@ Karthik:

Red could have lost her voice as part of a proximity thing to the attack. Its odd that she can hum but not speak. Maybe her tongue was downloaded. Or maybe its psychosomatic from the shock of the event.

I’ve also been researching theories on the game quite a bit(I’m making a tabletop rpg campaign located in cloudbank). I am frustrated that there isn’t much focus but on the culture and atmosphere of cloudbank. When we play the game, the world is changing. We never see it as it was. There are tons of clues as to what it was like and oddly enough for a world in which everyone can vote for everything and everything sound like it is just and fair there are several mentions of violence building. Red’s files talk about how her music has made controversy and how one of her shows incited a riot. I think that there must be more to the reasons and workings of the Camerata that have to do with this. Also whats the whole deal with Fairview and the new bridge? Its a new thing that’s happening, but why is it new? Why haven’t they been connected before.

Personally, I don’t think “the country” is a place. I think it’s polite way of saying someone died whose terminology is based on a the citizens nostalgia and idealism for nature. I imagine that much like the sandbox areas, that the inside of the transistor is chosen by the wielder and Red chose it to look like that. This is why the fight sequence with Royce has giant Transistors in the background. Royce is pretty obsessed with it. Also it is noticeable that “the country” is romanticized. There only a few only a few birds and no other people visible besides Red and “The Boxer”.

I find one of the weirdest and most motivating parts of the game is the lack of living people. You run into a few dying people, you meet Royce at the end of the game, and after you die you see “The Boxer”. Sure, everyone is trying to escape the city but there are surprisingly few stragglers and honestly few bodies for a city with a monster on attack. Also I’m curious to know what other people think the little ghosting effect of what looks like people are? They sometimes appear on the streets before the Process takes over.

I think the Process is a sort of evolving organism or software. Its a product of continually rebuilding the city and doing its basic functions. It made tools to do help more efficiently do its different jobs and then those evolved to be more and more like the lifeforms of the city.

Also I think Grant and Royce were the only members to actually care about the Camerata’s goals. Grant’s boyfriend was just really obsessed with making Grant happy and Sybil is power hungry and out to really only help herself. Royce seems more to care out of curiosity more than will power and Grant could be seen to be having a confused life crisis of doing his thankless job for so long. ?

My take on the game is pretty much this, with a few differences.

– I do think the final battlefield is “inside” the transistor, considering every pod maps to a transistor function.

– I also gathered that the characters in the game are artificial constructs, not plugged-in people at all–although at this point, the difference here is probably irrelevant.

– Some things I don’t have an explanation for, like why Red lost her voice, considering Breach() took the hit intended for her. It’s fitting that Red’s function is called Crash(). I wonder if Turn() is the trace of a person… or a primitive.

I just finished it, and I’m planning to dive right back into NG+ (or Recursion, as it calls it). I loved the deep combo system and the penalties. I often settle into a comfortable skill build in most action RPGs, a configuration that’s almost certainly a local maximum for fun or engagement. Transistor’s penalty system kicks you off your little peak and forces you to hunt for something better–And there’s always a better skill set waiting to be discovered!

That it remains ambiguous and open to interpretation is also fantastic. What I really want in such games is atmosphere, not story, and Transistor is drenched in it.

@ Gothmog:

It kinda annoyed me that you temporarily “lose” a function instead of dying, making the next combat harder, but that specific mechanic was the primary reason why I even bothered experimenting with putting different functions in different slots. Near the end of the game I discovered a decent combo that allowed me to back-stab the Man units to death with relative ease and I mostly kept that intact for the last half an hour or so.

The final battle was the most difficult one because the boss has a transistor of his own, and he can freeze time just as you can.

Well, that’s a fascinating review and hypothesis of the game, Luke. I kind of wish I had played it to completion, now. For some reason, I was hit with analysis paralysis when it sank in how I could mix and match the traces to affect combat. It sounds like this was a very cleverly thought out game.