We Died At Sea, and Now We're Dead On Land. Let's Play Why Am I Dead at Sea and Why Am I Dead: Rebirth [Complete]

[Timrod]

Unlike Dead at Sea, Why Am I Dead: Rebirth starts with you as a ghost standing over its dead body. There’s no need to unlock people in this game - everyone is available from the start and there’s no total control vs. partial control mechanic.

The only thing we actually need to do here is take control of Cricket. No one in Dead: Rebirth has a special ability, and we actually kind of have to use Cricket for the vast majority of the game (minus a couple of the new endings). We could simply walk (or float) out of this room as well - there’s no rule about the ghost not being able to enter rooms straight away like there is in the sequel.

I apologize for the shifting screenshot sizes here, by the way. Unfortunately, I took most of the shots for the introduction to the game while running the flash in its own window, forgetting that the game has black borders on an all-black screen. The bald guy is Randy - he’s the hotel manager.

: “Didn’t think so. Not sure what you were trying to do coming in here.”

: “Don’t you think we should try and find out who did this?”

: “No.”

Quella, this guy isn’t. Actually, can we just bring Quella back? That’d probably be better.

: “That’s what cops do. And I’m not a cop.”

: “We already called 911. Leave it at that.”

: “But with the storm that’s going on, nobody will make it here for weeks.”

There are vague thunderstorm noises that play throughout the hotel (which is one of the reasons I didn’t just do a stream of this and call it a day) for pretty much the entire playthrough. There’s also this kind of annoying transition sound that I think the dev took from 24 or CSI or something that plays every time you enter a room.

: “So we wait 'til they do make it. He’s not going anywhere.”

I’m not going to bother going through every dialog option in this game like I did for Dead At Sea, mostly because it would make each update take probably five times longer. You can assume that I’m going with whichever dialog option is highlighted.

]

: “Beats the hell outta me. The boss had a way of pissing people off.”

: “Can’t imagine anyone pissed off enough to kill him, though.”

: “Now if you’re done playing detective, I’m gonna booze up.”

You know you have a drinking problem when you’ve resorted to the phrase “I’m gonna booze up.”

Now we’re in the entryway to the hotel. That bottom doorway leads outside, but it remains blocked for the entire game. What we need to do here is talk to Ted, the guy that looks like he’s trying really hard not to be Ferdinand.

Ted doesn’t have much of an answer to the first two questions: he just gives his name and says he didn’t know the hotel owner. The third question is what we need to ask him to make progress.

: “Well… sorta.”

: “Sorta?”

: “I may know the whereabouts of… some of the people here last night.”

: “But, well, it’s not stuff I could tell to just anybody… you know?”

: “Nothing against you, I just don’t know anything about you.”

: “Is there anything I could do to prove my good will?”

: “I mean, I’m sure you’re trying to do the right thing… just, given the circumstances and all, I’d need to really trust you.”

: “So here’s what you’d have to do. Give me your alibi.”

“Your honor, I could not have killed that man, as I was busy taking a dump. Believe me, you did not want to be there.”

: “Can anyone back that up? If not, it’s not really an alibi…”

: “Actually, there was somebody there. He could vouch for me.”

“Your honor, I can verify that man was taking a dump. I can also verify that it stank to high hell. I think he may have committed a war crime in that bathroom and I demand he be taken to the Hague to face prosecution.”

: “Any idea where I could find him?”

: “I don’t know. I guess I’d start with the bathroom.”

This is the game’s way of telling us to switch to Ted and go check out the bathroom.

This is the main hallway. The doors are completely unmarked - which is I think a big reason that every room in Dead at Sea had the name of the person occupying it just outside. The center door across from where we entered is the bathroom.

Meet “Pooper”. His name was changed from the first release of this game, where he bore the creative name of “Shitter”. I like to think he’s a copyright-friendly clone of Oscar the Grouch who lives in a toilet rather than a garbage can.

: “No worries. So, uh, how long have you been in there?”

