I don't want to give away spoilers before the cut, but I don't think anyone who played through COE33's prologue could expect that the ending would be a neat and tidy happy conclusion. Fundamentally, after the final boss, you have a choice for a short kind of epilogue boss fight, which determines what happens in the end.
When I was in college, "morality systems" in video games started to become popular. Bioshock asked you to choose whether to save or harvest the Little Sisters, for example. The thing is, there wasn't really any ambiguity over which one was the "right" and "wrong" choice there, and the game even seemed to second-guess the choice by making the good choice actually more rewarding anyway. Later, Fallout 3 would present you with choices like "do nuke this town of innocent wastelanders" or "maybe don't do that."
There is a moral choice at the end of this game - a choice that has profound consequences - but where I think the debate over its "correctness" and which is the "good one" is open to interpretation. And while I naturally only got to see one of them, I think both will be utter emotional gut-punches.
The rest is spoilers, along with some spoiler-filled thoughts on the game as a whole.
What is technically the penultimate boss fight of COE33's main story (there's tons of post-game content to explore as well) is against Renoir Descendre, the actual father of the real Verso, and of Alicia/Maelle, whom we've known as the Curator from early in the game.
The horror of the gommage is his doing, but his reasoning is actually very understandable: his wife, Aline, aka the Paintress, retreated into the artificial world of Verso's Canvas in order to flee the grief she felt over her son's death. Unwilling to leave the comforts of her facsimile family, Aline vanished from her life in the real world. Renoir decided eventually that the only way to ensure that she wouldn't trap herself within there forever was to destroy the Canvas, which took the form in part of the Gommage.
While we succeeded in ejecting Aline from the Canvas, this led to the gommage of all of Lumiere, including, briefly, the Maelle persona of Alicia. Re-awakening with her memories of her outside life, Maelle/Alicia raced to stop him.
However, was her motivation to preserve Verso's work, or to escape into this world herself?
Well, both things can be true.
Verso aids us in defeating Renoir and ejecting him from the painting, and Renoir ultimately accepts Alicia/Maelle's promise that she will not stay there forever, and willingly leaves.
However, the facsimile Verso discovers that some fragment of him - which we've been seeing as the strange little boy everywhere - remains in the painting, giving it life but trapped and unable to leave.
Verso calls Maelle out on lying, and just escaping her life in the same sort of delusion as her mother had, while Maelle protests that her life outside the painting is one of pain and sorrow, not least because of her injuries and disfigurement.
So: what is the right thing to do?
Verso wants a release for whatever fragment of his original version is trapped here, but Maelle doesn't want to give up on this world and all the people within it.
And it's really up for debate. Verso and Alicia wind up coming to take their parents' (well, sort-of-parents in Verso's case) sides, playing out the same conflict once again, both seeking to do right by one another against their wishes.
Ultimately, while it pained me to do so, I sided with Maelle, primarily on the basis that I felt the people of Lumiere didn't deserve to be wiped out.
And here, I think, I'll level one of my main criticisms of the game's stories:
I think Lune and Sciel are not fleshed out enough or given enough agency.
They're both mechanically cool from a gameplay perspective, and the performances are good. But there's also a bit of a question of "why are these people, in particular, along for this ride?" Why did the story need these two to be the survivors (along with Gustave, at least for a time)?
In a fucked-up way, their thinness as characters lends some credibility to Verso's side of the argument: are the people of Lumiere truly thinking, feeling, sentient people? (And are the Gestrals and Grandis, for that matter?) If they are, the moral choice is clearly to side with Maelle, even if it means that Verso is trapped in a life from which he would prefer to move on.
And yet, if the Lumierans are truly just fictional characters, if this world is truly a falsehood, it opens the door to the idea that perhaps Verso is correct.
Basically, I don't imagine either choice is meant to let you feel comfortable.
As a note, I did a fair amount of optional content before heading back to Lumiere for the final dungeon, and I think that was a mistake. I had several fights with Aberrations (the most common new enemies in Lumiere) where I killed them before they got a turn, and both the Renoir and Verso fights were over far quicker than it felt they should have been.
I really recommend going there, if not immediately after the Monolith, then at least right after doing the "loyalty quests" for Monoco, Sciel, Maelle, and Lune (and be sure to talk to Esquie to get Verso's final gradient attack). Then again, the Golgra fight with Monoco and Verso that is part of Monoco's quest is going to be very tough (and I still haven't managed to successfully duel her on Maelle to get a the weapon).
This game's mechanics and combat system are fantastic, and so it's something that I'll be really happy to keep playing into the post-game. It's almost like the game has its DLC packaged with the main thing, which is nice. But it also means that playing through this stuff always comes with a weird asterisk that, well, in my version of the ending, Verso is kind of trapped on these endless adventures with Maelle (I haven't done any camp conversations to see if they address that, but given that I'm pretty sure Verso's ending sees the world erased, they probably just don't acknowledge the ending in the post-game stuff).
The story of this game hits hard and hurts. I both respect that and also find myself wishing for a game very much like this that isn't quite as emotionally devastating.
In a weird way, FromSoft's games have similarly morally ambiguous endings, but those games are also engage on more of an intellectual than emotional level, I think (at least in terms of how you feel the world should be). COE33 makes me care so much about this world and these characters, and in a lot of ways, as much as I'm happy to have saved Lune and Sciel (and because Maelle is nigh-omnipotent, now Gustave and Sophie and Sciel's husband Pierre,) the horror of the ending is the question: what if all I've truly accomplished is damn Alicia to live the rest of her life in a falsehood?
The game has been the talk of the gaming industry, and a model for creator-driven, original gameplay, a simultaneous embrace of old and largely abandoned game mechanics with bright new spins on them. It's a challenging, adult story, and genuinely one of the most visually beautiful games I've ever seen.
The people behind it should be very proud of their accomplishments, and I think it's going to go down in history as one of the best games ever made, which I feel confident in saying despite the game being out for less than two weeks.
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