Anyway, the point is, I had this suspicion of him and so everything he said or did suddenly became questionable to me.
I started suspecting Ed when he expressed his dislike of computers. Another game I like a lot is
Starlight Sacrifice, a second-person thinker, and the main character there shows strong signs of being indoctrinated or mind-controlled while being a genuinely good-natured and conventionally-likable person. He doesn't like computers either. That's seriously very telling. Ed looks like a player avatar, but this little detail sends a very clear message that he isn't "
Be warned: Your characters are not you. They may have their own interests and goals". Dislike of computers is the Hitler 'stache for the 21st century. (Also, I just Godwinned the thread.)
Initially, I thought it highly unlikely that Ed killed Morales - I thought he was definitely aiming at
something and I get to blow it up later in the game (his distress in the lab was obviously genuine, while if I were him I wouldn't have been able to even fake it). I was surprised that Bennet's letter wasn't also planted by Ed.
My main beef with just about any work of art is the matter of consequentialism. People learn from experience, including imaginary secondhand experience. The correct answer to "why did character A do action B" is "because the author said so". However, I find it amusing to attempt to look at a work through the eyes of a hypothetical three-year-old and deduce the Important Life Lesson.
I seriously think Ed did nothing wrong and was Right All Along. Being Right All Along is not easy or emotionally satisfying, brings no praise and may very well not lead to the best result. In this case it obviously doesn't, and Ed may even get himself killed through no agency of his own. Being Always Right means being
predictable and therefore easy to manipulate. This is exactly like exploiting a mathematically perfect optimization algorithm in a strategy game.
Bennet is Righteous. That *is* easy and emotionally satisfying (and very different from being Right). He won't let crimes go unpunished, and he won't be complicit in a crime. It's something that can garner you praise and admiration, except it might also get you killed through no agency of your own, too bad about that.
Anna doesn't get to choose because there's no reason she should. She's not the final authority. Sure, Morales entrusted her with that responsibility, but so what? He's dead. He doesn't have a stake in the future. (While we, as a civilization, need to keep up the pretense that the wishes of the dead matter, both for out own comfort and to encourage people to risk their lives - that is, for the greater good - that greater good takes a backseat to Free Energy For Everyone).
I absolutely love the characterization and plotting. Here, the question "Why can't they just get along?" has a definite answer. Given specific external circumstances, there's nothing they could have done differently. The catastrophe is unavoidable not only because it's an adventure game, not only because we saw the news report in the opening, but because the characters were acting to the best of their knowledge and abilities within their own very different moralities.
And that is why Ray is my favorite character (as in "the one who I most want to be like"). Besides being witty and honorable (someone powerful enough to supposedly dig up compromising material on the president blackmails him and he reacts by deciding to do a story on the blackmailer),
he keeps an open mind. He gets not only to live in the end, but to affect the global outcome. Well, actually he gets to live because the devs said so, but I'm talking about Important Life Lessons, and as Important Life Lessons go, this one isn't bad.
On top of that, one of Antevorta's festival days was the 11th of January, or XI of January if you see where I'm going with that.
Eleventh day of the eleventh month? Heh.
The coolest thing to me is, that all the information you need to piece this mystery together is right there in front of your eyes the whole time. You're just not really looking.
Everything serves a purpose.
This reminds me of similar experience with Spider and Web, best expressed by baf: "I'm still discovering subtleties just by thinking about it afterwards".
TL;DR: play it right now, it's free and short (took me about 3 hours on my first playthrough). There's a twist in the middle, a choice in the end, the science/ethics problem mirrors that of Resonance, and you can actually define your character (although in broad strokes).