See You After Christmas

I want to thank everyone for a very incredible Game Day marathon. You helped raise just under $1,400 during the stream!

Unfortunately (for me), I didn’t complete the game in the 24 hour time limit. I fell about one and a half dungeons short. I completed part of this during a stream yesterday (Sunday) and am now queued up to finalize the love interest (Lune won, but that means I have to defeat another boss) as well as complete the game.

I had planned a stream on Tuesday night (Dec 23), but with last minute work travel, that will push until after Christmas. I have time off, so I’ll get a schedule together to sprint to the end of the year.

There is another poll open. Without giving away too many spoilers, you have the chance to determine the ending of the game. You can either save the canvas we’ve been playing in, or destroy it. There are great reasons for both which I’ll detail in a spoiler section below for those that are interested.

You have one free vote during streams with !save and !destroy as well as extra votes for every dollar donated with “save” or “destroy” in the donation comment. The $5 or more party swap incentive is still live until I complete the game.

Now for the spoilers. You’ve been warned.

SPOILERS AHEAD

For those that want to know what happened without going through hours of VoD footage, I put together the below summary. If you haven’t fought or seen after the Paintress, a ton will be spoiled.

This is your lat warning!

Surprise, the world and the story you’ve been told isn’t even remotely close to what you thought it was!

The world itself is fake, a canvas painted by Verso—except not the one we know. The Verso is a painted entity himself, created by the Paintress, who is Verso’s mother, Aline. The Renoir we’ve fought multiple times isn’t the real Renoir either, the Curator is. The burned girl with a mask we’ve seen is the painted version of their daughter, Alicia.

Not only that, the Paintress and her number wasn’t a signal of who she would kill, but rather the age of the people she still had the power to save. After her death, everyone in the canvas gommaged. It was a great shock to everyone, save for painted Verso who knew the truth but hid it.

Why hide it? He knows he isn’t real, living a life not really his own for eternity and, as we are about to discover, born solely from grief. He needs the lie to end, his “mother” saved, no matter the cost.

What looked like the happy ending of the game ended up railroaded by this harsh reality. As everyone disappeared, we finally got the rest of truth in an “epilogue”.

In the real world, there is some sort of war going on between the Painters and the Writers. We don’t know (and never will) who the Writers are, why they are fighting the Painters, and what their powers are. We simply know that, sometime in the past, they secured Alicia’s trust.

This led to a fire in the Manor—yes, the same one we’ve seen all game. Verso sacrificed himself to save Alicia’s life. This led to the burn scars and missing eye that we’ve seen all game. In the real world, she’s also lost her voice.

In her grief, Aline went into Verso’s canvas, as painting one of these magical worlds leaves a piece of the soul behind. With it being the last remnant of her son, she went in the canvas and painted an immortal version of her family, complete with the memories their real world counterparts had.

Renoir thought this was an abomination and went into the canvas after her. The two fought into a stalemate, with Aline trapped at the top of the Monolith as the Paintress and Renoir below as the Curator. Aline paints life in the canvas. Renoir paints death.

And then there’s Clea, the eldest daughter. Her priority is fighting the war and moving on from Verso’s death. So she too entered the canvas and ”tipped the scales” in Renoir’s favor, which led to the fracture that we learned about in the beginning of the game. From that point, it was only a matter of time before Aline ran out of power and Renoir erased every bit of the canvas for good.

Clea, however, wanted the process sped up. In her mind, since Alicia caused this mess, she needed to help fix it and eject her mother from the canvas and hide it from her so she wouldn’t re-enter. Thus, the family could grieve properly and continue fighting in the war.

Alicia, not yet having full control of her Paintress powers, loses control when she enters the canvas. This causes her to be born into the world as one of Aline’s creations…as Maelle.

That leads us to the fun surprise that there is an Act 3 to this story. Maelle recovers her real-world memories and unlocks her Paintress powers.

She meets with her real father once again, but his intentions haven’t changed—he wants the entire canvas destroyed. Maelle, feeling a strong connection from the life she’s lived inside and the people in it, wants the canvas to remain intact. Even though the people may not be real, her connections to them are.

Seeing an impasse, Renoir summons loads of painted creations to go after Maelle and eject her from the canvas. Maelle manages to flee with Verso, but also feels the pure chroma of Lune and Sciel during her exit, whom she manages to resurrect at camp. Despite painted Verso’s betrayal, the group decides to go on the “greatest expedition ever” to collect the chroma of all those that were slain by nevrons, allowing Maelle to create a painted army of her own to face Renoir and his creations.

And that’s (mostly) where we stand in this wonderfully bonkers and well-written story. When I said this was a story about grief and death, I wasn’t joking!

When all is said and done, we will be given the choice to either save the canvas, and all the painted people in it (including the last remnants of Verso’s soul), or we destroy it, ejecting everyone from the canvas back into the real world for good, but at the cost of everyone we’ve come to know, including painted Verso.

Which will you choose?