Fridge / Obsidian

• Two things about the Bureau Realm:
  • The Realm takes place in a cubical location, with different departments existing on the inside walls of the cube. Where did Max and Lilah's bureaucratic work take place? In a cubicle office.
  • How do you get to the Bureau Chief's office in the required non-conforming way than he intended? You break (or think) out of the box, both metaphorically and physically. Within the context of the gameplay, you temporarily leave the cube, physically shifting your re-entry location to a position that you control yourself. Then you think outside the box metaphorically, using the constraining structures of the Bureau to your advantage, in a way that was not intended, considering the way that the Bureau was built.
• The Crossover Chip puzzle involves setting up a sequence for the Spider to follow, which then modifies itself as it's moving (provided the first process is set correctly), and then it repeats until the crossover chip is filled. In other words, the entire puzzle represents self-modifying code, which is how true AI comes to be.
• If Lilah activates the crossover switch, by the time that happens, it'll be too late - except that Max wrote a bug that will crash Ceres if the switch is switched back again. So in the good ending, humanity is saved for the same reason Ceres attempted to destroy them: they're imperfect.
• The three sections of the Bismuth realm represent the Ceres AI's thought processes that led to it designing a new perfect world. But before Lilah can reach them, she has to solve an initial puzzle, consisting of putting frames of a video of a flying bird in order, which teacher the ornithopter to fly. In other words, before experiencing an AI's development, she has to provide training data.