My takeaway from the early episodes of Interloper was more along the lines of a "ghost in the machine" kind of story, with multiple parties at play that created an enigmatic system but apparently long-since abandoned it, and left it buried deep in the Source engine. It seems that ended up somehow morphing into "the Source engine remembers literally everything played inside of it who knows why or how lolkthxbye" which is possibly the most frustrating and wholly unsatisfying way to wrap things up. The series started relatively grounded, everything rather matter-of-fact, yet with a decently high level of mystique, but devolved into meandering, completely nonsensical over-produced artsy fart huffing. What really rubs me the wrong way is that the framework of Interloper was very simple: it's an investigation. At the end of an investigation, you at least expect the conclusion to be an explanation and summary of your discoveries. But no, absolutely none of that. What a waste.
I'd disagree some with this take. While I don't disagree that things clearly did change from an original vision, and a LOT of meandering was included because of this, many things did come together at the end like any story should. Even getting a clearer picture of what type 5 demos are, one of the main mysteries that sought an answer for. Interloper was a story that started out as purely investigating the technicalities of a strange feature, but then became a more narrative focused as Anomi went more in on the nostalgia theme, that so happened to surround a technical mystery. I fell like some of that theming was always intended as the whole "Anomi was hiding information this whole time" was hinted more than a few times. Narratively, Anomi started out with investigating a weird thing in source, but devolved into him trying to figure out what INTERLOPE could be rather than trying find out what it was, and I believe that this is in someways always intended. Which is why things got odd mid way through. If he just locked the fuck in, dropped all the artsy shit (which is canonical), and stuck to purely investigating what it was, we would have far more answers. But Anomi, much like Eida who is his parallel, wanted to bring back the good times. He thought if the right inputs were used, it would recreate his old friend\lover or whatever. And as a result, compromised the original mission. And it's not like he didn't try to get answers, but it was all in service to an ulterior motive and resulted in adding to the confusion. Never once did Anomi think to try and find out who FSKY is and I believe this is an intentional narrative choice due to his hidden motive. It can be seen as a cautionary tale of not letting nostalgia blind you and to create new memories. Otherwise you destroy your own past and make what is present murky. In the end, it's still just some weird technical thing that is designed for a specific purpose. And just like any program\AI, it has it limits and can only perform the things it is coded for. And Anomi, much like Eida, forgot this in an obsessed malaise that ultimately went nowhere.
The INTERLOPE mystery is more of a vehicle to tell a traditional story rather it being the main plot point. But if you look into things a bit more, you can start to piece together how INTERLOPE works. Hopefully in the sequel series, Wander\\Stuck, the more narrative driven aspect is tone way down and the actual investigation takes precedence. As it was made clear that FSKY, or its former devs, are still actively keeping the project alive as evident in the Tuesday manifest and that more can be discovered if an investigation is properly lead in the right direction.
One critique I have though is that the fucker never explained what Kulcs means.
