Still Life Endings Guide
NOTE 8/4/19: This is a repost of an endings guide for my Still Life CYOA I originally posted on Tumblr. Since Tumblr decided to block every post on that tumblr because it was marked NSFW and not allow me to unmark it as NSFW, I'm reposting it here.
First off, I’ve received a very positive response on my story so far, so thank you to everybody who has read it so far. I figured I’d make this endings guide for people wondering what endings they’ve missed. It will describe the ending as well as how to obtain it, so obviously there will be spoilers.
I high recommend not reading this until you’ve completed the story at least once.
ENDING 1: Speedrun Complete
How to obtain: Simply choose to run away during the first two scenes of the story.
Description: You run home, and the story effectively ends before it begins.
ENDING 2: It’s Not Her, It’s You
How to obtain: The decisions you make during conversations with the gorgon (who I will refer to as Neela, since that is the name she comes up with) will affect two hidden values: her self-esteem and her trust in you. If your trust drops too low, she’ll ask you if you want to continue the conversations. If you say no repeatedly, you’ll get this ending. You’ll also get it by repeatedly insulting her during your first meeting with her and then again at the start of the next day, or if you do not build up your trust after agreeing to continue the conversations.
Description: Neela explains that she really wanted things to work out between you, but you frustrate her far too much for her to put up with you, and so she never talks to you again.
ENDING 3: Pitch Black
How to obtain: If Neela’s self-esteem drops too low, she will ask you if you hate her. Say yes and don’t take it back.
Description: Neela leaves and comes back with your sword. She gives a speech about how horrible she believes she is and expresses hope that her death will set you free before killing herself in front of you. It doesn’t set you free.
ENDING 4: Dead Weight
How to obtain: Once the first intruder comes in the night, press Neela to let you keep watch at night. If your trust is high enough, she’ll agree. The next day, press her to move you to the entrance to watch it. If your trust is high enough, she’ll agree. As she carries you, repeatedly try talking to her despite her requests not to.
Description: Neela gets frustrated enough that she loses focus and control of her snakes and drops you. You land on top of her, crushing her to death.
ENDING 5: Endless Friends
How to obtain: When discussing her telepathy, convince her to try talking to the other statues, but avoid guaranteeing they will understand/like her. If you ask how it went, she will explain it went badly, but will feel that it was worth a try since you both understood the risks. Ask her again later about talking to other statues and say she should try again. When she returns a few days later, don’t complain about being lonely.
Description: You talk to Neela less and less as she finds more people to talk to. She never finds a cure for petrification, but she becomes much happier.
ENDING 6: Spoiled
How to obtain: When discussing her telepathy, convince her to try talking to the other statues, but avoid guaranteeing they will understand/like her. If you ask how it went, she will explain it went badly, but will feel that it was worth a try since you both understood the risks. Ask her again later about talking to other statues and say she should try again. When she returns a few days later, repeatedly complain and try to get her to stop talking to others.
Description: Neela becomes upset that she’s finally happy and you’re trying to ruin it. She decides to stop talking to you since she now has plenty of others to turn to.
ENDING 7: Lousy Guardian
How to obtain: Convince Neela to move you to the front entrance (see ENDING 4: Dead Weight for details). Later in the story, your vision will be blurry and you’ll see a shadow moving in the night. Let Neela continue to sleep.
Description: The shadow was an intruder, and you watch them leave carrying a bloody bag with snakes peeking out, indicated they successfully beheaded Neela in her sleep.
ENDING 8: Lousy Watchdog
How to obtain: Convince Neela to let you keep watch at night, but not to move you. Later in the story, your vision will be blurry and you’ll see a shadow moving in the night. Let Neela continue to sleep.
Description: You wait for Neela to return, but she never does. You realize the shadow as an intruder and killed Neela in her sleep.
Finale Main Branch 1
The rest of the endings spread out from three main branches that split off after you discuss the afterlife with Neela (or after she speaks to you one morning if her trust in you is very high).
The first route contains 9 endings. It requires you to have convinced Neela to let you keep watch at night and for her to move you to the front. Her esteem must also not be too low or you must not discuss the cure when picking conversation topics. If she has low self esteem and you discuss the cure, you will be forced into the second branch.
ENDING 9: Seizing the Chance
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for finale main branch 1. When you are freed by the intruder, run away.
Description: You run away and embrace freedom, never knowing what happened to Neela or the adventurer who saved you.
ENDING 10: Et Tu
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for finale main branch 1. When you are freed by the intruder, take the dagger and join the hunt.
Description: Neela defeats you both and becomes furious with you. She considers shattering you, but holds back. She ignores you forever, and allows dust to collect on you, blinding you forever.
ENDING 11: Her Own Medicine
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for the finale main branch 1. When you are freed from the intruder, choose to call for the gorgon. After the fight, choose to get the adventurer’s bag yourself.
