Which ending did you pick in Eliza?

Games Video Games
1

Hey all, recently I finished up Eliza, and quite enjoyed my time with it. I was curious, given the range of endings in that game: what ending did you pick?

  • Nora
  • Rae
  • Rainer
  • Soren
  • Nobody

0 voters

Here’s a refresher on the various endings:

Nora: Evelyn joins up with Nora making electronic music and rejecting the corporate interests of her past.

Rae: Evelyn continues to work as a proxy and work towards becoming a licensed counselor.

Rainer: Evelyn joins Skandha once again and work on Eliza’s future as an artificial general intelligence.

Soren: Evelyn joins Aponia on it’s quest to eradicate human suffering through direct stimulation.

Nobody: Evelyn decides that she just doesn’t really belong in this town anymore. She seems to be planning on moving to Japan.

2

Is Eliza PC-only/is it worth picking up?

3

It’s been released on PC/Mac/Linux, and also has a Switch release.
Whether or not you should pick it up depends on the kind of games you like! However, I think it’s a very good game.

2 Likes
4

I trust y’all with my money. I think I have Switch credit wandering around still, anyway.

5

So, I really enjoyed Eliza, but I actually feel like the endings were the weakest part of the game.

Something that really impressed me about the game throughout is how complex and nuanced the issues it portrays are. Nothing is simple. Everything is multifaceted, confusing, and hard.

But when I got to the end, I was kind of surprised to see how… overt the endings were. All of the endings are very intense. We see Evelyn go deep into the implied ideological route we selected. This kind of felt… dishonest with her character? Her uncertainty is very present throughout the story, but it pops like a bubble right after we pick an ending.

I think part of this has to do with the kind of “no-half-measures” endings we have to choose. We can’t dabble in one or the other; Evelyn’s choice is final and complete. Which I think kind of makes sense, but it results in some weird feelings for me.

Thoughts on the other endings (spoiler tags for specific endings)

So like, take the ending with Rainer. Evelyn completely buys into the weird, orthogenetic quest for the singularity that Rainer is selling. It was very strange to see her like this. It didn’t seem like her at all.

Then take the ending with Nora. While I really like this ending, the game ends with Evelyn expressing absolute bliss and joy in her work. She pretty much explicitly thanks the player for making that choice. And while, again, I love Nora, and I was rooting for it and wanted to see that happiness, it felt very… flat. As much as I wanted this ending, it felt… too simple.

Soren’s ending isn’t quite as extreme, but it still feels a little weird. While she doesn’t sink into the whole utopian vision Soren has, she still express a lot of hope and ambition for direct stimulation.

Rae’s ending is more nuanced. It feels way more like the Evelyn we came to know over the course of the game, but very optimistic, still. I think this ending is alright, altogether.

It’s for these reasons that I actually find the ending in which Evelyn moves on with her life to be the most fitting ending. I still wanted to hang out with Nora and bake cookies with Rae, but this ending felt the most honest to Evelyn as a character. It’s not the ending I find the most joy in (that goes to Lil Sappho), but I think it felt the most honest about who Evelyn is.

Throughout the game, Evelyn is uncertain and feels at a loss for what is going on around her. And none of these decisions feel… right to her. None of them capture what Evelyn believes in her core; they all seem compromised in some capacity. Compromising either her desire to change the world for the better, her desire to find her own happiness, or her own sense of ethics and truth. So in a way, the choice that makes the most sense for Evelyn is to just walk away from it all. Leave Seattle, leave all the baggage and nonsense about Eliza behind.

It’s for that reason I feel like it’s the most fitting ending. Because it more clearly expressed the uncertainty in Evelyn, and the genuine anxiety she experiences over the compromises she has to make. That feels so much more truthful to me than any of the other endings I was given.

1 Like
6

The “Walk Away” ending was really the only climax that felt satisfactory, to me.

Soren is a creep and his plan seems kinda terrible. People suffer for a lot of reasons that aren’t related to mental health. Like, how is his device supposed to help if I can’t pay my rent?

Rainer is a technocratic freak. A dude who would, conceivably, let the entire world burn to chase the Singularity, like every other jackass teen libertarian, except he’s a grown-ass man.

Rae is really lovely, but also naive, bordering on nonsensical. I can understand and empathize where she’s coming from, but does she know that rapacious pharmaceutical companies would flock to a service like Eliza immediately?

Nora is cool. I got no problems with Nora, but she’s also, like, a steamroller of a person. It seemed like she was only really interested in Evelyn’s autonomy so long as it fit within her guidelines. Also, I really don’t think I want to spend the rest of my life dealing with online harassment from “Logic_Lord_420” or whatever.

Simply walking away seemed right. Evelyn needed to get away from Seattle, away from the suffocating influence of Big Tech, take a step back and reassess what she needs. I can’t remember exactly what she can say to Maya in their last session, but coming at life from a different angle seemed like sound advice in her situation.

1 Like
7

I went with Nora because she seemed like the option that was closest to a full repudiation of Eliza and how Evelyn’s previous work had been utilized. I especially liked the idea of a talented programmer like Evelyn, who Rainer and Soren were both actively pursuing, effectively going “nope!” and going to work in a totally unrelated field, while actively warning people of the dangers of their work. I thought it made for a decent ending, though definitely a little anticlimactic. Reading more about the “walk away” option I definitely see the appeal of that as well. I never really considered any of the other choices.

8

I went with Nora cause it almost completely lines up with my own fantasies for what I’d like to do. I love software dev, and thankfully I didn’t work on something as potentially harmful as Eliza, but if there was any chance I could have a decent career in music, I’d be there so quickly.

9

I went Nora and was pretty unsatisfied. The game promises you’re about to do one thing with that choice and you end up doing something completely different. But like, I came away from this game almost immediately thinking “fffffffuck everything that’s happening here, fuck it hard.” So the choice that’s the most like an escape from that (and this) Hellraiser Hellworld is coolest with me.

1 Like
10

Yeah, the fact that it hinted at one direction and swerved to another kind of erked me, but I can understand they only had so many words for the endings.

1 Like
11

I think it bothered me that the story hints at shades of grey in choosing one of these endings, but never delivers.
For example, I thought that a good choice would be for her join Rainer because she would be taking responsibility for her creation and try to fix things for within, but nope. That ending has you completely drinking his Kool Aid and blithely race into creating the singularity.
Given how the choices turn out I’d probably go with her leaving (Nothing)
@quantumdot Yeah, I agree the criticism of the endings a lot of us are having aren’t fair. The amount of writing they would have had to do would be sequels in themselves.

1 Like