My thoughts on Endacopia!
Spoilers for ALL the routes!!!
I didn't grow up with the countless classic point-and-click games, nor with the particular genre of edutainment that utilized them as a vehicle for learning. Mom raised me on old Hidden Object Games she pirated, and as such my only exposure to the genre in general was my uncle's gaming magazines, and one European goblin going around the world on a plane.
Beyond that, I avoid many older point-and-clicks - I am impatient, and generally don't find it too fun to wander around pointlessly and try stuff.
However, when I saw a streamer I enjoy play Endacopia, I decided to give it a go, especially as a fan of meta and surreal concepts. And oh boy, did Endacopia not disappoint... well in the surreal ballpark. In meta part it was extremely thin, but that was just me being misinformed by people who see a quirky indie and claim metatext. Blame Tobias Fox. There is one reference to the player and it's very light and unexamined. Overall, there are also some structural issues, but they pale compared to what I enjoyed.
Th toilet awaits our stumble into the wonderland. Can you stomach it? Is your heart pounding with excitement? Let's go then!
The game is about a small boy named Mellow living in a strange place. This is how we start up, in our room, with nothing but PC and a soccer ball. This room, and some areas we can reach from it, are the hub area that we return to for our intermission between "episodes" - our House. The room connects to hallway with a fake door, as well as toilet, with some other locales added as the plot unfolds.
Mellow is a little sassy but darling boy, of no more than 10 years. His general look reminds me of Homestuck, which I am unsure is a fond or cursed memory. Other inhabitants are all strange - lizard Henry, the surrogate guardian for Mellow who is fond of beating him with a wooden bat; Tip, a wooden sign that acts as a rather irritable tips dispenser throughout the game; and a strange Toilet Monster who promises to take you on an adventure. This strange cast of more important characters fully promise a cartoonish ensemble, a trend that continues with latter areas, although latter ones are more thematic. Their characterization - with one exception - isn't too deep, but it doesn't need to be, and they are quite delightful, usually.
This game already reveals its style of humor. Our dear Mellow is a precocious child, and that alone is a source of a lot of subtle jokes. Many jokes refer to internet culture, but some are just cute and ... just funny, sort of in an Earthbound fashion. Dark humour is also prominent and one of the most promising categories overall. The game often breaks out of the gloomy shell and exposes that gloominess for jokes, although never at the cost of telling a coherent story. For example, one puzzle involves watching 8 movies about clowns getting fucked over and killed, ending with one that merely scrapes his knee. Slapstick is also a factor, especially during death scenes, where Mellow's 3d models gets butchered, making deaths actually a delight.
However, one of the main problems of the game manifests early. To keep it free of UI, the developer decided to have clicks dictate everything. You move through Look/Use/Talk with scroll of middle mouse - entering your inventory is done by clicking on Mellow with Use active, Mellow tells you how he feels if you click on him with Look, and if you click with Talk, you will get a tip from Tip. While simple in idea, it often causes headaches, such as accidentally clicking and getting unwanted Tip's tip, when all I wanted was to talk to someone. I really wish there was an alternative solution to this.
As you ready to leave on the adventure, you encounter another mechanic that I am mixed on - combat. It is a very simple Punch-Out style sequence, but some encounters are very difficult, with notably strange tells. I am not wholly opposed to this, and some combat encounters were a delight, as they had rather imaginative twists, but overall, it wasn't the easiest thing to get used to.
The main game loop is this - at first, the Toilet Monster sends you down the toilet pipes into a strange hub, from which you can access the main three location - the Animal Crossing like town Timesville, the circus themed Misery Town, and the crushing-capitalism-commentary company The Office. As you enter for the first time, Mellow suffers an incident and loses body parts and with them, the ability to use Talk/Look/Use. To restore your skills, you must venture into every zone and get your parts back. This small thing is actually a very clever decision, as it lets you familiarize yourself with every single zone, before you need to commit to solving its main puzzles, and it also sets up familiarity necessary for the next part of the story to work. After solving each of the zones, you are brought back to the House by the Toilet Monster, who demands assistance with something dubious, before he allows you back to complete the rest. This continues, until you return the final time to face whatever resolution may await. On the negative end, Tip rather forcefully interjects during this stage. While I understand this was to prevent player frustration with a certain part of the game, it does feel very hand-holdy in the moment and it really increased my frustrations as I was already calling on him accidentally.