Description: While looking at a potion in the bag, you accidentally look in Neela’s eyes, turning back to stone. Neela is devastated and becomes more increasingly desperate to find a cure. She finds what she things is a potion labeled “Stone Cure”, but is actually “Stone Curse”. Upon opening it, she turns to stone. You maintain your mental link, but she is never the same again.
ENDING 12: Home Again
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for the finale main branch 1. When you are freed from the intruder, choose to call for the gorgon. After the fight, choose to wait instead of getting the bag. Then, when asked what you’ll do, tell her you’re returning home.
Description: You return home, uncertain of how things will be after 3 years away, but Neela is happy that you’re free.
ENDING 13: Nothing’s Perfect
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for the finale main branch 1. When you are freed from the intruder, choose to call for the gorgon. After the fight, choose to wait instead of getting the bag. Then, when asked what you’ll do, tell her you’ll stay with her. Note that if you told her at the beginning of the game you had children, this ending will be unobtainable because she will insist you go home instead.
Description: You both live a happy life together in spite of not finding a cure. As you watch the sunrise with her, you are reminded that although there’s a lot of unresolved threads, at least you’re together.
ENDING 14: A New Journey Begins
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for the finale main branch 1. When you are freed from the intruder, choose to call for the gorgon. After the fight, choose to wait instead of getting the bag. Then, when asked what you’ll do, tell her you’ll go find a cure.
Description: You stay for a few days to gather supplies before saying good-bye and setting off to find a cure. You are unsure of how the journey will go, but hold out hope she’d get to leave her place once you find a cure.
ENDING 15: Die For Your Freedom
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for the finale main branch 1. When you are freed from the intruder, choose to fight the intruder. After you are fatally poisoned, choose to reassure Neela you are free instead of opening your eyes again.
Description: Neela respectfully repeats that you’re free and you die from the poison.
ENDING 16: The Good Life
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for the finale main branch 1. When you are freed from the intruder, choose to fight the intruder. After you are fatally poisoned, choose to open your eyes. After Neela figures out her tears saved you, choose to send somebody out to find a cure for your poison.
Description: Neela decides to send out the same Adventurer who brought the poison in the first place. Having been convinced of the gorgon’s good intentions by listening to your deathbed conversation, he agrees to help. In the coming weeks, she sets statues free. The adventurer returns and you are restored to normal. You all live happily ever after. This is indended as the true good ending of the story.
ENDING 17: Her Will
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for the finale main branch 1. When you are freed from the intruder, choose to fight the intruder. After you are fatally poisoned, choose to open your eyes. After Neela figures out her tears saved you, choose to find a statue with a potion bag.
Description: She restores a statue of a man with a potion bag and brings him to you. He betrays her and stabs her. She steals his bag and turns him to stone before dragging herself over to your body and giving you the poison antidote and restoring you to normal. You sit up and find her dead, her body resting on you.
Finale Main Branch 2
The rest of the endings spread out from three main branches that split off after you discuss the afterlife with Neela (or after she speaks to you one morning if her trust in you is very high).
The Second Route contains 3 endings. You are placed on this route if Neela’s self esteem is very low and you have discussed the cure, revealing she has thought about killing herself if it would save everyone. This scene can either occur right after discussing the afterlife or after discussing her sanity if her esteem drops further after the latter conversation, and can occur regardless of whether you agreed to watch out for intruders.
It would not surprise me if most people ended up on this branch since I somewhat intentionally made her trust in you and her self esteem inversely related much of the time. In other words, the better she feels about you, the worse she feels that you’re in this mess. With that being said, it’s not a one-to-one relationship so it’s possible to raise her trust and avoid this problem.
ENDING 18: Thanks for Everything
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for finale main branch 2. After she comes and cryptically thanks you, let her leave without questioning it enough.
Description: You never see her again and it dawns on you thanking you was her way of saying good-bye. You decide that she killed herself.
ENDING 19: All In Vain
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for finale main branch 2. After she comes and cryptically thanks you, question her until she reveals she’s planning on killing herself. Do a poor job of convincing herself not to do it (more on that in the next ending) and she’ll go through with it.
Description: She decides she must die and leaves. You never see her again, and decide she killed herself. Unfortunately, her dying wish did not come true and you remain a statue forever.
ENDING 20: Out of the Darkness
How to obtain: Meet the criteria for finale main branch 2. After she comes and cryptically thanks you, question her until she reveals she’s planning on killing herself. You must successfully talk her out of it by inserting enough doubt in her mind. You can do this by pointing out how she’ll have doomed you to a lifetime of loneliness if it doesn’t work, and by pointing out that the cure may require her to be alive and you need enough time to consider all options that do require her alive. There’s 4 main points which will insert doubt in her mind. Finding at least 3 of the 4 will guarantee she won’t go through with it. Finding 2 of the 4 will make her decision partially luck based, but the odds are greater that she doesn’t go through if her trust in you is higher.
Description: She breaks down and decides not to go through with it. As she embraces you crying, you both discover her tears are the cure. After a setback in which you almost turn back to stone, she regrets how close she came to ending it all, but you assure her everything will be ok.
