the issues with Sam being Shadow. Granted, we do not currently have context for how Sam obtains the mask in the first place, from what I’m aware of anyway, but we can be certain it was either created as a result of the Visitor, or it was not. If it was not, we have no other explanation in canon for the mask’s abilities being what they are- which I am NOT going to get into my issues with random side plot time travel in stories here- which means it must be a result of the Visitor… but, there’s no other examples (that I’m aware of) of inanimate objects being observed by the Visitor remaining visually undistorted while having non-visible changes.