[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*

[Prettz]

Was it common for the wealthy of Victorian era London to wear glasses and have false teeth maybe?

Mandus could have been keeping those as a sort of trophy. He was a trophy hunter after all too

you can find False teeth and glasses in a few places in the mansion at the start. so maybe

[jacksepticeye]

I think he may in fact be reliving memories. I found something odd

In the mansion at the very start all the clocks are at 12am. I know this game is set on New Years eve but doesn't a Journal entry say the new year just ticked over when he's in the chair at the end?

The clocks could be stuck to symbolise that he's in the chair right now waiting to hit the switch to rip out his heart and he's reliving all that has just happened

Also one of the clocks isn't frozen in time, the pendulum moves and the clock ticks but it goes to before midnight and after ticking back anf forth between the two never moving forward.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it but I found it odd

EDIT: Oh and that ticking clock is when you get downstairs for the first time to the right of the audio recording before the piano jumpscare

[LarryV]

]

I really like this idea. So we can't interact because he never interacted in the first place? All we can do is follow his steps from before?

Maybe, I'm stilling trying to puzzle it together because the idea just came to me and it's also why my previous comment is full of errors; it was a stream-of-conscious typing.

Maybe everything we saw and did in the game did occur and we're just experiencing it after he's killed himself; a life passing through ones eyes. And in that moment (the moment we're playing through), Mandus realizes he's done horrible deeds and he's just trying to make amends with himself before he dies. To at least die and try to make a change for himself.

Then this brings up a whole list of interesting ideas. If what I said is true, then he can never really make amends, only an idea of it.

But it's hard because everything we see and hear and interact with is unreliable; we're dealing with just a fractured mind and reality, that what's real and what isn't is so insanely blurred. We're at times shooting in the dark.

[aquilantiqua]

Hey everyone.

Integria put forth an interesting theory and it does wokr a bit. The barriers we see all over the game, only certain things being allowed to move, the filter over the game, and towards the final act & the final act where things and you appear and reappear.

I think this is something occurin the mind of our protagonist. Now if this is the path we'll go then we can look at the rest of the game in a different light:
- Nothing we saw occured but the delusions of a madman and him killing himself is himself releasing himself.

So maybe, we're seeing a life pasting through our prog's life. He's already killed himself (maybe that's why he's returning to the temple, the way where he killed himself) and during his last minutes, he's trying to puzzle everything together, all the crimes his done and to make amends with himself and his children.

So the filter, is a sort of dream haze, a death haze.

This direction of thought is the thing making the most sense to me right now. Going further with the shifting of the environment and "teleportations", specially near the end where it gets much more noticeable and intense, it could be an indicator the unstable power balance between Mandus and his "evil" half. The little things like doorways disappearing could be the evil half toying with his memories of the place to keep him mentally unstable. However, the teleportations seem out of your control, but they don't hamper your progress and if anything seem to put you closer to your goal. They could be representative of Mandus' other half losing power and you're able to jump ahead in your mind/memories where normally you'd have to make the slow, obstacle-filled crawl through the Machine.

[Kein]

I was reading carefully the whole timeline Kein assembled (Thank you very much). And there's this one note that is very interesting and I feel it holds the answer to who is in the "Iron Lung". I'm not sure how, but I am sure it has to be Mandus himself and no one else.

The note:

Spoiler below!

27th December 1899

I am halved, I am bisected. I placed my feet in the stirrups of childbirth and I hung upside down and the great blade of history cut me in two like a butchered pig and my guts fell onto my children and smothered them in my love. Each half of me still living, but the guts kept falling onto my children. So we each went our separate ways and one half built a machine instead, to hold his hate in and to keep his heart beating. And the other fell into a sleep, to blunt the pain. And then he had terrible dreams and when he awoke, the other had made ovens and killed and skinned and cooked all of those he held dear. And thus, holding onto his guts, he strode forth to find himself and make himself whole again.

This note talks about the separation of Good Mandus and Evil Mandus.

"So we each went our separate ways and one half built a machine instead, to hold his hate in and to keep his heart beating. And the other fell into a sleep, to blunt the pain."

From this I conclude two things: First the man in the iron lung (more like a cryogenic chamber to me) is one of the two "Manduses". Second, the third heart is Mandus' heart as well.

I have two possible theories:
1.- Mandus made the machine to contain his evil side, then he went into cryogenic sleep to numb the pain of his wrongdoings and guilt. In this theory the whole game is a comatose dream (making it so at the end you see yourself in the cryogenic chamber and the ending is just a symbol of rejoining both your good and evil side) and nothing really happened. This would also explain the temple setting in London which doesn't make much sense.

Yep, I mentioned that before as possible explanation:

Hallucination/mental play - my favorite. Mandus builds a Machine on the bones of his children, he himself becomes part of the Machine, a machine itself, lying in the sarcophagus. His personality splits on two - The Machine and Mandus. Since he is the heart of damned device, each time when these personalities clash they cause havok to actual machine: Mandus wins at some point, "sabotaging' device and shutting it down. The Machine manages to shoo him, but in order to restore device it needs Mandus. So it "wakes" him up, and with trickery get his help in restoring "power" again (I assume the consciousness of his body in the lung can somehow operate machine). Second personality, ie Mandus. realizes it and he fights Machine again. Remember how he talks about making himself "whole again"? In the end I think Mandus wins, he accepts the truth, what he did, he accepts his damnation and thus completely takes over the machine (1st personality), becomes whole again and shuts down The Doom's Device since nothing can prevent him to do so anymore.
Now, what is about what we see in-game, all the locations and actions we do? This is the brain's interpretation of the clash of the personalities that happens in his mind. The notes we find is the memories his 2nd personality uncovers, it is all in his head. Pigs are obstacles, but that does not mean they don't exist in outer world, they do.