I'd like to move through each specific zone - they are specific themed locales, common to video-game, each with a different feel.
The Office is my personal favorite! I feel like I am an outlier as most streamers I watched started with the others. One of the first puzzles - strange communication via buttons with an backend outdated AI is very fun and I spent a lot of time fishing for responses here. The whole company is sort of on-the-nose parody of companies, where we don't even know what it does. It's operated by an AI, which conducts your interview. This zone also has its currency, which you can gamble in seedy area! Oh and you get a job. This job is delightful, as you manage a help call for some odd characters - it's honestly my favorite gag in the game. The main boss not only has gravitas but foreshadows some structural world-building. You fight the AI keeping the company going in a strange meaty place, with the most upsetting visuals of them all as the viscera folds around you.
A darling of most of the people playing is Misery Town, a circus themed spot! I agree it has moments, although I find its linear "get item A for person B to solve C", to be touch more stale than the Office. Still, it has a somewhat charming (if hetslop) love story between clowns, and the horror and despair are more pronounced throughout via the clown stories. The Trapezist makes for a good villain, and she is sort of "create a place that thrives on misery as entertainment" sort of guy. Her fight is fun as well, as it has you punch back the balls she throws at you, but in the latter half off the fight, you need to do it only once and carefully conserve stamina.
And then there is Timesville, which I have complex feelings on. It has awesome atmosphere and I do like the designs of the villagers. Pretty nice achievement of converting that specific Animal Crossing look into pixels. I also enjoy the idea of a town that is uniquely haunted and the community actually responds to it - everyone is forced to live in a communal reinforced apartment building rather than their home due to the problems. I also enjoyed the fishing gimmick and some more concentrated, classic horror hauntings. However, Timesville is also the part that gets, in my opinion, the worst puzzles, and its central piece is a mechanic I dislike. To explain, time moves in Timesville anytime you enter a building and many actions demand a specific time. Atmospheric, yes, rather frustrating, also yes, especially since at night the main villain of the zone - a serial killer - can stalk you over the map and force you to enter a building, actively shortening your time outside. There is also one puzzle I didn't even need to solve, because it was just information for another puzzle - one that I solved genuinely by accident beforehand (due to misclick on Tip). The zone villain is also - in my opinion - the weakest one out of the tree, a serial killer who makes puppets out of his victims. My main problem is that he doesn't connect to any theme the town could have, other than being a horror genre stock. One fun thing I liked about him is that you can avoid the fight if you do serious analysis of one of his snuff movies he made (VHS that you find and need to watch for the code to his lair). Seeing you as a serious fan he opts to not make you into a new actor of his pieces.
One thing that's consistent across the zones is the amount of Kickstarter backer characters. When I played I felt a bit awkward about it cause there is a lot, lot, more than original characters even. However, many appear briefly throughout the play, and it's random which ones you see as you reload the screen. This did made the areas feel more lived in and added a lot of charm. Randomization is actually a fun feature of this game, as some puzzle solutions are different across playthroughs.
So, what about the endings? Well, there is one main decision - after finishing two zones, you get a chance to give Toilet Guy a saw, something he demands in exchange for letting you go down the pipes one last time. You can either trust it blindly, or call its bluff and give it a Toy Saw.
What does he want it for? Well, clearly to break the tooth of the dying God everyone is stuck in and escape the sinking ship as he calls it.
Wait what? To grit -
The strange location you are all in - with Henry's and Mellow's House on top, and all the locations below - is constantly called out as being weird. There are many hint throughout the game that you are in fact inside a giant living being that moves through the desert and consumes things. The God of the Dunes, who is dying, slowly but surely sinking deeper into the sands.
I cannot even begin to explain how much I adore this. Many horror and surreal titles operate on ambiguity. Real world mechanics. Metaphors. It's such a wonderful choice to have just a STRANGE world as the core basis of reality.
This decision is what the Toilet Monster wanted the saw for. It's in fact a parasite on this God, and it needs to sever the connection and escape before this death.
In ending A, which happens if you give the Toilet Monster a Toy Saw and no opening was made in the mouth of the God following its escape. Mellow has to go through Henry. As you fight him, the God gets to vomit, and he throws up all the characters inside. In the apocalyptic wasteland, everyone decides to stay at a nearby House together as a found family. Heartwarming, and it brings closure to many of the characters!