: “…”

: “Okay, maybe that was the wrong kind of question. That came out pretty weird.”

: “Yeah, it did.”

: “I ask because there’s a guy who says he was here during the murder, and that you can back up his story.”

: “Oh, guy with the red hair? He was here.”

: “I was having a bit of a night-time emergency and he was using the bathroom at the time.”

: “Not sure what he was doing, but he was taking a long time and refusing to get out.”

: “Sort of like you, right now?”

: “Maybe we ate the same thing. When we were in the middle of switching ‘shifts’, as it were, there was a gunshot.”

: “I wasn’t in any position to go check it out at the time. Don’t know what the redhead did.”

Now that we’ve confirmed Cricket’s alibi for Ted, we can get him to narrow down our list of suspects.

Ted heard most of his information from Orval, and he was in Orval’s room when the murder happened.

Rose is also cleared, as she was in her room the entire night. Iblis (the little girl) was asleep the entire night. How Orval knew this… I don’t think any of us want to know.

The only people without an alibi are Randy (because his room is the one behind the counter), Morgan, and Lucille. Next time, we’ll investigate them and find out what their alibis are.

[Timrod]

So, one thing I’ll say about the flash game: it has a lot of points at which it expects you to do things that make no real sense to do and that you’re not even really given any hints about. I should also mention that there are (as far as I know) no comprehensive walkthroughs of this game anywhere.

The logical thing to do would be to possess Cricket and have him talk to the three people who don’t have alibis. Makes sense, right? Except… that won’t actually get us anywhere with Randy or Morgan. Instead, we need to possess Morgan’s daughter, Iblis, and have her talk to Randy. At no point are there any hints leading the player to do this: you’re basically just expected to brute-force it.

: “H-hi there! How’re you, little girl?”

: “Me? Oh yeah, I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.”

: “Just… you look exactly like my daughter did.”

: “She must look a lot older by now, I guess.”

So in case you haven’t played Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Randy is basically Dunning Smith from that game, right down to his motivations being exactly the same. In fact, there’s a LOT of stuff in this game outright lifted from Hotel Dusk.

: “No. Not for… three years now?”

: “Why not?”

: “Well… I did some bad things. Things I’m not proud of. And now I’m not allowed to see her.”

: “What if you apologized? Won’t she forgive you?”

: “Ha… it’s… it’s not like that. I can’t get back into the country. I’d be arrested.”

: “I made some big mistakes in my life, and ended up under the thumb of a complete scumbag.”

: “We had a deal, me and him. We had a deal. I could go back. I could see my daughter.”

: “But now he’s dead, and that deal is history.”

So yeah. For no reason whatsoever, Randy just told a little girl that he has incriminating evidence under his mattress. Makes total sense.

While we could look at the stuff under Randy’s mattress as Iblis (for some reason, Randy does not give a single fuck about people looking under there), we actually need to do it as Cricket to progress.

: “Underneath the mattress is an envelope. Inside are several letters. All of them are addressed from the owner of the hotel to Randy.”

: “While they talk about different things, they all mention some kind of deal between the two. There are also several veiled threats aimed at Randy.”

So yeah, now you know more or less where Marcurio came from. Next, we need to confront Randy as Cricket.

: “The owner was blackmailing you, wasn’t he?”

: “…I guess there’s no point lying about if you’ve already seen the letters.”

: “Yeah, we had some screwed-up arrangement.”

: “I worked at the hotel and did errands for him. It felt like being a house servant…”

: “In return, he promised I’d be able to see my daughter again.”

: “Moving things around. Transporting people. That kind of stuff.”

: “Nothing illegal, but it still left me feeling uneasy. I was never told why I was doing these things. He was hiding stuff from me, but I never cared to figure it out.”

As we leave, Randy gives us the hint to go talk to Morgan. However, it’s not quite that simple.

What we actually need to do is possess Rose, the evil old woman who literally exists solely to get Morgan to talk to Cricket. The entire exchange between them doesn’t make a whole lot of sense - Rose just knows somehow that Morgan was sleeping with the hotel owner.