---

One of the biggest issues with the timeline is the twins. Mandus and his alter ego keep talking of them at certain points as if they're still alive ("I can still save them!") and at other points as if they're already dead. The twins' journals would seem to indicate that they lived up until October 1899 at least. Yet during the summer Mandus would often opine about how his new "Children" made him feel like a father again.

I suppose it is possible that Mandus was just spending all his time in his Machine and never saw his twins for long periods and given his already disturbed mind could have believed they were already dead. Unless he did indeed try to resurrect them with Compound X.

Few pages ago we all agreed that Mandus killed them "on the steps" of a second temple, the one he found under London, not in Mexico. This way it makes a lot of sense.


So far we are being hold by few issues/questions:

1. Who is in the iron lung? Mandus or someone else?
2. Is it real what happens in the game or just mind's play (of the dying)?

[aquilantiqua]

Hallucination/mental play - my favorite. Mandus builds a Machine on the bones of his children, he himself becomes part of the Machine, a machine itself, lying in the sarcophagus. His personality splits on two - The Machine and Mandus. Since he is the heart of damned device, each time when these personalities clash they cause havok to actual machine: Mandus wins at some point, "sabotaging' device and shutting it down. The Machine manages to shoo him, but in order to restore device it needs Mandus. So it "wakes" him up, and with trickery get his help in restoring "power" again (I assume the consciousness of his body in the lung can somehow operate machine). Second personality, ie Mandus. realizes it and he fights Machine again. Remember how he talks about making himself "whole again"? In the end I think Mandus wins, he accepts the truth, what he did, he accepts his damnation and thus completely takes over the machine (1st personality), becomes whole again and shuts down The Doom's Device since nothing can prevent him to do so anymore.
Now, what is about what we see in-game, all the locations and actions we do? This is the brain's interpretation of the clash of the personalities that happens in his mind. The notes we find is the memories his 2nd personality uncovers, it is all in his head. Pigs are obstacles, but that does not mean they don't exist in outer world, they do.

The ending makes absolute sense if you frame the story this way too. It would mean the whole end scene which ends with him plucking his own heart out is a representation of his sane half winning, taking control of the facility, and possibly destroying the heart we see at the center of the machine. If that were true, it would answer why killing himself kills the machine.

[PathOS]

After replaying the game. The main areas where things get kind of "wonky" are the Tripery and the final area. The Tripery is where you go after destroying the Pig Line which renders the machine almost dead.

The Tripery gets messed up with those visions of his mansion rooms getting interlaced with the area and of course that whole waterfall of blood and the elevator smack in the center of it in addition to teleporations. Afterwards you're in the Orgone storage which is mostly "sane" and then you get to the South Tower which is where it starts getting a bit crazy again with teleportations and the heart in the center of it which is when you "teleport" to the final area which definitely defies logic. Iron Lung -> Corridor of Memories -> Aztec Temple.

[jacksepticeye]

Ok every single clock you find along the way is frozen at 12AM. And there are a lot of clocks that I never noticed before

If they were to be in real time for the game's world they should be much earlier in the night as midnight only strikes when Mandus is int he Machine at the end

This really does lend credence to the whole "we're playing a memory" idea

[Prettz]

ok time for some crazy stuff.

I'm thinking that the real Mandus is dead giving life to the machine but the Machine conciseness split ans we are playing in the subconscious of the machine created from Mandus and the good one was barely able to sabotage the evil and be the dominant personality. The map we keep seeing represents the subconscious and the lower we go the deeper we go. take the strange steam doors we go thru, they can represent travailing deeper into the mind.

We start in a familiar place at the start but as we go deeper notice the surroundings, you can also hear the machine evil side trying to take over at first. the next area is that of wood then we go thru the first steam door and reality starts to shack a bit as we go deeper. stone replaces the wood more and more. the church has a stone statue of a pig women on both sides. in the sewer we go thru another steam door and soon the stone is replaced by steel. We see pigs eating pigs and then we make it to the bottom the deepest part of the subconscious and tricked into handing over control to the evil side.

Notice how after this we see another steam door but then it vanishes, good Mandus is no longer the dominant force and keep blacking out and getting pushed further from deep subconscious till he is back at the top and must travel down the evil Mandus subconscious and it's very different form the good side. It goes from steel and stone to decay and blood to wires and electricity. At the bottom Mandus makes it to the Hart to evil Mandus subconscious. we then see the real Mandus a cog in the machine and good Mandus kills him self extinguishing the ghost in the Machine.

[rotten]

Ok, there is one very strong argument in favor of the theory that Oswald's body is the one in the Iron Lung. Occam's Razor. According to it it can be Mandus, Professor or Father Jeremiah. But there is no indication whatsoever that it is in fact Prof. or Jeremiah, whereas there are all those notes about Oswald being split in two half one of which is sleeping. So, Occam's Razor, it really is Oswald inside the Lung.

Let's assume it's true. But when is he plunged inside the Lung? There's a lot of questions here, because on one hand he kills his children somewhere around 1st December (so he has to be human at this point), and on the other hand he says he was bisected (which must be the point where he is plunged in the Lung) and one half built the machine which can't be in December, because then he already knows that the Machine has to be destroyed.
It only would be possible if there were two Oswalds physically, one sleeping in the Lung and one possessed by the Orb, building the Machine and spilling blood.

Also, by the moment I can't abandon the idea of the Machine being a God which needs blood to enter our world. Because Oswald, even if we relive his memories, would not be able to predict the future (XX century) and would not tell to himself that he is the one killing dissidents, waging wars and so on (Machine's final dialogue).