Most of the time, I complain about games having depressing endings.
However, I am disappointed about how cheesy the ending is for this game.

Don't get me wrong, I love this game. I felt I was beginning to choke when it was revealed that Johny and River first met at the fair, with the rabbit constellation, the platypus, and the promise to regroup at the moon.
It should give the player some more time to reflect on this revelation. Instead, we were thrown into the game's only action sequence.
Perhaps it would be better if the game has just ended after the revelation.

I don't like how everything is fixed with one simple solution. It just felt a bit forced to have everything changed the right way only by removing the memory of Joey's death.

The story in the original memory is tragic and beautiful at the same time. The fact that River made so many origami rabbits for Johny so that he can remember, and the fact that Johny held onto a promise he can't remember yet so dear to him. The way that both of them sacrifice for each other for nothing other than love added emotional weights to the story.

Johny and River going to the moon together at a younger age just isn't the same, and the magic of the story is lost. Keeping the promise of regrouping at the moon to a girl you met only once is different to keeping the promise to your wife that you have loved for decades. (I know Johny's memory isn't necessarily linear, and the memory of his love to "old" River is transferred to the reconstructed River, but meh.)

Anyway, it's just my opinion about the ending. Feel free to share yours.

I too was rather disappointed at the ending. They missed a great opportunity to creat a genuinely moving bitter sweet ending and instead went with a cliched perfect happy ending (more or less) instead.

The game was so close to ending on such a strong note. Had it ended shortly after Eva's line "he can always find another River, but never a new brother" (or whatever it was, I can't remember the exact words), where Johnny makes it to the moon but never sees River after the carnival. Johnny's wish would be technically fulfilled, in his last few minutes alive, he'd have a lifetime of memories with his brother, Eva and Neil would've done what they were contracted to do, but also destroying the real memories of the woman he loved. It would've made for a very moving bittersweet ending. Not to mention, it would highlight the ethical issues of tampering with someone's memory (though I suppose the game does that already to a degree (that or I'm just being overly pretentious)).

I have to say, the story was otherwise great, especially for a video game. It's just it didn't end on the strongest possible note.

Just finished it today, not without being ripped from a couple tears (the fair, too :P).

But, "a cliché'd happy ending"? John dies and River has been dead all along. It's a story of regrets, nothing more. All the game was a way to make John's depart a bit less bitter.

Basically, everything turned out exactly as it was supposed to, nothing at all went wrong and as the OP said, it felt a bit forced to have everything just work out perfectly.

In my opinion, it did have a bit of a bitter sweet ending. I loved the story and it made for a great game, and I thought at first the ending was a happy one. The more I pondered on it, however, I felt even more sorry for Johnny than I did in his original memories. I know his memory was changed and the new one was all he knew, but it was fake. It's like the phrase " living a lie', but in this case, "dying a lie".

Still, great game. IMO I wouldn't change it a bit. Makes you wonder on the ethical side; Would you be willing to forget a world of memories and experiences, friends and lovers to justified your own regrets?

Exactly!But I wondered about that too, when they go to the moon there's a sort of flashback of all the game's memories, John and River. And I wondered if they weren't reconstructed/retied as memories of them both AFTER the moon's journey. Were there any memories when they were younger? Maybe it reconstructed his life correcting the one error of it: forgetting about River.

Dunno, simple wondering. :P

All in all: lousy gameplay, so-so graphics, wonderful music and touching story.

I couldn't agree more with you, OP, but my guess is that the happy "cheesy" ending fit with what this interactive story seemed aimed towards: a younger audience.

The comic relief and overall acting of the two doctors seemed ripped out of an anime series (with the intellectual Rosalene and the silly, overconfident, "I'm-too-cool-to-have-feelings" Watts) and the way River's condition was exposed catered to teenagers who had never heard of it before then; pushing itself as far as creating some clichè school-dating scenes and romantic-comedy movie moments like the horse therapy scene.

With this in mind, does it seem all that surprising that Kan Gao decided to conclude the story with a cookie-cutter scene? No. It was the easiest way to convey the message "look, the old dying man's happy now... see? Look, he's hand-in-hand with the woman he loved all his life. He *must* be happy."

Others might argue that the dramatic bittersweet aspect of the conclusion is not what we're seeing but rather what we know is *actually* happening. Others might consider the cheesiness of the shuttle launch scene to be, in fact, *willingly* unrealistic in order to convey to the viewer how this is all a figment of the patient's immagination; manipulated by Rosalene and Watts. To amplify this feeling even further, the fact that we're aware of Johnny's missed opportunity to understand what River was trying to tell him, due to his (oh no... not another clichè) forced amnesia, might strike the sentimental chords of many gamers as well but, in my opinion, the conclusion is relying too much on us overthinking what, after all, was a cheesy ending.

A shame, really, because I wasn't all that impressed about how the game was developing up until the Joey plot twist and carnival scene. After those two twists, however, I was regaining some confidence about where the story might've ended up... only to get ultimately disappointed about its conclusion. There was a movie that tackled that theme 8 years ago:

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"

There was another (claymation) movie that tackled Aspergers as well, with a truly bittersweet and profound conclusion:

"Mary and Max"

I guess that they weren't hyped enough to be loved as much as this "game". That's the only plausible conclusion I can give to this injustice.

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That's not to say that Kan Gao didn't come up with a good story. Quite the contrary... I appreciated the anti-chronological narration of Johnny's life, the way Kan cleverly tied everything together in just a single scene (during the carnival night) and the soundtrack (which was excellent, although a tad repeated at times)...