So yeah, in another fit of complete nonsense, Morgan just kind of tells this evil old lady who walked into her room and starts talking about her sex life right in front of her daughter that she’s hidden incriminating paperwork in her dresser. Dead At Sea, this game is not.

Now we can bring Cricket in and have him just search Morgan’s dresser while she’s in the room. Makes about as much sense as anything else in the flash game. Just as an aside, the dev himself has admitted that this game was basically a trial run for Dead at Sea, so there wasn’t a ton of effort put into it.

: “Inside are assorted clothes, makeup, and cigarettes. Also, some very risque lingerie!”

: “…Underneath the lingerie is a giant brown envelope with the word “CONFIDENTIAL” written on it.”

: “Inside the envelope are a bunch of files belonging to the owner of the hotel. They have to do with the hotel’s finances.”

We then have to confront Morgan about the file. The conversation is mostly stuff we already know - she suspects the hotel of being a front for something but doesn’t have any idea what. At this point, the game’s four endings start to branch off. Next time, we’ll talk to Lucille and achieve the first ending.

[Ferrovore]

This game looks kind of frustrating, especially compared to the flawed-but-much-better Dead at Sea, but for being more or less a proof of concept/tech demo it’s got a surprising amount of work put into it! Has the creator done any other games?

[Timrod]

The only games the dev has made are Dead: Rebirth, Dead at Sea, and some game called “Mandate” that looks like a Nobunaga’s Ambition clone. You can see all of the dev’s games on his website, which is linked in the first post. It looks like his most recent work is a game called “About-Face” that he finished last summer. You can find it here: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/676121?id=676121 though it’s kind of a shitty VVVVVV/Eversion clone.

[Timrod]

Now that we’ve uncovered all of the evidence, it’s time to get the original bad ending. Dead: Rebirth has a total of four unique endings: two that were in the original version and two more that were added in the remake.

To get this ending, all we have to do is talk to Lucille as Cricket after finding the evidence in Randy and Morgan’s rooms. As soon as we do that, we’re locked into the bad ending.

: “I…I see…”

: “It must have been somebody else…”

: “And Morgan was in the middle of investigating the owner’s finances. His death only disrupted her search, so she didn’t have a motive either.”

: “…”

: “That leaves one person as the killer. You.”

: “Meet me in the owner’s room. The scene of the crime.”

At this point, Lucille just kind of teleports away into the murder room. I forgot to mention it earlier, but Dead: Rebirth doesn’t have the feature Dead at Sea does where NPCs will wander around when not possessed.

Interestingly, while you can’t possess Lucille anymore, you can still possess anyone else in the hotel and bring them in here. Lucille won’t react to them.

: “Then you’re in luck. Tell me, what do you know about this hotel?”

: “…Wrong.”

: “The owner was a criminal, yes. But the hotel was not a front. The hotel was the stage of the crime.”

: “What do you mean?”

: “It suffices to say that the remote location of this hotel was by design, not by accident.”

: “Away from society, Away from the law.”

: “And that was why you killed him?”

: “No, not exactly. Sadly, Morgan was not the only person whose investigation was ended prematurely.”

: “I had been careless, and he discovered me in my search for evidence against him.”

: “In that moment, it was me or him. I chose myself.”

: “And a badge and a license to kill to go along with it.”

What isn’t explicitly clear here until about a minute from now is that Lucille does not have her gun with her. She was apparently trained by the same people who taught Donovan not to carry a gun when investigating secret rooms in a crime scene.

: “You’re a cop? You were sent here to investigate this hotel?”

: “No, I came here on the trail of a known serial killer.”

So one thing I want to mention here. There’s a popular fan theory that Ted and Ferdinand are the same person. The game never actually addresses the whole serial killer thing, but in my opinion, Ted and Ferdinand are two different people.

: “However, when I grew suspicious of the owner, I realized he was more… deserving of my attention.”

: “I’m… not sure how to react.”

