Another Barnbellow's Estate song, right on time for the Spooky Season!
I've covered a couple of the endings BE would have if it were a real game- namely the "Stay" ending (one of two bad endings), and the "True" ending (which is the canonical one). but the "Survive" ending is effectively the default, standard ending. When initially writing the design document, I put down that the way to trigger it was to breeze through the game without investigating many of the hauntings or reading many of the notes/documents, but I'm also considering the idea that it's the only ending achievable on a first run of the game- with the game spelling out that there's more endings to unlock as you go. I'll have to think about it.
As for the actual story contents of the ending; Yuna faces off against The Agony rather then running from it, and barely manages to eke out a win- not outright destroying or "killing" it (as that may well be impossible), but damaging it heavily enough that she has an opening to run and get clear, trundling down a large, fleshy tunnel that somehow brings her to the outside of the manor at the break of dawn. The rain starts to die off as the estate's bell finishes its dramatic peals, and it all slams into her at once; supernatural entities are very, very real, and they are all far beyond any contemporary understanding of what they're believed to be- the things she's encountered and barely managed to survive put even her worst nightmares to shame and would drive lesser men mad.
She got her answers. And she doesn't know how what to make of them. Overwhelmed and exhausted, she falls to her knees in the grass and weeps.
Upon her return to the United States, she decides to quit her Parapsychology course at SJSU, and decides to go travelling around the country as a means of decompressing and finding herself, reevaluating where she wants her life to go. She eventually settles somewhere in the American Midwest, opening and maintaining a music store, determined to keep this grisly chapter of her life closed and have it fade away into a distant, unpleasant memory.
But you know what they say about old ghosts, right?
I'm fairly pleased with it- its very blatantly Silent Hill inspired, right down to using several samples used in Silent Hill songs (take a shot for each one you recognise!), but the strength of those samples and the original lines I built around them make for a great melancholy track. I'm particularly fond of the b-movie sample during one of the bar ends that ties back to Yuna's initial impetous for knowledge, and how this ending (and the "Stay" ending) turn that curiousity against her. I'd not initially planned for the ending songs to follow a naming convention- hence why the "True" ending music doesn't follow the trend- but I like the idea of the other ending songs having a "Your [X]" convention, so I'm going to keep it for the remaining ending songs (the "Corrupted" ending, and the two special endings you get for completing Overdrive Mode and playing through the game as the unlockable secret character respectively).
~ Decon (20/10/2024)