...it's just that I'd consider him to be more of a Quentin Tarantino of Indie gaming: he simply took the best parts out of many games, movies and books and blended it into one seemingly original game.

The greatest praise I can give him is that he hass contributed to re-animate a genre that was thought dead for almost a decade: point-and-click adventure gaming.

The ending was depressing! I think you missed the most important aspect of the game: the man died believing a lie. How is that not depressing?

The whole story is dark. If it had just ended after the revelation it would have rang false. After all, the doctors are the evil people in the game. If you missed that you missed the whole story, seems to me. I don't see it as "overthinking" but merely the obvious. I do agree with you that some of the elements were cliche but that strikes me as precisely the point here...what makes this game stand out is the emotional journey the author takes us on. Yes, the place he takes us too is bitter, dark, and jaded and you can argue that this is trite but personally I found the roller coaster ride thrilling.

IMO the best single player game I played this year.

I don't know. I didn't see it as a happy ending. I mean - a whole lifetime of memories was abandoned for the rewrite. Still begs the question of whether we'd want it done if we could. At the end of life you'll hear a lot of folks say they'd never change a thing - but I'm not sure I buy that. I think this gets at those big "bad" choices we make that change our lives forever - for better or for worse. We can't see our life any other way sometimes - so we naturally say we wouldn't change it, but...

Anyhow, that was one of my takeaways.

How are they evil? They don't act out of malice, they don't deceive their clients about what they do and its stated many times that they do it because they like to make sure people can die happy. While the ethics of altering a person's memory is very much questionable, they only do it for people who not only fine with it, but are also willing to pay money to have their memories altered and mere days away from death, so saying they're outright evil is a bit extreme.

The story isn't a standard "good guys vs. bad guys" dealie. It's just about a old man who doesn't want to die miserable, even if it means believing a lie in his final few hours.

I don't like "explaining" stories because any deep story works on multiple levels of consciousness and an author can weave several different yet interrelated meanings together.

I think your right in the assessment I quoted above. I think that is one layer of meaning. I think there are also other layers of meaning to the story. Let me give you one example.

More than one person has talked about the oodles of rabbits that were made as a sign of passion and love. I think a close reading of the story posits a different symbolism: that of compulsive guilt. Just like Lady Macbeth washing her hands "out out damn spot" the wife covers up her intense guilt by compulsively making the rabbits.

It was Swift who defined happiness as "a perpetual possession of being well deceived”. The serene and peaceful state is to be a fool among knaves."

What I couldn't get out of my head the entire time playing the game: NOTHING ACTUALLY EVER CHANGES. River still died, just after being lied to by her husband, who had earlier in their lives taken advantage of her autism for very selfish reasons. She still descended into madness, broken. As a final betrayal, the old man forgets that he ever committed this very seriously evil act.

Now, he did not deliberately believe a lie, or at least mean it as a betrayal, and his last act as the man he really was an act of fidelity to his wife --- I want to go to the moon, because that's where you are --- but everything after that is basically two spineless legalistic professionals muddling their way through an elaborate lie. If there is a bright spot in any part of this story, it is in that only in his final days does a brittle old liar love his dead wife one last time: By hiring others to lie to him. So, really, at each of the telling character moments this guy has, he lies, and only in the last two does he at least have a noble intention. It is the story, in the end, of a man who cannot handle the truth, in part because the two times he faces it there is tragedy --- his brother dead and his wife gone mad.

In short, while the story of their lives is gripping, the old man is a hugely flawed person. (This point only underlies that the story is a good story.) What condemns the story is rather that the premise itself involves gravely wrong things, and the whole of the third act laces the cake with arsenic icing, and it never seems to realize how wrong that really is.

Hopefully that heartbeat in the final moments gets played up for all its worth in future installments, that Neil ends up rebelling against those attacking his memories, embracing the hard truth, rejecting the lie.

It is artfully woven, though; the doctors are exactly like the old man in that their favored tool is the lie. At that angle, the story is a subtle but ringing condemnation.

She didn't descend into madness.

With his confession, she realized that he cannot remember their first meeting, which she obviously remembers herself since she kept the platypus doll since. That, combined with the fact that she is autistic, is why she started making paper rabbits repeatedly and asking him to describe them to her. In her own way, she was trying to get him to remember that meeting. She was trying to get him to remember the rabbit constellation they drew and his promise to meet her on the moon when she is lost. But he couldn't remember because the memories were suppressed by drugs.

Btw, personally. I don't think the ending very happy at all. Simply to fulfill a contractual obligation, the real memories of her had to be erased and replaced, all the way from childhood to old age, all gone. They met when they were little children, and somehow met each other again in high school and stayed together until the end. And he died without any of those memories.

Fair enough. But that she withdrew from normalcy further, &c.. &c., has exactly the same practical effect, so the moral effect of it is not all that much better.

I thought this game was very clever and well made in many ways, but like several posters mentioned, I felt disappointed in the ending.

Unlike many posters, I teared up pretty early in the story when he was at his wife's side when she was sick. My long term gf has a very fragile health and I guess I projected myself in that scenario.

I thought the fair scene was beautiful though.

This.

His wife died remembering their shared life together. He died remembering a fake cutty cutter version.

He disconnected himself from her with the fake memory.

For me, the perfect ending would have been reconnecting the lost memories so that he could have died seeing the whole picture just like his wife did and realized the real meaning behind the origami rabbits.

Yeah, his twin bro died. It was sad. Double sad because of the way his mother handled it. That's life. His lifelong relationship with his wife more than made up for it. Unless you live a really crappy life (it happens), I actually believe that saying.

With the right attitude, your mistakes can define you and not necessarily in a bad way. You learn from them and become better.