In ending B, you can easily escape the God through the damage the Toilet Monster did, leaving everyone behind without a second thought. The home from Ending A is found nearby, empty and silent, taken over by the Toilet Monster, who kicks Mellow out. As Mellow comes upon another house, he finds his REAL family - one that didn't even notice he disappeared and is clearly dysfunctional, except for his little sister.
These two endings clearly distinguish between two kinds of families, and both are named just that, Family, either "Family!" or "Family...". The achievements refer to these as "Escape" (escaping abuse for a chosen life) and then "Return" (you returned to your old neglectful circumstances). For a game in a genre saturated with edgy takes for their own sake, this narrative cuts close to Earthbound and, God forbid, Undertale in a way I enjoy. There's sincerity in it, and hope, even in ending B, where Mellow bonds with his little sister, only person in the family he gets along with.
But, if you want real horror....
There is Ending C. And The Surgeon. If there ever was a dedicated miserable ending you have to fight hard for - congrats. You got it. It's also an ending that explains everything in the world of the game and very difficult to get (I had to use a guide, like a poser.)
The Surgeon is, more or less, an optional part of the game, but also the most fleshed out and fascinating one. A man who speaks politely, a man who can resurrect and create monstrosities, who connected two women into one Bride in one horrifying operation, for he loved both. You meet him as you play, once you lean close to finishing every zone and always he breaks out in a song, where you learn something about him. An android, who misses the feeling of feelings, narcissist with an ego about saving the world, someone with a I do what I must mentality. The only character in the whole game I will genuinely call complex.
And he, just like Toilet Monster, has his own agenda, plan.
In every zone, there is a super secret puzzle section you MUST complete before finishing the zone, if you want the ending. In Timesville, you see spirits of the deaths, and connect and harmonize experiences within two brains, two souls. In Misery Town, you operate on the vats of flesh to bring online the batteries, living sacrifices (remember the clowns in the movies? Four survived their injuries...). And in the Office, you awaken the old copy of the brain of the original Founder, who shuts down the rogue AI chief and restarts the machinery, starting the functioning of some of the organs you see laying around.
And when you return to the House for the end, you have a new path, regardless of the saw you handed to the Toilet Monster.
You enter the heart of the God. And you See a book, full of occult and of medicine. And the Surgeon comes in. And explains what you did.
You made his Bride whole, and you set in actions the revival and healing of the God, with the Bride taking on as its new Vessel. You and him and the Bride must be sacrificed for this. As you sit down, you can type in anything you want to ask of the Surgeon, and he answers, illuminating many of the details of the world. It truly is worth it to get this ending purely for honest explanations. One of the most interesting facts is that the Surgeon had to recreate and revive Mellow at least once, which makes him sort of his father and something perhaps created TO find and utilize all these small parts and bring them together.
And when the questions dry up, the heart begins to beat once more. We see the walls close in on the Surgeon and the Mellow, and before they crush them fully, he proclaims them all a Family.
It is mythical, esoteric journey reminiscent of an Unity with God found in real spiritual paths, a twisted image of a sacrificial lamb all at once. I adore this choice, especially how effectively it utilizes all that we learned about the Surgeon - his egomania, powerful love for his twisted Bride he sees as perfect and worthy of ascension, and a desire to fix people and save the world. I just have to strongly admire this amount of work put into this. I was promised meta stuff, or some dark twisted secret like every mediocre Youtuber-chasing horror has, but this one really got me because it was so honest, so strange and yet so understandable. It connects deeply to my love for something surreal grounded as reality, for a strange ritual, for a theme that connects to the weird.
Not to say this is the only way to read it, but the focus of - what makes a home - biology?; choice; purpose, is indeed a thematic througline of the game, and the major question raised and answered in every single one of the endings.
To retreat from my bullshit a bit for some additional words - I cannot praise the music and graphics enough. The game has wonderful smooth pixel style, mixed in with 3d media as needed. Since it inherits from edutainment games like Putt Putt series, a lot of stuff on the screen is just playful animations, adding to the whole surreal experience. It's a delight, to be sure.
As a whole Endascopia wasn't a big meta horror thing and I am so intensively glad for it. In its earnestness, it held both horror, terror and sincerity and managed to let us have fully happy (or miserable) ending without feeling cheated or incomplete, without demanding thirty lore videos on Youtube. It just told a pretty good story. Due to all that, I can honestly say I strongly recommend Endacopia to everyone, and it was my pleasure to play it.