Thief of Virtue

"I'm in the wrong and I've done it all before

I cannot breathe this poison air filled with lies"

 

Combichrist - Throat Full of Glass

 

 

I decided to hit Strangeland before Lorelai for my next adventure game... errr, adventure, and so far it looks promising, aside from the painfully predictable "man bad, woman good" men-are-gynocidal-maniacs feminist setup which I'm hoping (but not expecting) to see discredited before the end. I got stuck before even finishing the first scene, though.

I don't mean stuck in practical terms. I know the next step (and double-checking with the in-game hint system even confirms it) but I've been trying my damnedest to find any other solution... than lying to the nice, helpful old blind man feeding the birds in the park. Or feeding the nonexistent imaginary doves in a post-death fugue state or-possibly-alternate-dimension and they're actually ravens. Not the point! I don't want to lie!

... Can't I just shoot him or something?

Computer games have always had an uneasy relationship with nonviolence, as clicking things on and off (i.e. into or out of existence) is the most straightforward use of an electronic interface even down to single pixels. From there to making the pointer into a gun barrel is a short path indeed. When they do try to get nonviolent (whether to break the mold or dodge parental groups) the results can be unexpectedly macabre.

Take Thief, for instance:

As the forerunner of modern stealth-based games, Thief made quite a splash by pushing you to knock people unconscious instead of noisily fighting them while you sneak to your objective, in direct contrast to Doom and its contemporary copycats dominating the market. Of course, you also had to move the sapped victims out of patrol routes so others wouldn't run across them and raise the alarm. By the time you find yourself lovingly stacking your twentieth unconscious person in a tiny cupboard where they'll never be missed, you might realize that holy shit, this would actually be less creepy if I'd just killed them!

 

In Strangeland's case, you've already established some kind of journey to the center of the mind in which death only means a temporary reset and your main task is reconstructing reality from fragmentary hints. This makes telling a lie, further fragmenting reality, a crime against your solipsistic universe itself while you have every reason to assume (at this early point in the game anyway) that cudgeling the codger for the breadcrumbs in his pocket would only result in him rematerializing on the same bench a minute later.

And that's ignoring the basic distinction that I'd rather be an honest villain than a lying hero.