Sigmund Minisode 2 is the second of the Sigmund Minisodes, which are spin-off adventure games developed and published by Freebird Games based on the characters of To the Moon. It was launched on February 18th, 2015 on Steam and GOG, for Windows, MacOS and Linux. It is a free downloadable content that is available alongside the purchase of the base game, together with the first minisode.
The events of the minisode occur during a winter holiday some time after the conclusion of Sigmund Minisode 1; however, it is not clearly indicated how much time has passed between them, or whether they precede Finding Paradise. It is hinted that the events of this minisode are a part of the memories of either Eva Rosalene or Neil Watts, the playable doctors in the series.
Plot[]
In the afternoon before Christmas, Eva Rosalene and Neil Watts are seen in the Sigmund office meeting room, waiting for the protesters surrounding the building to dissipate. (It was shown in Sigmund Minisode 1 that the company had a bad rep among the public.) Eva gives Neil a Christmas gift, which was a handheld audio recording device. She then tells him that she was going to her sister's for dinner.
Neil is about to tell her his own plans when two senior doctors, Willis and Taima McMillan, enter the room flirting with each other. They leave in embarrassment after noticing the two occupants. Eva then leaves the meeting room to retrieve her briefcase.
As soon as he is alone, Neil makes a phone call to someone. The person on the other end doesn’t recognize him. Neil seems unable to speak, however, and hangs up after a short while.
Meanwhile, Eva goes to her office, passing by other doctors who are also about to leave. She picks up her briefcase and takes the elevator down to the lobby. When she is about to leave the building, Neil emerges from the elevator and addresses her, saying that he was going to stay in the office. Eva then heads for the door, but she briefly stops to offer him something (possibly to come with her to dinner). She then decides not to, and leaves the office without a word.
In the company car, Eva calls her sister, Traci, and they talk about Neil's stay at the office. Traci tells her to invite him to dinner, but Eva refuses and starts driving. Just a moment after, however, she slams the brake. The screen pans out to reveal an apparition of a second Eva Rosalene in the middle of the road, who disappears in a flash. Eva then tells her sister she’ll be right there, almost as if nothing has happened, then drives off.
In his locked office, Neil is revealed to be working on a machine that looks similar to the machine used in the series to traverse the patient’s memories, albeit visibly lacking some features. He seems to have been working on it for some time. He dons machine’s helmet and jumpstarts it, but failed when the company’s power shut down.
After putting away the machine and locking his office, Neil goes downstairs to the basement via the elevator (which uses auxiliary power) to restart the electricity. Upon checking the power supply log to investigate the outage, he finds something wrong, and assumes it was a glitch. (Later, if Eva checks it, she would see that apparently it was Neil himself who did the shutdown.) He then hears the sound of footsteps coming from upstairs, and grabs a broom with him as a weapon before he goes back up to the lobby. He finds sets of white footprints in the lobby leading from outside to the elevator. Shortly after, the elevator comes down and opens. Neil swings his broom without checking who it is, and it turns out to be Eva.
The scene switches to the lounge, where Eva is tended to by Traci, who scolds Neil for his behavior. Her family also came, which includes her husband, Aaron, and their child, Jamie. Neil exits the lounge, and is greeted in the corridor by Roxanne Winters, who escorted Lily, Johnny’s caretaker in To the Moon, along with her two children, Sarah and Tommy, to the office. Neil doesn’t follow them to the lounge, though, and instead takes the elevator.
Later, Eva notices Neil was gone and goes out to look for him. She finds him just outside the lobby, where he is making a phone call to one of his parents, and like before, he seems unable to speak. When Eva attempts to ask him why he wasn’t talking to them, he quickly changes the subject and asks her why she came back to the office. He then tells her he’s going home to work on some things.
Eva yells at him, asking what’s wrong with him. She is devastated that although people care enough about him that they come to the office to have dinner with him, he still refuses to be with them. Eva tells him to give himself a break from being miserably alone for once. After telling him he could just do whatever he wanted to do, she returns to the building, closing the door behind her.
Neil pauses and looks back at the building, and the lobby door opens. The credits sequence begins, showing scenes of Neil joining the dinner party in the lounge and enjoying himself.
The post-credits scene shows Eva and Traci leaving the elevator. Eva starts to ask her sister if she can give her a ride because Neil needs to use the company car. The screen flickers into another scene, where Eva is seen presumably inside her own house, using what looks like the same machine Neil used in his office. The screen goes back to Eva’s question, and Traci lets her hitch along.
Trivia[]
- If the player doesn't interact with Eva's diary as Eva, Neil can later access it when he is alone in the office. It reads as follows:
- "Dear Diary,
- I can't believe how busy this season's been. They say that you get used to it, patient by patient. . . But it never stops taking a toll.
- It's gonna be nice when the days get warmer soon. I haven't even been eating enough vegetables lately; I miss my garden. I guess I'll have to endure a few more of these hectic months.
- Oh well, at least it takes my mind off this nagging feeling that someone's been following me.
- -EvaR"
- The dialogue boxes, which are normally colored brown except for calls and messages on a screen, become blue when Neil checks the power log, up to the moment the power gets restored.