MiSide is a psychological horror game that tells the story of Mita, a digital avatar that you can take care of in a sort of simulation. Things quickly escalate as Mita traps the player inside the game world, forcing them to run through many different versions of the game until they find a way out.
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The game has multiple endings, with the developers claiming that even more are on the way, but what little there is already paints a big picture. The world of MiSide is both vast in its horror and small in size, with those two factors being key in understanding the characters of this digital world and their goals.
Spoilers For The Entire Game Ahead!
The Story Of MiSide
The game starts with the player trying out a new version of the game MiSide, a casual simulation game where you take care of Mita, a digital avatar. After over a month of game time spent with Mita, she starts showing signs of being self-aware, wanting to spend more time with the player than these short play sessions allow.
Mita manages to absorb the player into the game, and they share a few peaceful moments together. However, what Mita is really trying to do is fully absorb the player into a ‘cartridge,’ adding him to her collection of other players she has absorbed in the past.
We don’t know if this absorption includes the body of the player, only their mind/soul, or if it only creates a copy.
Realizing something is up, the player tries to escape the virtual reality, traveling through many versions of MiSide with their own Mitas, all of them feeling as trapped in this universe as he does. A lot of them tell a story of loneliness, of being created only to be left alone and abandoned.
The Main Ending
The main ending of the game has the player work together with different versions of Mita to stop the one pursuing him, known as ‘Crazy Mita.’ He concludes, with the aid of ‘Kind Mita,’ that he needs to reset Crazy Mita if he has any hope of escaping her grasp.
How exactly he planned to escape after dealing with Crazy Mita isn’t clear, but his efforts are for nothing: Crazy Mita can’t be rebooted because she has no version to be rebooted into. With enough time having passed, the absorption of the player into a cartridge is complete, and the player becoming a plaything of the digital avatar.
Mita is then seen pulling the cartridge from the console, then transitioning to the main menu of the game as if nothing had happened. The player now became one more cartridge in Mita’s growing collection, trapped forever.
Are We Playing As The Developer Of The Game?
When we start the game, we see someone sending us a new version of MiSide, implying that we are already aware of the game’s existence. During the later stages of the game, Mita shows us how our life was outside the game, trapped in an apartment much like her and living a painfully monotonous life.
Said life involved programming MiSide (the game inside the story, not the actual game we are playing), making the assumption of us playing as the game’s developer not that far-fetched. However, we never see actual MiSide gameplay, and Mita never treated us as anything more than another player, so our real identity remains a mystery for now.
Pulling The Cartridge Ending
The previous ending gives us the code of Mita’s safe, where she was keeping the player’s cartridge. That safe can be found in several chapters of the game, and with the code in hand, we can open it and stop the process from being completed.
The code, 4970, is always the same, making it possible to get this ending before the main ending.
To stop it, we yank the cartridge from the console, which seemingly kills us. This was confusing for a lot of people since it implies that we were the cartridge all along, and by forcefully removing it from the console, we are killing ourselves.
Was The Player A Cartridge All Along?
In short, no. Kind Mita confirms that we are real while interacting with her, and the percentage we can see on the console shows that the upload isn’t complete. While removing the cartridge does cause some form of damage (and the end of the game), there isn’t evidence that the player was a cartridge all along.
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What must really be happening is that the player is pushed back into reality with such force that he loses consciousness, maybe outright dying in the process. While a bleak outcome, it might beat being stuck with Mita for all eternity for some people, depending on your priorities.
The Peaceful Ending
This is another ending that throws players for a loop, since it is the ending you get when you agree to stay with Mita forever. Mita starts off in disbelief, giving the notion that she has lived this conversation before but is still overjoyed at our decision.
We then spend the rest of our days as a digital avatar alongside Mita, although we might still be her plaything like in the first ending, only now we are a willing participant. To achieve this ending, you have to do a series of tasks, namely:
- Achieve the first ending.
- Play a console game with Mita.
- Try Mita’s sauce.
- Don’t look into the vent.
- Collect the refrigerator magnets when they fall.
- Don’t look into the oven.
Why Is Mita Surprised?
Mita expects the player to refuse, even though she wanted him to stay, because she has lived through this conversation before. This might be fuel for the theory that the player has been a cartridge all along, but there is one key difference here: the requirements to unlock this ending.
Most of them make sense since you need to avoid finding the clues that point at Mita’s evil schemes, as well as doing activities that show that you enjoy her company. The one crucial requirement, however, is having beaten the game, since from that point on the player is a cartridge.
So, while the player is a real person at the beginning of the story, every playthrough after getting the first ending is Crazy Mita using the cartridge to replay the story over and over again, in hopes that something changes. It seems that, through mindless repetition, Mita got what she wanted: a happy ending where the player stays with her forever.
