The Farm 51’s Get Even for Xbox One, PS4 and PC is pretty much the video game equivalent of Memento meets The Cell meets Inception. The game plays hot and heavy on the neuroscience themes pertaining to cognitive phenomenology and mnemonic manipulation. Very similar to Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 or Blooper Team’s Layers of Fear, the themes and story of Get Even can be very hard to follow due to the fragmented way the story unfolds, so for those looking for an explanation of the game’s story and ending, hopefully this article will help.
Before getting into the game, we hear two women talking – one asks the other if she’s sure she wants to proceed, and the other reluctantly replies that she’s ready.
While the start of the actual gameplay puts players in the role of Cole Black, the head of security at Future Defense Group, Black is guided through a series of fragmented memories by an overseer who goes by the handle of Red. We later discover that Red is actually the head of Future Defense Group, Robert Ramsey.
Ramsey walks Black through a series of locations and sequences using the Pandora headset, which can visually reconstruct memories from those hooked up to the device. Black is suffering from amnesia, and discovers why he’s suffering from amnesia when he happens upon a warehouse where he encounters a memory of a girl tied to a chair with a bomb strapped to her chest.
Black attempts to save the girl but is unable to do so in time, and the memory breaks down when the bomb goes off.
Ramsey carefully guides Black through a series of damaged and partially reconstructed memories using a device he designed at FDG known as the Pandora. The headset allows the wearer to parse and examine the memories of another person, even partially alter them.
To help dive deep into Cole Black’s memories, Robert Ramsey devises the memory of an asylum where he uses it to gauge Black’s aggressiveness, behavior towards others, and trustworthiness. This is all so that Robert Ramsey can uncover the truth behind the girl with the bomb strapped to her chest and the people who organized for it to happen.
Through the memories we learn that the girl with the bomb on her chest is Robert Ramsey’s daughter, Grace Ramsey. Cole Black, the head of FDG’s security, worked for Robert Ramsey. However, Black and a woman named Rose Atkins, Robert’s personal assistant, wrought a machination to unseat Robert Ramsey from his company and steal his Pandora technology.
It’s revealed through the memories and retrieved e-mail messages that Rose Atkins came into FDG as a personal assistant, but her ambition was too big to contain and she began scheming behind the scenes to get people fired in order to move up in the company; she seduced and slept with Robert in order to get as close to the Pandora project as possible, and goaded Robert to leave his wife Lenore and his daughter Grace. Robert, however, wouldn’t commit to Rose, and thus Rose became spiteful.
As a way to get back at Robert, she worked with Cole Black, and one of Black’s old military buddies, Jasper Prado, to cook up a plan to kidnap Robert’s daughter Grace and hold her ransom. The idea was that Robert Ramsey would give up his Pandora technology in order to get his daughter back. However, things went horribly wrong.
It turns out that in order to bring their plan to fruition, they needed more manpower and an opportunity arose when Robert Ramsey’s arch-nemesis, Roger Howard, tried to hire Cole Black.
Diving deeper into Cole’s memories, Robert Ramsey recounts how he hired Cole Black to steal a high-tech piece of equipment from Roger Howard’s Advanced Defense Strategies facility; it was known as the ADS Cornergun (the swivel gun used in the game). Black not only stole the Cornergun but he also damaged ADS’ servers, nearly bankrupting Roger Howard’s company.
Howard tried to strike a deal with Cole, hoping to hire him to get even with Robert Ramsey. However, Cole turned down the offer and made a counter-offer to Roger Howard, requesting him to provide him with mercenaries and ADS equipment so Cole, Jasper, and Rose could pull off the kidnapping of Grace Ramsey, and force Robert Ramsey to give up the Pandora technology.
Roger Howard acquiesces to Cole’s demand, providing him with his men and support.
However, Jasper begins ruminating on the idea of using explosives. Cole vehemently denies the use of any explosives. However, Jasper rigs a bomb anyway, just in case.
When Cole catches wind of how sloppy some things are coming together, he decides to call it off. However, Rose disagrees and decides she’s going to go through with the plan and fulfill her ambition of acquiring Robert’s patented Pandora technology. Rose orders Howard’s men to kill Cole, and to make it “painless”. However, Cole avoids being killed.
Jasper and the ADS mercenaries are successful, however, in capturing Grace Ramsey and taking her to the facility, but they never had time to actually send the ransom note to Robert Ramsey. Cole warns Jasper about what’s going down with Rose, and Jasper asks Cole to help get him out since he’s surrounded by ADS mercenaries. Cole makes his way to the warehouse, incapacitates some of the ADS mercenaries and kills Jasper, but he’s unable to fully save Grace Ramsey in time from the bomb, and the device goes off, putting Cole Black into a permanent coma and blowing off the lower half of Grace Ramsey.
After the incident with Grace, Robert’s wife, Lenore Ramsey, leaves him. She tells him she knows about the affair and that he’s dedicated to his work on Pandora, and that he was a coward for not leaving her sooner.
We then learn through Robert Ramsey’s own fragmented memories that after Lenore left him, he visited the hospital where Cole Black was, and paid to have him brought to a “private facility”. In reality, Robert Ramsey retrieved Cole Black’s body so he could hook him up to the Pandora device at his own house and explore Cole’s memories so he could uncover the truth behind what happened to his daughter.
When Robert Ramsey discovers the truth about these events, he takes it upon himself to get revenge. Robert starts by unplugging Cole Black from the machines he’s hooked up to, causing him to die of brain failure. Robert also enacts revenge against Roger Howard, the CEO of Advanced Defense Strategies. Robert storms into Roger Howard’s office with a gun and kills him; shooting him point blank in the chest before turning the gun on himself and blowing out his own brains.
The game then pauses to reveal that Grace Ramsey is actually alive and had been using the Pandora headset on her father’s dead body under the supervision of Rose Atkins. Just as it had been revealed in Cole’s memories, Grace is missing her lower half from the bomb explosion.
Rose was the one at the beginning of the game asking Grace if she really wanted to go through with using the Pandora, and thus the main character was Grace all along. However, Rose did not know that the truth about her arranging the kidnapping, trying to have Cole killed, having the bomb strapped to Grace, having an affair with Robert Ramsey, and attempting to break up their family would all be revealed by Grace surfing through the memory highway of her father.
Grace was able to discover all of the details because – while surfing through Robert Ramsey’s memories – she was also able to see Cole Black’s memories since Robert had used the Pandora device on Cole Black before he committed suicide, thus all of those memories from Cole were stored in Robert’s memory as well. Thus, Grace saw everything.
The Good/Bad Endings
These revelations enable players to encounter one of several different endings. After the first pause where Grace takes off the headset, Rose will ask her if she wants to continue. Players have the choice of shutting down the device and not continuing any further, which means they will miss out on discovering how and why Robert committed suicide.
If players choose to keep viewing Robert’s memories until the end, Grace will witness her father’s suicide in real-time. If the player has been violent throughout the game, this will result in Grace becoming emotionally distraught and confronting Rose about her crimes, followed by breaking the Pandora headset to ensure that Rose Atkins never gains control of the technology.
A less violent approach will see Grace signing the contract, willing to pick up where her father left off and continue the development of the Pandora technology. Grace will request that Rose resign from Future Defense Group and hand all of her responsibilities over to a separate team and that they never speak, see, or talk to each other ever again. Unlike Cole, Roger, or Robert, Grace forfeits any further measures to get even.