: “Act as if nothing has changed. If my cover is blown, all of my work could be reversed.”

So yeah, Cricket is actually evil and there were zero clues to it. I think what the dev was going for is the part in Heavy Rain where you learn you’ve actually been playing as the origami killer the entire time, only Heavy Rain didn’t have the writing to make that work either.

: “What are you doing?!”

The real question I have about Dead: Rebirth as a game is why the ghost even needed to be a thing. The ghost has no real agency, and really the plot is the same whether or not the ghost is present as a character. This is one thing I’m really glad they fixed in Dead at Sea.

And with that, we’ve achieved the first ending to Dead: Rebirth. The original game (as far as I know) had one more ending, which is the one that is canon to Dead at Sea. Next time, we’ll make sure Lucille has her gun before she talks to Cricket.

[Timrod]

So, welcome to the canon ending route. You would think that making Lucille grab her gun would be an easy task… and you’d actually be wrong. First, we need to have done everything up to the point where we’d get the bad ending - finding the hidden stuff in Randy and Morgan’s room and then confronting them with Cricket. The good ending requires even more nonsense that isn’t even really hinted at.

First, we have to talk to Cricket as Lucille - not the other way around, as that would give us the bad ending. This results in a conversation tree that is remarkably identical to the one Cricket had with Ted in the beginning of the game. He won’t confirm anyone’s alibi… but he will confirm where he got them from. Which, again, is something we already know.

The only new bit of information to come from this is that Ted got all of his information from Orval. We haven’t actually talked to Orval for any reason and this is the only time we’ll be doing so.

Orval is basically the equivalent to the clown from that one case in Phoenix Wright 2 - he’s very elusive about giving Lucille any actual answers to her questions. Fortunately his dialogue trees are relatively short, but it’s still annoying if you’re trying to pick the right answer.

: “Sorry! Doesn’t ring any bells!”

Only the last one will get us anywhere. Picking the third option will get Orval to deny he even knows what a lounge is.

: “No way!! He really said that?! Best friends?!”

: “And by that I mean… who’s Ted? Sorry. Doesn’t ring any bells!”

: “So you do know Ted. You just said so. Stop wasting my time!”

: “Woah! Woah! Woah! Let’s just calm down. Okay, so, I talked to Ted. A little bit. We’re sorta buddies.”

Now I see why Donovan likes her so much. Orval kind of stumbles around for a bit, and then…

: “I mean, Ted kinda told me to do some research for him. Keep an eye out on the other guests. And report back to him.”

: “Y’know, nothing weird.”

So now, we’ve confirmed that Orval is Ted’s source. There’s also this little tidbit he gives us:

Basically, Orval and Ted are Ferdinand split into two characters. I think the dev was going for the exact same thing he wound up doing with Dead at Sea, where Cricket and the hotel owner have their own thing going on until the serial killer shows up and demands to work with them.

Anyway, this next part is… probably the dumbest thing we’re going to wind up doing on this route. Remember how when we set things up for the bad ending, we found the documents in Morgan’s dresser that outright stated she was investigating the hotel owner and then interrogated her with Cricket?

Now, we have to do the opposite and interrogate Cricket with Morgan. The reason for this is that the final two endings are heavily based around Morgan and Randy, and this is also a requirement for those endings.

: “Well, actually, I was supposed to meet with someone at the hotel. He wasn’t here, though, and anyway this mystery takes precedent.”

That’s all we actually needed to hear. Now we get to interrogate Morgan with Lucille again, giving us largely the same information she just told Cricket. This is one of those things that I’m really glad the dev/writer fixed with Dead at Sea.

Similarly, we then need to interrogate Randy, who gives us the same information for the… fourth time now? I’m starting to think that… maybe… just maybe… Cricket was planning on meeting someone at the hotel! But who? It’s not like most people who’ve played this far wouldn’t already know the answer!

Once we do, Lucille has a moment very much like the one Gwen has after her final conversation with Ferdinand in the sequel.

: “It’s most likely that they were, in fact, going to meet each other.”

