Singularity/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Fridge Brilliance

  • Okay, so having an E99-armed Soviet Union curbstomp the world in the 1960s without anyone coming up with any deterrents is implausible, right? It seems like it...until you realize that not only is the USSR's new power coming from a line of research that no one else in the 1950s has imagined, let alone done basic theoretical work in, but said research has literally given the Soviet Union time machines. If a defector steals some samples or someone at Los Alamos starts making independent discoveries, Moscow can just send someone back in time to kill them before they've done any damage. And they can do this as many times as they want.
    • Hey, why is the pathfinding function made out of footprints? They're yours.
    • The explosion at the Singularity that wrecked the island and spread E99 radiation everywhere is your fault. It's the E99 bomb you set off; You Already Changed the Past and Demichev just rebuilt the generator afterward.
      • To clarify: in the unaltered timeline, the Barisov reactor was never finished, and the island was devastated by an experiment gone wrong as a result of political pressure to produce some sort of result, after which the Politburo shut down the research program on the island. When you save Demichev, he lives to change their minds, allowing the Singularity to be built. Then you blow it up, causing the mutations and everything else. Supposedly, the ghost-imprints and the time waves that crash your helicopter and bring you to 1955 for the first time are either natural on the E99-addled island, or a result of the original experiment.
    • Why does the description for the futuristic-looking assault rifle say it's built in the USSR? Because you changed history, and now the USSR rules the entire world in 2010!
      • Additionally, the Valkyrie is very clearly modeled on the AK-47, which not only parallels how Russian rifles have evolved in reality, but explains why you can find ammo for it in 1955.
    • Why do the Phase Ticks, when mutated and inflated with the TMD's de-aging function, begin to attack their own kin? Why, it's the same with humans: Reverts are universally aggressive toward all humans as well.
    • Here's something that will only become apparent upon multiple playthroughs: Those hidden messages scrawled in E99 dust that you reveal with the TMD? On a replay, the ones you have uncovered will remain uncovered, and any you haven't yet found will remain obscured. The messages are written by yourself from the future, who has repeatedly gone back in time to try to fix things. And you've started the game over. Congratulations, you, the player, are now complicit in creating your own time loop!
      • Furthermore the hidden messages are both conflicting and suggestive of madness. Some of them have tick marks as if it were counting something, and one specifically writes "the many deaths me". What if what happens when the player dies is the same thing that happens to Renko himself. He's trying various ways to fix the timeline and keeps dying over and over in the process, but every time he dies his vision just fades to white and he wakes a few minutes earlier and tries again. The messages conflict because they're written in different iterations of the time loop, and Renko is desperately trying to overturn his previous failed attempts to chance history. Hence messages that say the opposite of previous messages and finally one that cries "Don't trust me!"
    • This troper had a moment of boredom near the end of the game. Specifically, immediately after putting one between Demechev's eyebrows, and figure he could just take potshots at the good professor. Then he fell over, dead. Did not see that coming.

Fridge Horror

  • The island is called "Katorga 12." The "Katorga" was a system of penal colonies. How many of the people working on the island were actually volunteers?
    • It was a penal colony during the '40s, when they were mining for Uranium (a job usually delegated first and foremost to those people you wouldn't miss). When they found E-99 and set up the facilities, it's pretty clear that everyone was enthusiastic with the project, and their families were there as well.
    • On a vastly more massive scale, imagine the effects an all-powerful Soviet Union has on the world.
  • It's revealed at the end that all the faded notes written on the walls were written by you. And every single one of them is true. You're pretty much stuck in a hellish cycle of death and destruction on Katorga-12 till the end of time.
  • Why is the Russian spoken by enemy soldiers so painfully bad at times? Because it's Soviet Union! A multilanugaged country with obligatory Russian in schools, yet not known for teaching languages well. They may be Baltic.