Spoilers are unmarked as per policy!
The protagonist is a former soldier.
One of the tapes mentions Soldiers being trained to the point of "Seeing Targets in the mirror", the Protagonist has somewhat competent fire-arms skills and sees himself as a Target in the Mirror, they still blink when firing due to being out of practice after returning home.- I figured that the implication was that Receiver recruits trained hard enough that truly did see themselves as targets in the mirror, not that you're specifically a soldier yourself.
- Receivers probably don't wean away from their natural aversion to killing humans. This is the result of a different form of training (not to mention the Receiver compound featuring targets shaped like killdrones, yet none like people).
Shooting the tapes helps the Threat.
There's unused ending tape data, one of them contains a message from The Threat about how you helped them destroy humanity, and that you will be absorbed as a token of gratitude. If this is added in a future content update, it could be that shooting the tapes will result in Earn Your Bad Ending or Non-Standard Game Over. The Threat has the most noteworthy influence in Australia.
It just dreams animals instead of killdrones to kill people. The Metaverse of some sort is used to initiate the Mindkill.
The Mindkill is stated to work by severing the bond between what we regard as our minds and what we regard as our bodies. If enough people are indoctrinated into focusing their lives onto screens with depth perception, then they will neglect their bodies in Reality B due to being trapped in The Metaverse and regarding it as their only real life. The Desert Eagle is an intentional nod to its usefulness being exaggerated in other shooting games.
The Desert Eagle being overpowered in the game might seem out of place in a Gun Porn Decon-Recon Switch. But even the game is a piece of media, and this could have been done to further remind players so. This could also be a catalyst for funny moments within a dark game that has themes of mental illness and gun safety. Receivers being especially susceptible to the Threat is correlation, not causation.
The Threat is not able to deliberately target Receivers more than any other person, unlike what the Tape Receiver believes. Receivers are only in more danger of dying by suicide because:- The organization intentionally turns around the lives of once-suicidal people, which often takes great effort.
- Receivers frequently train with guns, which are extremely effective methods of claiming lives (namely the user's own).
