watched bandersnatch

it takes forever?

they made it weirdly difficult to navigate between the different paths for some reason

it's pretty good i guess? but they keep drawing a branching path diagram thingy in-universe and it would've been way better to actually give us viewers that diagram as a thing you can click thru to switch paths

like the wario land 2 level select screen

actually talking about the plot of bandersnatch rather than its game mechanics now, so definitely spoilers 

the true ending? does not make sense to me??

i'm talking about the one where stefan gets his rabbit back, and then chooses to catch the train with his mother, which is clearly intended to be the true ending

every other path you go down follows more or less realistic physical laws. by influencing stefan's choices, you're basically selecting which timeline to view, and save for stefan or colin occasionally remembering something you tried on a "previous" timeline it could all conceivably happen in reality if those choices were made

but somehow, choosing to retrieve nineteen-year-old stefan's rabbit in the present? puts you onto a timeline where five-year-old stefan also retrieved his rabbit, caught the train with his mother, presumably died when the train derailed, and then somehow went to a therapy session fourteen years later?? at which point he spontaneously died again for no apparent reason??? what

this one particular path seems to rely on bizarre and idiosyncratic rules of time travel - if you kill your past self, then you're fine until the next day at which point you just randomly die in the present too - which no other aspect of the game depended on at all


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@monorail bandersnatch does at least let you backtrack to previous choices, but the undo stack is significantly shorter than the number of choices the game actually offers

which is bizarre since this entire streaming video novel engine was designed for this very game

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