"Out of Scope" is a political romance about which forms of love and violence our society condones, and which it condemns.  The story alternates point of view between two siblings, Joe and Zoe, whose closeness their military family condemns.

The game features very few puzzles, but if you get lost or feel like you missed something, here is a walkthrough of the narrative to help fill you in:

Chapter 1

When the story starts, the two siblings are stalking each other around the torched ruins of their wealthy family home, Carnation Place.  As Joe, the player explores the house, and through it, the memory of events that bound him and his sister together.  From their relationship, he remembers intimacies, jealousies, solidarities.  Both Joe and Zoe were wrapped up in a war that enveloped their country, and now they direct their deadly talents against one another, still fulfilling the judgment of their society after their service has ended.

One of the divergent outcomes in the story requires Joe to take an old toy gun from his youth with him.  It can be found buried in the mud outside the garden, or in the old chest of belongings in his room.

There are three occasions in this scene where Joe's reverie can sufficiently distract him into mortal danger: when attempting to reproduce his childhood habit of sneaking into Zoe's room by climbing through the outside window, when pausing too long to scan the scenery at the rear of the house, and when trying to get a fix on Zoe from inside her bedroom window, who he has spied through his sniper's scope.

Chapter 2

Zoe ambushes Joe from afar with her sniper rifle, but is conflicted enough that she suspects she missed the kill.  She moves in to investigate, and to finish the job if necessary.  Zoe stalks through the house, and we see the memories there from her point of view, and how alike they are.

Joe has dragged his mangled body into the pantries behind the colonnade, which he has discovered was the epicenter of the fire that incinerated the house.  Zoe discovers him there holding a detonator, which he takes as evidence that Zoe destroyed the house because she was a sapper during the war.

Zoe can deflect the blame or take responsibility.  They quarrel at gunpoint, each heartbroken over what they perceive to be the other's betrayal, or at least pretending to be heartbroken so they can gain the initiative.  Joe succeeds in distracting Zoe just long enough to get a shot off.

Chapter 3

An eight year old Zoe plays hunter and prey in the garden outside their beautiful house, Joe shooting his new toy popgun at her.  Zoe, pretending to be a panther, gets the chance to ambush him here, too, but wounds him by knocking him into a nail protruding from the garden gate.

Frightened and tender, they resolve to keep the injury from their parents, whose disapproval of their bond they already unconsciously suspect.  They plan to enter the house unobserved and perform first aid themselves.  If they sneak into the washroom through the servants' quarters, they should be able to avoid the family gathering going on in the main hall.

During the attempt, Zoe can spy on the gathering and get a glimpse of several details that she'll recognize growing up: Joe's suspicion that their house security are intelligence agents, her grandfather's importance to the military complex, Lavina's gregarious front, Aunt Marion's preoccupation with statuary, and Uncle Graham's gluttony.

Zoe and Joe stumble across their mother and father arguing in the servants' quarters.  Her mother is convinced that Joe and Zoe have become unnaturally close, and she insists that her husband, an admiral in the navy, do something about it.  He agrees to raise Joe as a soldier, noting his existing interest in guns.  A young sailor would have no time for cavorting with his sister.

Chapter 4

An eighteen year old Joe has just received his apprentice rank in a navy combat force like the SEALs.  He is receiving spotter and sniper training from his weapons sergeant, Jameson.  On break, Jameson plays a practical joke by painting Joe's sidearm the same color as his childhood toy gun, a description of which Jameson has read in the letters Zoe has been sending Joe.

The crew on Joe's aircraft carrier have also been hazing him.  His latest task is a challenge to nick Jameson with a red sharpie they've provided.  Joe will fail to do this initially, but while Jameson is distracted giving advice to Joe he succeeds.  Jameson's impression of Zoe's letters is that Joe and Zoe are attracted to one another.  Jameson's advice to Joe is to be proud of himself no matter what others say, a sentiment he expresses vulgarly.

After they resume training, the camp is suddenly attacked by artillery and the pair flee into the jungle.

Chapter 5

Zoe makes herself ready to see Joe, who has been in basic training for months, on the eve of his deployment.  She wanders among the household's dinner party preparations: her mother directs hired help and caterers as they tidy rooms and prepare for the banquet; her father broods on how unsuited some are for war (without naming you or Joe), and security seems tense.

While wandering, Zoe might encounter her aunt Marion in the gallery over the east wing.  Marion picks up on Zoe's anxiety over Joe, and like Jameson presumes to know what that means.  She reveals that she sculpted all the statues in the gallery, each fashioned after someone she had married to get closer to Zoe's mother, who she is in love with.  She indirectly advises Zoe not to follow in her footsteps.

