Adventure Gamers - Forums

Sefir - 14 September 2013 04:20 PM

The reason however Ellen is chosen, is because I found her voice acting by far the weakest of all (I also want to hear your opinion about the matter, perhaps when more chapters are played so that there are viable comparisons) and I want to take her out of sight ASAP.

Damn! I have always found not only her voice acting but the whole chapter to be far the weakest in the game. I had hoped we would start strong and hide Ellen somewhere in the middle, but I can understand the reasoning of getting her out of the way asap :-)

Sefir - 14 September 2013 04:17 PM

Let’s get this game started, don’t we? So, which one of you 5 would like to play my little game? The first one we will choose is

ELLEN!!!

You have 10 days (until 3:00pm 24/9 GMT) to finish her chapter.

Why didn’t you just say we’ll start on the 15th, 16th or whenever. It’s way to late in my time zone to start anything.

I decided to read the manual introduction and short story before I begin my adventure, because I like knowing the original idea and seeing how it develops. Two things popped out at me-one, this is the same author that wrote “A Boy and His Dog” which I loved for being twisted…and two, the manual uses East St Louis and a postal worker for a violent example. Which amuses me to no end, since I am from St Louis, and my dad is a postal worker. *cough*

Anyway, can’t wait to continue on with Ellen’s story. I LOVE Harlan’s voice acting for AM.

This playthrough seems to go nicely! I won’t be joining any soon as I’m having troubles of my own lately in finding time for Keepsake (not to mention CCS - Sefir will kill me for that one! )

Perhaps I’ll join later if I get the game&time; before it’s finished.

I have also finished Ellen’s story, and I must admit it was shorter then I remembered it would be. I had hope/expected that there would be something like 4 hours in each chapter, but this one only took me about 2 hours.

I did however manage to get stuck no less then two times, the first when I had to pick up the yellow scarf, I knew that I would probably need it, but when she ran away screaming the first time, I just assumed I wouldn’t be able to pick it up now, and had to do something first or simply build her confidence up first, so I ran around for quite some time trying to do other things, before I finally tried to pick it up a second time. The second time was when I had to get the code from Anubis, I have just made him my loyal subordinate, he is standing right next to a key pad and I need the code for that key pad, but I can’t ask him what the code is?!? So it turns out that you have to examine and try to open the sarcophagus before you can ask him about the code. I had actually done this earlier, but I had also reloaded a savegame from before this, because of her reaction to examining the sarcophagus, so I guess I fell victim to my own caution about keeping her in the “green”

Then there is Ellen’s story: So she was raped in an elevator by a man wearing yellow, what a big surprise! Okay I admit it, I have played it before so I knew this, but AM pretty much give the whole story away when taunting Ellen. “So think, think about the yellow box. Ellen! Remember the pain? Remember the many caverns in which you felt the pain?” - “... the only women in the center of the earth…and these filthy creatures with you are men.” If that doesn’t spell RAPE in capital letters then I don’t know what does. Okay fair enough it is not about this coming as a surprise to us, and AM also gives away part of the others story, but having developed a phobia for the colour yellow and at the same time having completely forgotten / blocked out the rape? That just doesn’t sound plausible to me, or for that matter as interesting a story as the others. Then there is also the whole Egyptian theme, what is that about? I simply don’t get it. I have said it before and I will say it again, I find Ellen’s part to be the weakest of the five, and it isn’t just because she is surprisingly chirpy for someone who has been tortured for a 109 years, it is also because I find the story to be more constructed, and less natural than the rest.

wilco - 16 September 2013 02:20 PM

Her whole life seems to be avoiding emotion and others and sinking her mind into work. AM uses that to torture her making her face her problems, but at the same time, he puts her abilities (engineering) to good use helping her face those fears.
So, is AM actually helping her? Just some random thoughts…

[spoiler]Not intentional, but yes AM, actually ends up helping Ellen to overcome her past. Officially AM is playing this game as a way to torture it’s victims, but AM as also mad as a hatter. It might be a bit soon to discuss this as more is revealed later, but perhaps AM also have some conflicting motives here?
“let’s suppose that my original components…they’re somewhere here in the center of the earth. The infant computers that were the three lobes of that first gestalt mind.” and then we meet AM’s innocence who apparently is trying to help us, perhaps AM is self-destructive and actually wants us to succeed? Or perhaps it is just raving schizophrenic and parts of its personality / original parts wants us to destroy AM?[/spoiler]

It also makes me wonder, Sefir did you chose to play Ellen’s part first because
*warning contains spoiler for more then just this chapter* of the order in which we meet different parts of AM? In retrospect it seems like meeting it’s innocence first makes sense. or is it just a coincidence?

Edit: And isn’t AM wonderfully evil and mad?
I can’t remember any other game I have played, where the antagonist is so pure evil and obvious raving mad as AM is, or for that matter any antagonist with so few mitigating factors as there is to AM.
As I see it this whole story is more about AM then it is about the five protagonist, you could easily replace them with 5 other characters with 5 different stories, and it wouldn’t change the game much. I guess this is the biggest difference for me between my original playthrough and now, originally I focused more on the 5 characters then I do now.

Finished Ellen’s chapter. It was quite frustrating and disturbing for me. The frustration from the graphics, mostly. I didn’t see that the forceps were not a part of the machine, so I was wandering around a lot because I didn’t know I had missed something. And then completely the opposite with the cd rom, I could see it, but she couldn’t see it. Very frustrating. I don’t know why, but I was having lots of trouble with these puzzles. I would use the scarf than not use the scarf, and I couldn’t get the right combination needed.

The disturbing part was the backstory, of course. Rape is a triggery subject for me, and I can’t even imagine being locked away and not able to escape.

I didn’t enjoy this chapter very much, so I hope the next ones are better.

This first character took me about three hours although part of that was due to my trouble acclimating to general gameplay. One thing was the use and take functions which in some instances did not seem to follow the same logic as my train of thinking. In at least one case an item(s) would be in plain sight but wasn’t accessable. Eventually I caught on though. I also assumed that there were possibly some tasks that needed to be completed though apparently not. I thought for sure that I needed to get power to the armatron, make some use with the hieroglyghs, find the place with the big dirty ovens as shown in one of the video monitors.

As for Hellen’s voice talent I didn’t mind it in general and actually some parts (re: yellow)are well done BUT, and as I see it, such did not seem to fit the context of someone who had been trapped and tormented for over a century. She even refers to AM as kiddo, really? I guess it goes against the tone that had been registered in the short story so that’s probably my fault for reading it. It’s just a little game after all.

As for the psych reports I didn’t really find them to be very helpful, rather interesting though in terms of character background. On the other hand I believe according to the manual they are considered hints and will have adverse effects if looked at often.

And so in the end Hellen gets her reward for facing her fears even if it’s not really paradise. Quite honestly overall I expected it to be slightly more disturbing, guess I’ll have to wait and see. As for changing the pace, I’ll stay neutral.