Game Development: Starting by Healing the Players
Chapter 36: The Truth Is About to Be Revealed
As the game continued to progress, Dong Zhen was already starting to feel a little uncomfortable.
But Doctors Neil and Eva were still working hard to fulfill Johnny's wish of becoming an astronaut and landing on the moon.
After all, in the real world, they had already signed the contract.
No matter what happened, they had to help Johnny achieve this dream.
Time continued to move backward, and this time they reached Johnny's high school years.
From Johnny himself, they learned why he liked River.
It was because Johnny thought that River was special.
Johnny came across as somewhat selfish here, so much so that even his best friend Nicholas criticized him for it.
The livestream chat was also filled with comments:
"I really feel sorry for River!"
"I'm suddenly starting to hate Johnny!"
"+1. What a selfish jerk!"
"But I feel like something isn't right. Maybe there's going to be another twist later?"
The viewers in Dong Zhen's livestream were discussing the situation among themselves.
But at this point, Dong Zhen's attention wasn't on the comments at all.
He had been completely drawn into the game's story.
Johnny certainly seemed extremely selfish during this part of the story, to the point where he was genuinely unpleasant.
But Dong Zhen couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong.
Admittedly, this explanation could account for why River kept folding paper rabbits.
But Dong Zhen still felt that something about it was forced.
What exactly was wrong?
Time continued moving backward, eventually reaching Johnny's childhood.
At home, Johnny was getting ready to leave for school, but his mother didn't call him Johnny.
She called him Joey.
Using a football as the medium, Eva and Neil once again advanced through his memories.
But what happened next was completely different.
Dong Zhen leaned slightly forward in front of his computer, his eyes widening.
The screen showed nothing but an expanse of white.
At the same time, within this memory, Neil and Eva could even smell the foul stench of a dead animal.
Beyond Johnny's next memory was nothingness.
This meant that part of Johnny's childhood memories had been damaged.
And within those destroyed memories, there seemed to be traces of the bloody stench of a dead animal.
Unable to move forward, Neil and Eva decided to follow the plan they had established earlier.
They would implant the dream of becoming an astronaut into Johnny's mind.
That way, through the special machine, Johnny would be able to spend the rest of his life pursuing that goal.
However, the player clearly wasn't happy with what Eva and Neil were doing.
"How the hell are his memories damaged? You still haven't figured out what happened during Johnny's childhood!"
"How can you just go ahead like this?"
Dong Zhen looked extremely displeased.
After all, compared with going to the moon, he was now far more interested in the secrets hidden behind everything that had happened.
And judging from what the game had shown so far, he had a feeling that all of the mysteries would finally be unraveled in Johnny's childhood.
But these two doctors were acting as if they were willing to do anything to achieve their goal, focusing only on the superficial solution!
Yet something unexpected happened again, completely catching the two doctors off guard.
No matter how Neil and Eva tried to guide Johnny or plant suggestions in his mind—
They added astronomy lessons to his elementary and middle school curriculum.
They even changed the movies Johnny went to see at the cinema into films about aviation and space travel.
Everything was designed to constantly suggest that Johnny should become an astronaut.
But none of it changed Johnny's subsequent memories.
In fact, Johnny remained completely uninterested in going to the moon.
Not only were the two doctors in the game completely dumbfounded, but the player was as well.
Johnny's subconscious seemed to contain absolutely no desire to go to the moon.
But if that was the case, why was his final wish before death to go to the moon?
What exactly was on the moon that attracted him so strongly?
Time was running out.
Johnny's body couldn't hold on much longer.
If they wanted to fulfill Johnny's final wish, then his damaged childhood memories might be the key.
Dr. Neil went to consult the company about why this situation had occurred.
Meanwhile, Dr. Eva analyzed why implanting memories into Johnny hadn't changed his desires.
If the machine itself hadn't malfunctioned, then clearly, going to the moon was only a secondary concern for Johnny.
There had to be some more important factor that had caused a fundamental change in Johnny's desires.
And River had played an important role throughout Johnny's life.
They had been together ever since high school.
But what exactly was the factor that caused Johnny's desires to change?
While Eva was pondering this question, Neil successfully obtained the answer on his end.
The reason Johnny's memories were missing was because he had taken a large amount of beta blockers when he was a child.
Propranolol, a type of beta blocker, was believed to prevent proteins in the brain from restoring memories in their original form.
In other words, Johnny's childhood memories were missing because he had taken a large amount of beta blockers during his childhood.
However, this didn't mean that the memories had been completely erased.
Rather, they had been hidden away and effectively ignored by his mind.
Therefore, if they wanted to continue exploring Johnny's childhood memories using the machine, they needed a medium.
At that moment, Dong Zhen suddenly realized something.
"Blood? The smell of a decomposing corpse? That's it! Didn't the doctor run over a squirrel at the very beginning? Could they use the squirrel's scent as the medium?"
Looking at the prompt in the game, Dong Zhen immediately understood.
It had all been planned from the beginning!
"So that's why! That squirrel was actually important from the very beginning!"
"You could say that squirrel died for a noble cause! It was destined to die! Let's thank this squirrel for making such an outstanding contribution."
As he spoke, Dong Zhen controlled his character toward the roadside and collected the squirrel's scent.
The livestream chat immediately began filling with comments.
"Squirrel: Well, thanks a freaking lot!"
"One of the most tragic characters in the game: the squirrel!"
But putting the jokes aside, most viewers, just like Dong Zhen, were eagerly anticipating and wondering what Johnny's childhood memories would actually reveal.
Amid the barrage of viewers urging him to hurry up, Dong Zhen used the scent as a medium and successfully entered the chaotic section of Johnny's memories.
It was an extremely disordered memory, with different points in time overlapping with one another.
As a result, there were numerous versions of young Johnny wandering around the streets.
Dong Zhen noticed one of them playing with a soccer ball.
This soccer ball was one of the mediums they had used earlier.
The two doctors searched all over the town, but found nothing.
At that moment, Johnny's mother finished talking to someone and prepared to start the car and leave.
But no one noticed that young Johnny, chasing after his soccer ball, had wandered behind the car.
The engine started.
Bang!
Young Johnny was struck by the car and knocked to the ground.
What was going on?
Had young Johnny been in a car accident?
Was this the reason his memories were missing?
But hadn't they said it was because he had taken too many beta blockers?
There were still some questions.
But just like the two doctors in the game, Dong Zhen also assumed that the child who had been hit was Johnny.
Then, in the very next moment, the real Johnny appeared.
And instantly, several of the earlier mysteries were explained!