Decision Point 1 — The Parents (Episode 2)
The reunion with Mr. and Mrs. Graves is the first heavyweight decision cluster. It matters twice over: practically, because how you handle the parents is one of the three areas the route calculation actually reads; and thematically, because it is where the game shows you the siblings functioning as a unit against the people who made them — right before it starts pulling that unit apart.
Play it deliberately. Reflex cruelty and reflex mercy both write things into the record. Watch who leads the conversation in your chosen approach and what it costs the other sibling, because Episode 3, whichever branch you get, will quote this sequence back at you. There is no score popup. There is only the finale, later, feeling inevitable.
Decision Point 2 — The Trinket and the Visions
Every use of the demon's trinket is a small ending-decision made early. The visions show real futures, and the game tracks whether you chase them, ignore them, or share them — and with whom. Runs diverge here more than players realise: two saves with identical finale answers can still land differently in tone and available scenes because of how the visions were handled along the way.
The guide rule is the one the community converged on: a vision is information, not instruction. Ask who profits if you act on it. Lord Unknown prices knowledge exactly like it prices everything else, and the bill always arrives in a later episode, at a worse moment, with interest.
Decision Point 3 — The Finale Trust Pattern (Episode 2)
This is the gate. In the finale, Ashley must decide whether she trusts Andrew to handle a dangerous moment alone — and the game reads that moment together with Andrew's loyalty answers and the relationship record behind them. Trust holds: Burial. Trust cracks: Decay. There is no warning, no label, and no way back inside that save, which is why every guide on this site repeats one instruction: keep a manual save before this sequence and never overwrite it.
From that single save, this guide's whole strategy unfolds. Finish trusting for one route, finish withholding for the other, and both Episode 3s are yours for twenty minutes of replay instead of four hours. If you take one thing from this page, take that save.
Decision Points Inside Decay
Once in Decay, your steering wheel shrinks but does not vanish. The demon's escalated offers and the siblings' handling of Julia shape the main ending's final form — the portal accepted, or the abusive engagement closed around them — and the wrong step at several pressured moments drops you into dead ends instead. Keep rotating saves before bargains and confrontations; Decay is generous with quiet moments right before irreversible ones, and those quiets are save points wearing a disguise.
Notice, too, what Decay will not let you do: reconcile your way back to Burial. The route's honesty is its cruelty. Choices inside Episode 3 decide how the fall looks, never whether it happens. Players hunting a 'good Decay ending' are hunting something the game deliberately does not contain — its main ending is a cliffhanger into Episode 4, wreckage included.
Dead-End Checklist
- ☐ Police shooting — push the outside-world pressure to its limit instead of managing it.
- ☐ Andrew's total surrender — appease at the moment the route offers him one last spine.
- ☐ The jump — follow the bond's logic all the way down when the game offers the edge.
- ☐ The hidden fourth — refuse the obviously-correct outcome at a late bargain/confrontation and watch what the game does instead.
- ☐ Main ending — complete Decay's arc and carry the save toward Episode 4.
Work the checklist with saves, not restarts: park a save before each cluster, take the wrong door, watch the dead end (they are short and deliberately brutal), reload. Ninety seconds is the tell — a real ending completes an arc; a dead end amputates one.
Setting Up Both Routes From One Playthrough
- Play Episodes 1 and 2 once, exploring fully, examining everything.
- Save manually right before the Episode 2 finale. Never overwrite this slot.
- Finish the finale on trust → this save line becomes your Burial ticket (content arrives on release).
- Reload the finale save, finish it on distrust → play Decay now, all six hours.
- Hunt Decay's four dead ends from rotating in-episode saves.
- When Burial releases, your step-3 line is ready on day one.
That is the entire endings strategy for the game as it exists today — upstream decisions, one protected save, and patience for the branch still being built. The endings explainer covers what each outcome actually is, and the episodes guide covers the route there.