: “They must have had some prior relationship. Maybe even partnership.”

: “It seems like Ted is feeding information to the owner’s partner.”

You know, I bet if Lucille was in Dead at Sea, she would have popped Garv multiple times before he could even reach for his gun. Hell, I bet Lucille could’ve saved the captain.

That last item is something that was added to this version of the game. It’s used for the final ending. Instead, we’re now going to progress just like we did for the first ending: having Cricket talk to Lucille and meet her at the crime scene.

This time, Cricket pulls his gun… and is promptly shot in the hand by Lucille.

: “You… you knew?!”

: “That you and the owner were working together? Yeah.”

: “I thought it was suspicious that Ted, of all people, was giving you information.”

She’s even got a sick burn just for this situation.

: “What are you talking about?”

: “Once I realized the owner still had a business partner kicking around the hotel, I knew I wasn’t finshed.”

: “But when I knew Ted was working with him, I figured it was only a matter of time until they made their move.”

: “All I had to do was be ready and wait. And I was right, because you delivered yourself right to me.”

: “But arresting you will have to do.”

: “Oh, you will definitely tell me everything you know. But I’m still arresting you.”

Somewhere, in whatever wastebasket Activision tossed him in once they acquired Sierra in the early 2000s, Sonny Bonds looks up with a smile knowing proper police procedure is being observed.

: “This is the end for you.”

And that’s the second ending. Next time, we’ll finish the final ending of Dead: Rebirth!

[Timrod]

This is it. The final update for Dead: Rebirth… and a second giant ripoff of Hotel Dusk. This ending, along with a second bad one that I’m not going to cover for reasons you’ll understand shortly, was added in the Rebirth re-release.

The requirements for getting it are convoluted to say the least. First, we have to go through the game up to the point where Ending 2 happens - Lucille has to have her briefcase opened.

What we actually have to do is talk to Randy as Rose, and confirm that Morgan is investigating the hotel’s owner. From here until we reach the actual ending, I’m going to be abbreviating a lot. There are two reasons for this: one is that a lot of this is stuff we already know from one of the other endings. The second is that the dialogue related to the new endings is REALLY poorly programmed, particularly in one spot coming up.

This is the first real hint on how to get this ending: we need to make Randy and Morgan team up. This is among the most convoluted and poorly designed things in this entire flash game. If we were to talk to Morgan while controlling Randy, we’d get nowhere. Instead, we have to talk to Randy while controlling Morgan.

So here’s where the coding starts falling apart. The option we actually need to make Morgan work with Randy is exactly none of the ones you see here. It’s actually a fourth branch that comes after you ask the other two questions. We already know the answer to question one: it’s because the owner was blackmailing Randy with his daughter in a blatant Hotel Dusk ripoff.

: “Apart from his general nature and the fact that he was extorting me?”

: “Well, he would give me strange odd jobs all the time. Nothing illegal… but suspicious.”

If you’re thinking “Hey this sounds exactly like Marcurio when he was telling Quella his theory about there being an animal hidden somewhere on the ship” you’re EXACTLY RIGHT. Keep in mind that the Rebirth version came out after Dead at Sea did. I’m actually pretty sure this entire dialog tree is just Marcurio’s with the names changed.

: “The weird thing was they seemed to have no connection to the hotel. Maybe I’d fix something he gave me, or maybe I’d go out and buy something and bring it to the hotel.”

: “But then… I’d never see it again. Like. I’d buy blankets, but never see them used for the tenant’s beds.”

If you’re thinking “Gee, this sure sounds exactly like Marcurio’s testimony at the end of Dead at Sea when he reveals how Garv is a human trafficker” YOU’RE EXACTLY RIGHT! This ending is exactly as ham-fisted as you’re thinking it is. Actually, even more so.

I would point out the obvious parallels to Dead at Sea here, but you’ve probably already got the idea. The dickish part here is that this third question has two nearly identical branches. Both of these need to be explored AFTER asking the other two questions to proceed. If you asked both of them beforehand, you’ll need to do it again.

