The glorious tower, and how it connects to the original house spatially
The glorious white tower – as Mr Kittens calls it, is the home of the Finches of the future, though Mr Kittens thinks it is full of cats. It was built in the shape of a virus, reflecting Max’s grandmother’s views about humanity after the end of the ‘original timeline’. It’s where WEAVER, the omniscient A.I. and quantum time machine lives.
I originally thought that WEAVER would transport Kinoko from the future to the past and back again via ‘spatial equivalence’. Meaning that she had to be in the same place spatially in one timeline, to get there in another.
But that doesn’t make sense in the case of Mr Kittens. At the start of the game (DEMO/Prologue1), he is in the laboratory in 1989 but in Over Lyme Bay in the killer plant future (kpf). They are not in the same location, spatially. How would the body move there? It couldn’t. Therefore WEAVER can only be transferring minds, which is what I thought anyway, but it’s good to have this clarified now.
So when Kinoko dies / messes up in 1989, she will initially return to the Quantum Room, deep underground in the kpf (killer plant future). But thereafter, it will depend where she was last, I mean, where her body was.
If she wants to get back to the past again, does she have to die? Or is there an alternative mechanism?
In 1989 she can only get back to the future by dying / messing up, until she figures out a way to safely eat the cat sick in scene 2 (a by-product of the time travel process conflicting with the body swap between Mr Kittens and Max) which allows her to travel at will. (She just has to eat sick!)
It might make sense that she has the same problems in the future too. Therefore – she (and the player) need motivation to start moving around in the future. WHY? to investigate something of course! This is a point and click adventure game after all.
For example, if she sees the serum launcher in the underwater cave (the missile launcher attached to the sub), then she might start to grasp that her family had something to do with the origin of the killer plants, which might make her curious about how it all started. This would drive her to start finding things out in her world too.
The underwater cave is on her route, so there is no way she can miss this part of the story. Though as yet there is no puzzle element in that scene, apart from having to try getting into the tunnel. Perhaps there needs to be a puzzle that relates to the missiles, to really draw the player’s attention to it…
The other question that this leads me to ask is – How can Kinoko get back to the surface? Her way back is now blocked by various killer plants… wasn’t I thinking about some kind of pipe tunnel thing. But then – she has the teleporter right next door.
BrainInAJar 