Penumbra (Requiem) Ending General Discussion

[Devastor]

It has been quite a while since I finished Requiem but as I remember I found the "enter the inicerator" ending the better one. That way we end Philip's suffering, he longer has to endure the torment caused by the infection. Choosing the door, while keeps Philip alive, just puts Philip in an endless cycle where he has to go through all the suffering again, which I hardly find any good.

As for a sequel I'd love to see another person enter this huge underground facility to uncover its secrets, Philip's fate, and more

[Goja]

Amnesia the dark descent was far better than penumbra. I was only a bit dissapointed with the story but in overall it was excellent.

And this is just your POV of course. Amnesia is a more "polished" game, which also means more enjoyable by the mass > mainstream. Overture is and will stay the best to me. I'd be glad to be wrong though, but i know i'm not. Dunno how long you've been playing video games but i've seen how things evolved and i'm 200% sure of what i'm saying. Again, the fact they're developping on xbox360 shows it all (even if they do it cause of piracy, they'll end up mainstreaming, else they won't sell).

[Plotark]

It has been quite a while since I finished Requiem but as I remember I found the "enter the inicerator" ending the better one. That way we end Philip's suffering, he longer has to endure the torment caused by the infection. Choosing the door, while keeps Philip alive, just puts Philip in an endless cycle where he has to go through all the suffering again, which I hardly find any good.

As for a sequel I'd love to see another person enter this huge underground facility to uncover its secrets, Philip's fate, and more

I feel the exact same way. It almost feels like Requiem created more questions, instead of giving the answers I wanted.

[BAndrew]

I feel the exact same way. It almost feels like Requiem created more questions, instead of giving the answers I wanted.

Absolutely Agreed. Black Plague gave us more questions than the answers we wanted from Overture and Requiem gave us even more!
That's a nice feeling and it really makes you want to play the other game to find the answers you want, but if you suddenly learn that this is not going to happen you are a bit dissapointed.

[eiahmon]

After playing Requiem through again, I've drawn a few conclusions about the endings, so here's my take.

At one point in the game, Red tells you "better to have a story and end it, then to never realize it has begun." and then that Carpenter guy also says that Red offered him death, and that he refused, so now he was trapped in there. If you choose to climb in the incinerator with Red, you see Phillip lying on the floor, motionless, and you hear his breathing slow down, though you don't hear it stop. If you choose to leave the room, Phillip appears in the boat, though it has the picture on the wall from the dream sequence from Black Plague. The entire scene to me always seems to have a surreal dream quality to it, like a dream.

I took all of that to mean that Requiem is all in Phillip's head, and climbing in the incinerator with Red is the "good" - if one can call it that - ending, where he dies, and his soul is free to go on to whatever afterlife awaits. Leaving the room is the "bad" ending, where Phillip is trapped in that dream world forever, never to escape.

At least, that's my opinion on it. XD Thoughts anyone?

[ledlino]

That's almost it. I just finish playing the game, and rewatched some sequences from the end of BP too. we have to pay a lot of attention to what is beeing said and connect the dots. If you do this you'll see that in the end it comes down to this:

Dr.Swanson said it was possible the cure wouldn't work entirely, and it DIDN'T. It was not expected that clarence would get tranferred to another body, and although he got rid of clarence, he remained under the hive's influence.

In the last stage of BP (phillip wakes up in the examination room), the light effects, the vanishing walls, the vanishing books, were references on the hive's desire to erase all evidence of the place and itself. It is talking to him and influencing his mind, scaring him, trying to get him to do what it wants.

After sending the email, the hivemind started messing even more with his head, and Requiem started. Requiem is all inside Philip's mind and it is all about Phillip trying to escape the influence of the hive that is trying to trap him. (requiem is all about escaping areas)

Phillip sended an email betrying the hive, but even if he didn't, it wouldn't change a thing, because Phillip never gets out of the facility: There never was any intention from the Hivemind to let him go. The only thing it promissed was to tell him what he had told Howard (its origins). The Hive couldn't take the chance of letting him go, and moreover it instructed phillip (during the tests) that one has to sacrifice oneself for the good of the group.
Also the hive asked him to send word for someone ELSE to destroy the evidences, it didn't ask him to destroy the evidences himself when he arrived home

Phillip knew he woudn't ever get out, that's why he wrote in the email "if we're lucky, by the time you read this I'll be dead" because if he wasn't dead, he would be infected.
During Requiem and specially at the end, in Red's room, pay attention to what he says and you'll understand that there is no escape from that situation. The only way out is by entering the incinerator. althought it is all in his mind, entering the incinerator means phillip managed to fight the hive's influence and just "turned his brain off", dying. - By choosing to exit through the door makes him go to the boat, and you think he escaped but he didn't. if you look closely, its not the real boat, its the boat from the illusion in his mind, and he can't leave, he's trapped, and soon after there's a white flash, and all that means his mind was completely taken over by the hive.

the hole time from the end of BP to the end of Requiem he is lying on the floor of examination room, and the "good" end is the incinerator, so he dies, escapping the take over from the hive.

If you pay attention to the speeches during requiem will you find clues to all of this. for instance there a part where the Dr.Eminiss says that if someone would find the entrance to that place they would never find the exit.

Excelent story and closure.

Oh and one more thing, the email at the start of each game doesn't mean YOU or anyone else is receiving the email. It is just that thing they like to do in the movies: to put a part of the end in the beginning to make you curious about how the situation got to that point.

If you liked my post, send me a PM!

[Desperate4God]

Well said, my good man. I think you have it all figured out. You made some points that I never considered and caught some things that I missed in my playthrough of the Penumbra series. If you don't mind my asking, are you planning on analyzing the Amnesia storylines (The Dark Descent & Justine) also?

[ledlino]

some other interpretations:

1 - in the surface stage in requem (snow stage), phillip says: "Good, a helipad, now i just need a helicopter", meaning he wasn't yet aware he was trapped in his own mind. And that is the point, the player has to realize this during gameplay, so that he understands that there is no running away and the incinerator is the only way.

2 - did you realize that the miner-dog-man in the kennels (black plague) is wilbur frisk, and he is the one that made that tunnel in the wall of the 1st storage in overture? when you are under the floor you hear something bruttaly going through the storage rooms, violently grabbing the guy that was in the locked room, and dragging him back into the wall. the "entry 9" on the note you find in the kennels, explain that the "thing" was wilbur frisk, and the guy he killed was dr.roberts, who was the first to fled into the mines and started eating spiders and cut his tongue off. the same tongue you find on the shelf. that means this "entry 9" was written after phillip was already there! cool huh?

3 - when i think about it, i guess howard died the same way phillip did. i mean, he was infected but was not tottaly controlled. he applied the cure on himself and then the hive talked to him, and then he must have gone through a 'requiem' of his own, dying at the end, because he didn't want to become a mr.monster.

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Desperate4God, i wouldn't exactly call this an analysis, i just tried to understand the story, but i guess it could be.
As for Amnesia, well, yes, i plan on playing it. but i've noticed amnesia is way more frightening, so it might take longer to go throught the hole game hehehe... but i also read here and there that the story is much more simple... does it also have a confusing end?

[spukrian]

Amnesia has a few different endings, while not actually confusing they don't answer all questions (which is good!).

[BurningKirby]

I agree with everything you guys have been saying so far. I just noticed one extra thing. I noticed that the noose that was in Red's back room has mysteriously disappeared. Pretty weird. I don't know what to make of this. I think it must mean something, I just don't know what.