YMMV / Crossing Souls

• Esoteric Happy Ending:
  • Sure, the entire world is saved, and Charlie lives to the old age and tells that whole story to her grandkids! And even though the other kids died, their souls are in the afterlife and they all reunited anyway! The only problem is that it makes no sense how Charlie rescued all the people linked to the Duat on her own. Perhaps Spielgman, his scientists and surviving soldiers repented and helped her do that instead of capturing her on their own. However, it's unclear if they would have done that, when dozens of people were clearly killed by the Duat, as Chris sees their skeletons before the final battle. Discovery would have meant prison or execution for all the surviving people on Oh Rus' side. Since we don't hear about this at all in the epilogue, they might covered it up somehow, but since the world doesn't appear particularly different, Spielgman and others clearly failed to account to much, whether in prison or not.
  • And of course, in the ending, old Charlie in effect intentionally committing suicide to get to the rest of her childhood friends faster is disturbing on its own. It implies that none of the people she knew and lived with in all the intervening years, including the father(s) of her children, were ever as valuable to her as those four kids. It might also imply that without that machine, she would have been reborn as an old woman ghost. Thus, all the people who lost their limbs, eyes, were immobile or comatose, or suffering from bed sores before their deaths might spend their eternity like this. Soon after, just imagining Charlie grandkids being told how she died right after they left her is disturbing. Their parents might lie to them about the cause of death, and she did say conciliatory words at the end, but still...
• Nightmare Fuel: Even though they later come back as ghosts, two of the child protagonists do get killed, and the game treats it completely seriously. The first time, the rest of the characters go to their friend's funeral, while in the second time, one of the characters is shot by a Sociopathic Soldier. What makes it worse is that he doesn't die immediately and that you have to play another whole area with his speed slowed down to a crawl and him clutching his chest from the wound. On top of that, the area itself involves block puzzles with heavy stone pillars, with the injured character being the only one strong enough to move them, which must be extremely painful in his own serious injured condition.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Spielgman's plan was really fascinating, if the means he settled for in order achieve it with Oh Rus were not. Thus, it's such a pity his entire idea of letting dead scientists works alongside the living ones is completely forgotten about the moment Oh Rus gets frustrated and starts fighting Chris, and Spielgman himself is never mentioned since.