Player choice and The End.

[Brennenburg]

The WAU scene seemed tacked on, although the room where you lose your hand to it is, I THINK, the same room from the first gameplay teaser trailer just flooded and grown over. It's never really explained what exactly the WAU was trying to do or who that teleporting apparition that talks in Simon's mind is. It didn't feel like a logical continuation of the ARK storyline especially because afterwards you just trek to Phi and launch the ARK from there.

I was really curious who the apparition was, especially since the little messages appearing on monitors like "WE MUST DESTROY IT" kept showing up in Omicron.

Those WAU interaction thingies were like healing stations, the more digital visual debris you have, the more injured you are. Sticking your hand into those heals you, and I liked Catherine's reaction to it before you launched the ARK. Simon mentions he feels better after doing it and Catherine thinks it's really bizarre.

The logic behind killing the old you at Omicron is multifaceted. On one hand, sure, you're killing a person. On the other hand, this is just like the teleportation dilemma: if teleportation were to copy your body and build a copy elsewhere while destroying your original body, would you be dead or just a copy? Destroying the original can help ease some people's minds as to whether they are real or not. It cleans up the messiness of having diverging life paths nicely if you end diverging paths immediately. It was something Simon's character struggled with, especially at the end after the ARK launched. He thought he would continue in the ARK and couldn't understand still being down in PATHOS II, because he perceived his self and timeline as linear. Meanwhile, the Simon on the ARK didn't perceive any difference and probably didn't realize he was also left behind at PATHOS II. The whole multiple-selves thing was a recurring theme. I personally don't understand the idea of spreading yourself out like a virus to exist in 1,000 places at once like you mention, but everyone has a different perspective.

The DUMMY simulation is on the prototype ARK, not the real ARK. It's like playing a demo of a game versus the full game. The demo has no effect on the real ARK because they weren't connected at the time.

I would also like larger consequences of our actions in the game, although the dialog and how small decisions are remembered was quite good in this game.

To me it kinda felt like Frictional decided midway through development to change the storyline pretty significantly and didn't have enough time to flesh out everything unfortunately. (Could be wrong though)