Anyway, we do all that, and then Randy re-caps everything we just read not even seconds ago… before going into a twist I’m sure absolutely none of you will see coming. Ready?

Yes, they just went there. From this point on, Randy and Morgan function as one person when possessed.

… However, there’s one more person we need to get to join them - Lucille. This is what differentiates the final “golden ending” from the second bad ending. Now, you might ask me: “Well, couldn’t we just have Lucille come over and ask Morgan what she’s doing, since Lucille already knows that Morgan is investigating the hotel?”

Oh no, my friend. The answer is something FAR more stupid. One thing you might have noticed in Dead at Sea is that little “…” icon near people’s heads. This is an indicator that they have a dialogue option we haven’t explored yet. If, for some reason, you possess Iblis while in Morgan’s room, you’ll notice that the doll in the corner has a speech bubble above it.

While Randy and Morgan stand in the middle of the room posing for a family photo, we’re going to possess the doll and use it to talk to Iblis.

Now we need to have a five year old girl convince an FBI agent to go along with a plan to find a hidden room in the hotel that may or may not even exist.

That was surprisingly easy.

A few minutes of repeat conversation later, Lucille joins Randy and Morgan on their quest to find the hidden room. Now, you might ask how we’re supposed to find this hidden room that we’ve been given absolutely no clues to other than that it might possibly exist.

The answer is that the other mirror in the owner’s room has the switch behind it. There is zero indication that this is the case if you examine this mirror at any point before right now.

Welcome to the hidden basement. There’s one thing about this basement that will be extremely familiar if you’ve played through Hotel Dusk - namely that it has an airtight seal to the outside that has never been mentioned before now and will make absolutely no sense in a minute.

: “Look at that thing… talk about ominous.”

: “I can’t believe a place like this was under the hotel the whole damn time.”

: “…it won’t open. It looks like there’s a giant lock on the door that needs a key. Do you know anything about that, Randy?”

: “I don’t know. I have a few hotel keys with me I could try out…”

: “…”

:"…"

So, if we hadn’t gotten Lucille to come along, the game ends right here with Randy realizing that the door going back into the hotel is sealed… and airtight. This is a blatant ripoff of Hotel Dusk, which had the exact same gimmick only with a stupid substitution cypher that had no reason to exist.

Yes. You read that right. Lucille is so hyper-competent that she actually has the key to a door she didn’t even know existed until mere seconds ago.

And there you have it. The final ending to Dead: Rebirth is copy-pasted straight from Dead at Sea, right down to the assets. Now, I want you to think about something. This room is completely sealed off from the rest of the hotel. How are these people still alive if Randy and Morgan run out of air about two seconds after the outer door gets closed?

: “I was thinkin’ we’d find a drug stockpile. What is this?”

: “Randy, don’t you get it? These people are… are…”

So now you would think that it would make a lot of sense for, say, Garv to show up. Or for there to be any kind of connection to Dead at Sea other than the copy-pasted ending.

Nope! Instead, Cricket shows up and gives a monologue about evil hiding in plain sight.

Lucille pulls her gun and demands that Cricket talk, since the rest of this is basically the second ending just in a different location.

Cricket gives his usual A Few Good Men speech, and then pulls his gun.

: “The people that were found in that horrible black room were moved to shelters where they could slowly come back to good health.”

: “it seemed like things had been resolved.”

: “But I still had questions. How many more places were out there like this one? How many people like Cricket were out there?”

: “How did a place like this escape our attention for so long? Am I the first to discover it?”

: “And was my mission that led me here a coincedence? Or was there a deeper meaning to it all?”

And there we have it. All four endings of Dead: Rebirth completed. I honestly did not like this game anywhere near as much as I like Dead at Sea, but I still think it’s worth looking at to see how the dev actually learned lessons from this and applied them to the sequel. Thanks for sticking with me for these past four months.

[Timrod]

@moderators I’m finally done… at sea. Put this one in completed.