Not only was it weak, nobody seems to have noticed it. We know it really happened, and isn’t some shared hallucination, because Aunt Mall Cop and the Janitor both reference it. But it makes no sense that nobody in this small town with a small population noticed the rate at which people were disappearing. How the arm came to be outside the diner is never resolved. The ghost is never resolved. The story about Mae getting knocked out and being in a coma seems to have been written by two different people, neither of whom knew what the other had written, or what the rest of the plot was about. It would have been much more interesting to have it as a pure mental health story, and it’s also the only part of the story which seems to have been fully thought out and realised.

I also played the two wee prequels. They had interesting mechanics that didn’t make it to the final game, which is a shame. One of them seems to support my theory that much of the script was written with Mae being a child, then sloppily updated to her being 19. The other unfortunately demonstrates the writers’ inability to give weight or substance to their supernatural plots, as supposedly significant and important events just seem like... nothing.

And all of this is such a great shame because there was so much to enjoy. It is a game with so much potential, it’s failure seems like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

I suspect that the local council are among the underground cultists. Yes, Casey was missed, but nobody seems to have noticed that now all the cultists are missing. Now that you mention it, the Bruce storyline is another thing that feels like it just ended without really concluding. I mean, I know he spoke to Mae and asked her to pass the message on, but that felt like it was building up to something.

Yes, I suspect that the ghost is the person referred to in the clippings and spoken about, but the fact that there is a ghost at all seems at odds with everything else. Why he’s haunting/following/trying to reach out to Mae is anyone’s guess. I was anticipating a Scooby-Doo-style reveal, but no. He just manifests out of thin air in the mine lift (so, definitely supernatural) takes physical form to grab Mae (for what purpose?) and is then presumably smashed to a pulp in the fall.

I should probably stop talking about it, because I don’t want it to seem like I’m shitting on anyone’s enjoyment of it when there’s a lot to like.

The World Ends With You