Headscratchers / The Evil Within 2

Superficial Wound

• Since when is being shot in the abdomen with a .45 ACP round superficial?
  • When the person in question is wearing full ammunition pouches in a bandolier across her abdomen. I figured one of her spare mags took the hit, so she was bleeding badly but didn't take the full gut shot.
    • Watch the scene again, the blood stain on her shirt is centered in the middle of her abdomen, in between the magazine pouches, there was nothing stopping the bullet apart from her shirt.
    • Whatever, man, it's about as close to an answer as you're going to get. She's got something strapped to her stomach that could've partially deflected the round and let her walk away with a painful and bloody but not fatal wound. The only other option for a possible explanation is to wave both hands in the air, say "That's our STEM!" and play a slide whistle.
    • She used Green gel to up her health, so the bullet only penetrated a little bit in, with the fight with the Lost being the reason it got worse and bled everywhere. Heck, her shirt might've been 'programmed' to be bullet-resistant.
    • Occam's Razor explanation: It wasn't superficial, and Hoffman is lying so Sebastian won't beat himself up over a mistake he can't unmake. There are no other serious injuries apparent on her body, and the area surrounding the gunshot wound is positively saturated in blood, suggesting that she ultimately bled to death.
  • Maybe the bullet was through and through, missing major blood vessels (hence why she was able to defend herself and drag Sebastian around) however ultimately had she didn't fight off a horde reduced to basic melee weapon - she might've lived. Until the purge anyway.

Infiltrating Mobius

• So Myra was allowed into Mobius why exactly? They decided to let into the fold a woman whose daughter they kidnapped for use in their illegal experiments? They really thought she agreed with their goals and Lily's use in achieving them and wasn't just doing this to get Lily back and take revenge against them? What contribution did she make to the organization that made it worth the risk?
  • They likely approached her the same way they approached Sebastian and told her that Lily was alive. Kidnapping or not, Lily was still separated from her parents, and being with her mother again likely helped keep her calm and happy during the STEM experiments. Mobius also had eyes and ears everywhere, so even if Myra tried to escape with Lily, they wouldn't have gotten far.
    • I think They didn't "approached" her. If we take her obsession at face value - Myra found MOБIUS. And since Lily likely was uncooperative (what happens if you force a child to imagine a wonderland? Probably Silent Hill) they made Myra into a member to keep her from interfering. A perfect leash for both parent and a child, that and a kill switch.

Kidman at the end

• Other than through video game and plot logic, why did Kidman think she could possibly get through several guards with just her handgun that she apparently had her desk custom built to have a secret compartment for? Was the order to kill Sebastian so unexpected that her only plan was to have a one-sided shoot out? Presumably, she was ordered into the STEM because she showed some ability before, so is she just that badass in real life?
  • Given that the cutscenes show her one-shotting guards left and right, probably. She did only have to fight through a handful of guards before she could lock herself in, and, given the lack of head protection for the guards combined with her assembly line head-shots, a fairly safe gamble. It did seem rather off-the-cuff though, given dialogue. The original plan was likely to have Myra deal with Mobius before it got that close to the line, or she thought the Administrator might want Sebastian alive to replace Myra as the calming influence for the Core. Theodore might also have been supposed to arrange for additional help or people inside the medical team, or for Torres to exit first and take out the medical team. The desk-gun was probably more of a general back-up if she got discovered, not Plan A. Honestly, this was probably around Plan Y by then. With Plan Z being updating Stem to Windows 10.
  • She could have offered Sebastian as a replacement for Myra to try and stall for a little more time. Worded well enough, the Administrator might have even bought it. There was still some wiggle room left for Kidman to diffuse that moment without blowing cover, albeit not much.

Why is Sebastian surprised by what he sees?

• This is his second time in a STEM, and this time, he knows he's entered one and is fully conscious of the nature of the place. So why is he uttering "what is this?" "what the fuck is that?" How?" and so on?
  • In his last foray into STEM, it was said all the problems were due to the Core (Ruvik). Being he knows the Core is his daughter, he's probably confused more on how it could be a product of her psyche. It's also been years, with plenty of therapy to convince himself he imagined it all and drinking to numb the mind, so that and the adaptation shock probably contributed a bit as well, especially with most of his first encounters being with Stefano's weirdness. He might've also repressed most of Beacon, and had to get re-used to reality shifting at will. He does get over it fairly quickly.
  • He could've also been going into it all giving Mobius more credit than they deserved, thinking they'd fixed the 'bugs' from Stem 1.0.

Crossbow Aiming

• How exactly does Sebastian aim his crossbow when the limbs block his line of sight? Is the blue line that shows the bolts trajectory part of a Diegetic Interface?
  • It might be just part of STEM or a weird laser sight. Since it's Mobius weaponry, they might have 'programmed' that part into the STEM to make its use easier.

Lily's Age

• Or lack thereof, more so. Is there a reason given for why she looks the same age as when the fire happened? Such as the Stem inhibiting aging or something?
  • The last time Sebastian saw Lily was six years ago, and that's how he remembers her looking before the fire. A Form You Are Comfortable With was likely in effect here, with STEM using Sebastian's memory of Lily to project that to him. When she's removed from the system at the end of the game, she's noticeably older, and everyone else likely saw her as her older self within STEM.

Why not kill people outside of STEM?

• Perhaps this was explained somewhere else and I just missed it, but—why not kill people who are causing problems for the STEM system by killing them in the real world the moment they present themselves? In the first game, one couldn't just kill Ruvik as he himself was the Core, so you couldn't really remove him without rebuilding the entire STEM (it's also suggested he's sort of haunting it like a ghost, unless I'm misunderstanding). People like Stefano, on the other hand, are just residents of the STEM who have just hijacked the Core's powers somehow. The subversive team has no reason to hide his actions from Mobius' surveillance like it can be assumed Kidman is doing for people like Myra and Theodore (before he was discovered to be evil anyway). What's stopping them from just going to his prone and helpless body and killing him outright?
  • One theory is that STEM uses actual Brain Uploading and leaves the body a vegetable, so terminating his vitals wouldn't stop his consciousness from wreaking havoc inside the system (assuming they even kept the bodies around at all; the one chamber we see is empty apart from the plugged-in search team). When they try to dispose of Sebastian, they planned to wait until he was disconnected from STEM and occupying his physical brain again to give him a lethal injection, lending some credence to the theory. By all indications given in-game, Mobius didn't intend for any Union residents to be temporary, and had no plan B for dealing with Stefano and Theodore because they didn't count on two psychopaths getting through their screening process (remember, Mobius was thought up by the same guy who gave us the famously Stupid Evil Umbrella Corporation).
• Although, this does raise another interesting question: There is an area set aside for corpse disposal inside The Marrow. This would perfectly explain what happens to the bodies of STEM subjects, except that The Marrow isn't a physical location. So what, exactly, is that disposal center there for?
  • Among other issues, Mobius suffers a severe lack of imagination. They could have made the Marrow literally anything, and they chose... dingy gray concrete bunker. The fact they don't need corpse disposal when the corpses aren't real probably never occurred to them.
  • Except it's not so much corpse removal as it is psyche removal. Each body represents someone who died in STEM. it's what's left of their consciousness. Dumping them down the pit is probably a physical representation of putting them into the deep system to keep them from "haunting" STEM like the haunted and lost. Think of it as the Recycling Bin found on Windows Desktop.