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Headscratchers / The Witch's House

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As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.


  • If "Viola" was actually the witch the whole time, wouldn't she know her own house well enough to navigate through it easily, even with the puzzles set up?
    • Try navigating your own house when someone has rigged it with a billion death traps.
    • The house changes its configuration according to the controller's whims. With the Witch's body comes her magic, which Viola turns against Ellen.
    • If the player knows what they're doing, she does navigate through it easily.
  • According to the third pseudo-ending, Ellen gouged her own eyes out and sawed off her own legs "before Viola came to her house". I know Viola's a really nice person, but even then I find it hard to imagine she'd be willing to swap bodies with someone in such a state without even asking what the heck happened...
    • Good Is Dumb sometimes.
    • It was supposed to be for one day, which probably helped Viola decide to go through with it to give her "friend" a day of happiness.
    • I'm guessing Ellen found some way to hide her condition; maybe she covered her legs with a blanket and wore a hood or sunglasses, so that Viola wouldn't see what she'd done to herself.
      • Confirmed in the side-story, The Diary of Ellen. She covered her eyes with bandages and her legs with a blanket.
  • How does Viola chase Ellen out of the house when she can't see? As in, she both can't see where she's going, and can't see where Ellen's going.
    • Either really good hearing or using magic and/or the house itself to track her.
  • Seriously, how long is Ellen going to be able to fool Viola's father? She has some of Viola's memories, so she may be able to impersonate her for a time, but given that their personalities are polar opposites and Ellen can't seem to resist her cruel and violent nature, I doubt it would be long before Viola's father realized something was very wrong.
    • Somehow I ended up with the interpretation that the Witch's House was an allegory for puberty. Probably overthinking it though.
    • At the end of the day, probably not for very long (maybe not even until the end of the literal day). It's really Fridge Horror more than a Headscratcher, though. Viola seems to recognize that Ellen isn't going to be able to pull it off in the long run, which is part of the reason for her concern for her father. While Ellen is very old chronologically, she seems to be stuck mentally and emotionally as a very disturbed child. It's unlikely that she thought through the likely outcome of her actions. Even she apparently knows that she's eventually going to go back to her old lifestyle, since in the Pseudo-Third Ending she states that it's not so bad being powerless for a while. She's probably just going to end up doing that long before she intended when Viola's father realizes that what he brought back is an abomination.
  • Why the hell would Ellen go to the house wherein the only other person is both magical and has a grudge against her?! She's practically begging to be killed, for Christ's sake!
    • This one is actually explained in the True Ending: Ellen didn't consider the possibility that Viola, in the "witch" body, would be able to use Ellen's own magic against her. This means that the game starts mere minutes after the body switch, and Ellen goes into the house because (per the in-game item description) she knows about the "cute little bottle" that can destroy the roses blocking the exit path.
  • Diary of Ellen spoilers: the spell involved in switching Ellen and Viola's minds between bodies requires that both people have a "mutual bond of trust." How could the spell succeed if Ellen, someone who has spent hundreds of years selfishly murdering others in pursuit of her own goal of survival, have full trust in someone else to switch bodies with her? Even with Viola's trust in Ellen, Ellen doesn't seem to be the sort of character to trust anyone after her being constantly let down (in her eyes) towards people she opened up to. It's even worse given that Ellen is deliberately manipulating Viola to get what she wants, which is at odds of trusting Viola.
    • Well Ellen did trust Viola to give her her body. I think it primarily meant both being willing to make the trade.
    • Ellen trusts Viola because she trusts that Viola is "foolish" enough to trade bodies with her. It's the same sort of trust many abusers have that the people they abuse will never turn against them.

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