Remothered: Tormented Fathers

An old woman named Madame Svenska meets a young man named Mr. Manni, who she begins recounting an old story to him so that it will not be forgotten.

In the year 1992, a mysterious woman named Rosemary Reed heads to the villa of Dr. Richard Felton, a retired notary, to discuss how to treat the mysterious and incurable illness he suffers from. During the interview, it is revealed that Felton's adopted daughter, Celeste, ran away from home 21 years prior and his now deceased former business partner, Professor Albert Elias Wyman, was the prime suspect for her disappearance. However, it is quickly revealed that Reed only used the medical interview as a pretext to find out the truth behind Celeste's disappearance. Angered, Felton orders Reed to leave the villa.

Later that night, Reed sneaks back into the villa to find Felton's wife, Arianna Gallo, who might have the answers she seeks. However, upon reaching Arianna's bedroom, Reed only finds a decomposed corpse. Alarmed at the discovery, Reed begins scouring the villa for more clues while a psychotic Felton stalks the halls. Eventually, Reed finds out from a recorded hypnosis session and from Felton himself that Celeste had actually returned home after her disappearance. However, Felton in his madness came to believe Celeste was a different girl named Jennifer and murdered her. A mysterious masked red nun then appears in the villa, chasing both Reed and Felton. Reed heads up into the attic, where's she's attacked by a young woman before falling unconscious.

As Reed regains consciousness, the woman apologizes for attacking her and tells her about a hidden room Felton sealed away. Reed finds and opens the sealed room, discovering that it is Celeste's bedroom. A tape recorder reveals that after Celeste returned home, she was imprisoned inside the villa with Arianna and subjected to forced hypnosis sessions which began to gradually destroy her memories. Celeste then decided to escape. Reed follows Celeste's escape path but falls into the sewers beneath the villa. Upon returning to the mansion, Reed discovers Felton's birth certificate, listing his name as Jennifer Richardine Felton. Reed realizes that Felton was born as a girl but raised as a boy and given testosterone treatments by her cruel father. This created the split Richard and Jennifer personas, and the young woman Reed encountered was Felton in her Jennifer persona.

Reed then encounters Felton's nurse, Gloria Ashmann, and warns her about Felton's madness. Gloria is shocked that Felton murdered Arianna, and confirms all of the revelations of Celeste and Felton's past. However, Gloria drugs Reed, revealing herself as the red nun. Reed attempts to escape but is captured by Felton. When Reed wakes up, Gloria reveals that she had been experimenting on Felton for revenge and manipulated him into murdering Arianna, but Celeste was able to escape. Gloria then orders Felton to kill Reed in a murder-suicide. Reed is able to escape and kill Felton by setting him on fire, as the latter drenched himself with kerosene. Reed then heads to the attic to find an escape route, and tricks Gloria into falling out of a window.

Reed approaches the mortally wounded Gloria, who reveals that she, Felton, and her fellow nuns of the Cristo Morente convent near the RossoGallo farms were subjected to inhumane experiments by Wyman to perfect Phenoxyl, an anti-psychotropic drug created by Felton, the Ashmanns, and Professor Wyman himself by synthesizing a rare species of parasitic moth to repress and erase traumatic memories that was eventually banned in the late 1960s for its severe side effects, including severe photosensitivity, hallucinations, ulcers, proliferation of the parasitic moths, and homicidal rage. Gloria then recognizes Reed as one of her fellow nuns, who set fire to the entire project to put a stop to the experiments conducted on the nuns of the convent. Reed confirms it but says her memories of that period are still missing. Gloria apologizes to and forgives Reed, telling her to keep searching for Celeste before passing away. Reed returns to Celeste's room with a piano key Gloria gave to her and finds a clue, a luggage tag pointing her towards the Flemmington Girls' Institute, an all-girls’ boarding school.

Back in the present, Madame Svenska tells Mr. Manni that Reed continued her search for Celeste.

• The game's title "Remothered" is a deliberate puzzle. It could mean something like "mothered again" or "born again" but it is instead a combination of the words REM (rapid eye movement), moth, mother, other and red, all of which refer to the game's story and symbolism.[31]
• The first time we meet the main antagonist of the game, the Red Nun, she introduces herself with the line "you want to kill me?", an homage to Dario Argento's Suspiria, in which the protagonist played by Jessica Harper has to fight against Helena MarKos, the dance academy matriarch who says the same identical sentence with a similar inflection.
• According Italian website Upside Down Magazine, the game is an homage to many famous films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, The Birds, Stanley Kubrik's The Shining, David Lynch's Mulholland Dr., Dario Argento's Deep Red, Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby but also to other media, from television series to video games such as Twin Peaks, The Evil Within, Rule of Rose, Clock Tower and Silent Hill.[32]
• The first version of Remothered was a one-man-only-project developed on Enterbrain's Rpg Maker Xp, with 2d and oil paintings aesthetics and similarities to Clock Tower. The project was cancelled in 2012 by Chris Darril himself with the objective of making a stronger version with new 3d engine.[33][34][35]

• On April 11, 2019, during the IVGA (Italian Video Game Awards) in Rome, on stage rewarded for "Best Italian Game", Chris Darril and Modus Games' CEO Christina Seelye announced a sequel to Remothered titled Broken Porcelain, in collaboration with Maximum Games that was released on October 13, 2020 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows and Nintendo Switch.[36]
• On January 29, 2021, was also released a digital spin-off director's cut graphic novel named Remothered: A Lamb to the Slaughter - Book 1 on Steam and GOG.com. The comic book is set in between Remothered: Tormented Fathers and Remothered: Broken Porcelain.[37][38]

Notes

Footnotes

• Official website