I've been thinking about the story and meaning of this game for a bit and here's what I've come up with so far:
In terms of the story, the hivemind has been subject to an experiment by the institution that tests the awareness of its consciousness. Like the game, this experiment exists in a continuous cycle: the boy will always come to break the hivemind out, the hivemind will always reach the same spot at the edge of the land in the light before the water (which was even modeled out, showing how it was planned), and then everything will be reset overtime; a new boy will be grown, the building will be repaired, and the hivemind will be restored, maintaining its thought from before (same with the player). The orbs are what reveal the existence of the cycle, since the ones you have previously shut off remain that way. This cycle can only be broken once the hivemind discovers the existence of the cycle and figures out how to unplug the boy, exerting the only true level of control it has in its world at all: the ability to stop playing the game set up by the institution. As a side not since this doesn't really fit anywhere into that, but I think those swimming things were failed versions of the boy who did not make it to the hivemind who have been lost control of and have gone rampant as a result.
In terms of meaning, I think it can be related to Plato's Allegory of the Cave in a way. The game is the cave for the hivemind, and going through the cycle is its attempt to break out of its cave - the world it inhabits - to achieve freedom. This freedom that the hivemind seeks is the water that lays beyond the light that it always ends up in; reaching the water is equivalent to exiting the cave. But, as both the player and the hivemind discover, they cannot reach the water no matter how many times they try. So the revelation that the player and the hivemind have is that the cave is a construct that they are subject to, that their whole effort to find freedom is just a part of the game and is controlled to the point where it can never be achieved, similar to how we can truly never escape the cave. By breaking the cycle, this signifies that we are exerting the only true freedom we have, which is to accept that the game exists and stop playing it. So pretty much the hivemind/player can only find the freedom they seek through truth.
Sorry if this didn't make much sense, it's late and I want to go to bed, but felt like I should try to explain what I think while it's fresh in my mind.
Truth is not given, but found.
Brilliant.
I think what they were doing was to find a way to make the human race capable of continuing to live in that world that was colapsing.
I had a vibe of that, too, albeit with a different outcome.
It seemed like, possibly, the blob was another evolutionary step. A human hivemind. A big, self-sustaining, multi-intelligent creature. The scientists wanted to perfect it rather than control it or contain it. It wasn't
finished yet.
But I don't see how the boy fits into this narrative. Unless somehow the hivemind, the blob itself, is controlling the boy, trying to bring him
back to it?
I think Gnome Scat's analysis is the best one.
When you break through the first room as a blob I swear you hear a baby crying, implying a woman has just given birth. What if that lends credence to the fact this was all planned and perhaps the birthed baby is you in a continues testing loop.
Jesus!
On the other hand, why would the scientists include the destruction of their office in the plan? Maybe they planned the puzzles as tasks for the blob to go through but didn't anticipate the destruction?
I'd like to see more screens of the underwater part, once you get grabbed by the water-boy and can breathe underwater.
I've got a feeling that the underwater part is actually a mirror of the lab that we end up in - that after each 'experiment' they flood the whole lab.
Maybe I am just really fatigued after studying cinema and working in the industry and seeing these edgy script writers and storytellers come up with these kind of "cool" stories.
I felt like this for a long time after finishing my degree. Like, years. I couldn't really enjoy anything, mainly due to overanalysing everything. My particular field was prose fiction. I honestly didn't read a book for at least a year after finishing my degree. I'd get enough out of one page, and I'd pick things apart too much. It took me about 10 months to read Slaughterhouse Five (a 130-page novel).
A point comes where you just say "fuck it" and stop caring whether people are trying to be edgy or not and just take each work as it comes, good or bad, warts and all. I've found that I've begun enjoying
everything I consume since I started giving less fucks, pretty much.
This also reframes the whole drone slavery in something more ambiguous and brings back the possibility of a catastrophe: the worm infection could've been an accident, and people figured out how to capture and de-worm zombies, but found out you couldn't bring the victims back to humanity. Rather than just kill them they discovered their susceptibility to mind control and "recycled" them into a cheap workforce and continued to experiment on them to understand the phenomenon (the ethics of this are still highly debatable). Rather than oppression they're trying to do the best they can with the resources they have (possibly using the drones because there aren't that many humans left).
This seems like a solid theory.
Maybe after Limbo-boy ruins Limbo-world the worms seep out into IRL?
- Security camera watching the procession
A really horrible thing - see the procession? At one point a tall woman goes by - and she is clearly pregnant. Has a bump, and is ambling along awkwardly on long legs.
Really disturbed me and I didn't mention it to my girlfriend because it would harrow her, haha.