Finale Main Branch 3
The final branch is seen if you do not convince Neela to move you to the main entrance to keep guard, and she either does not have low self-esteem or you haven’t discussed the cure. It contains the final two endings.
ENDING 21: Meta Madness
How to obtain: When Neela begins to question whether you’re real or a voice she made up in her head, insist she isn’t real and this is all just a game. Continue insisting and she will ask you to guess what word she’s thinking of. Enter the correct word (it is a made-up word. Fail the prompt and she will tell you what the word is, allowing you to use the back feature to try again).
Description: Having successfully read her mind, you inform her she exists solely for the reader’s entertainment and her life is meaningless. She tries to resist, but eventually goes mad, destroys your statue, and kills herself...except not really, because, as you’ve just explained to her, none of this is real. As an aside, for whatever reason, her insistence that she is “more than just words” probably hurt me more to write than anything else sad in the story. The only other thing that depressing to write was...
ENDING 22: Just a Statue
How to obtain: Fail to meet the criteria for any other ending.
Description: You both continue talking until your mind begins to fade. It fades in short bursts at first, terrifying Neela. Eventually, the problem becomes worse until you wake up after 40 years. After one last conversation, you and Neela say your good-byes, both of you realizing it’s likely you’ll never talk again and your mind fades into oblivion, making you a lifeless statue. This was actually not intended as the saddest ending (the one where you tell her you hate her was, hence why I called it Pitch Black), but it seems to be the one people have responded to the strongest, myself included. It’s probably because you both know that the end is near and there’s nothing either of you can do to stop it.
RIP My Tumblr
Escape (Unity Version) - Release 1.1
Release 1.1 Tumblr Post: stonelad.tumblr.com/post/16799…
Release 1.1 is out already. I tried to lower the difficulty a bit and added a new option to help some players who aren't as good at platforming to see more content.
64-bit: www.mediafire.com/file/em8w5ds…
32-bit: www.mediafire.com/file/e4br12j…
ORIGINAL POST:
Release 1.0 Tumblr Post: stonelad.tumblr.com/post/16796…
Escape is a 2D Plaformer focused mostly on the Inanimate Transformation fetish. This is the third iteration of this adventure, the previous two having been lost to outdated software and my own disinterest. However, I’ve rebuilt the game in a real engine this time, so hopefully everything works! Just download and extract the zip file and you should be able to start!
This release contains the first area of the game, the Stone Gallery. There’s 10 standard levels based on ideas seen in previous iterations of Escape, but now there’s also 2 more secret levels each containing their own new perils. These effectively replace the gallery pieces of the previous version since those were a major contributing factor to me dropping the game. Check the info screen from the main menu for details.
If you wish to find your save file, check the info screen for the file path. This save should carry over to the next version of the game so be careful with it.
There’s still a number of bugs and issues with this release (namely, I think it’s still a bit too hard), so let me know which ones you find and I’ll keep a running tally.
Mediafire Mirror: www.mediafire.com/file/63femdl…
Update 11/11/17: I've noticed this story has now been played over 500 times! Thank you for your support!
Update 9/10/17: I've created an endings guide for everybody trying to find each ending or is curious what else happens in the story. I recommend you only read it after completing the story.
philome.la/StoneLad91/still-li…
For those who don’t know, this is a story I've been working on for the past month or so about becoming a statue in a gorgon’s lair after failing to kill her…only she’s learned telepathy and starts talking to you. There are 22 endings of varying difficulty to achieve. As a warning, this is NOT a fetish story: things get pretty dark with potentially stress inducing topics including suicide, so don’t go into it expecting sexy fun times.
It has an autosave feature, but it requires cookies to be enabled.
I hope you enjoy it.
Endings Guide (spoilers, obviously):
Still Life Endings GuideNOTE 8/4/19: This is a repost of an endings guide for my Still Life CYOA I originally posted on Tumblr. Since Tumblr decided to block every post on that tumblr because it was marked NSFW and not allow me to unmark it as NSFW, I'm reposting it here.
First off, I’ve received a very positive response on my story so far, so thank you to everybody who has read it so far. I figured I’d make this endings guide for people wondering what endings they’ve missed. It will describe the ending as well as how to obtain it, so obviously there will be spoilers.
I high recommend not reading this until you’ve completed the story at least once.
ENDING 1: Speedrun Complete
How to obtain: Simply choose to run away during the first two scenes of the story.
Description: You run home, and the story effectively ends before it begins.
ENDING 2: It’s Not Her, It’s You
How to obtain: The decisions you make
Updated Contact Info
While I'm at it (and since I'm bored), remember you can ask me any question at stonelad.tumblr.com/ask (although people watching me strictly for quicksand purposes should probably ask at sinkingsandland.tumblr.com/ask).
Thank you, and sorry for the long drought without anything to show. I'm hoping to end that sometime soon!