Marion's latest husband is Uncle Graham, Zoe's mother's brother, who, together with Jorge, Zoe's Colibrian boyfriend, interrupts them as they come out of her father's study.  If Zoe visits the study before talking to Marion, she can see Jorge getting a tour, flippantly handling father's collection of Colibrian artifacts.

Jorge and Graham are arguing amiably about Zoe's father's military legacy as a conqueror.  They invite Zoe and Marion down to the colonnade to steal snacks from caterers.  Zoe can accompany them, but if she stays she can also explain the pet name she has for Jorge ("R.G.") to Marion, which is that it's his first name without the "Joe."

Preparations for the dinner party will continue until Zoe finds and confronts Lavina in her rooms.  In order for that to happen, she has to be granted permission to enter the kitchens.  To enter the kitchens, Zoe has to offer her father a refill, either wine or tea, for which he'll give Zoe his sigil.  The sigil will discourage the hawkish caterer corralling Carnations away from the kitchen entrance.

After encountering and barely recognizing Lavina in the cellar, Zoe can find her in her old room in the bilge behind the kitchen.  In conversation with Lavina, the doorbell rings: Joe has arrived.

Chapter 6

Greetings and felicitations shower on Joe.  He can escape from them in the washroom for a moment, but is otherwise compelled into the dining room, where he is pinioned by barbed conversation flying back and forth past him across the table.  Zoe joins the party late.

As courses come and go, events occur depending on who he talks to when:

1. His father toasts the colonial legacy of the family's patriarchs.  He obliquely discourages Zoe from following Joe into the military.  He praises his wife's work as editor of the Clarion Call, a popular newspaper and propaganda outlet.

2. His mother notices Zoe holding onto Joe's arm and finds that worrisome.  She'll cue her husband, who will start an awkward conversation about girlfriends or boyfriends he might have had in the military.  Joe's mother will then segue that into a conversation about how nice Jorge is, who is seated further down the table.  This conversation morphs into a tale of how he met Zoe, and finally a debate about his being a Colibrian and a pacifist, which embarrasses everyone in this family of movers and shakers – even Zoe.

3. Uncle Graham asks questions about the region where Joe is being deployed: a "new territory" on the border of a country called Golsja.  Zoe promises to write Joe letters, and already has one to give him.  Joe can reciprocate or not.

4. The housekeeper, Carla, can endure some abuse from Joe's mother for not having enough of the Colibrian wine that her husband prefers.  This sparks some anecdotes about the former housekeeper, Lavina.  Zoe drags out of her mother the recollection that Lavina tried to burn the house down and that father dealt with her humanely.

5. Aunt Marion can flirt with Joe to deliberately get a rise out of Zoe, who is trying to behave for her boyfriend.

After the last course, the intrigue runs its course and everyone makes their way to their rooms for bed.

Chapter 7

In her bedroom, Zoe is having trouble falling asleep.  Threats and villains seem to lurk in every shadow.  She has to process her fury with her father from the dinner party, whose sexism, moral certainty, and narrow-minded concept of love, she feels, is stymying her efforts to follow Joe into the military.  She feels it's controlling of him to dictate to her, and pathetic of him to kowtow to mother's misguided nervosa about her close relationship with Joe.

Lavina has also told her that they had an affair, and that she used the influence to try and destroy father's artifact collection, but that he wouldn't allow it, and then spies caught and fired her for trying to do it anyway.  As a Colibrian, she said, she felt his appropriation of the artifacts was a mortal desecration, and she pleads for Zoe's help to destroy them and get back at her family at the same time.  Zoe recalls the package of explosive chemicals and the detonator that she hid in the room, and the veiled threats that if Zoe doesn't do it, someone else surely would, and someone might get hurt.  Indeed, Lavina portends ominously to Zoe that trouble is brewing with the conquered peoples of her country, and that helping the Colibrian Resistance that Lavina has joined could result in them owing Zoe a favor in the future when it might be urgently needed.

Zoe can resolve whether to help Lavina's cause or not, and if not, whether to turn Lavina in.

Her train of thought is interrupted by Joe climbing through the window, like he used to do when they were children.  They slip into old comfortable habits, enjoying each other's company as they can enjoy no one else's.  When it comes up that Jorge and Zoe haven't had sex yet, things get awkward in a way they haven't before.  Joe makes an ill-judged joke about kissing her that hits too close to Zoe's insecurities and she flips out.  Even if she calms herself down, he's infected by the same fear that gripped her, and he flees the room in self-loathing.

After he's gone, Zoe can resolve to heal their rift or to create more distance between them.

Chapter 8

After being ambushed with Jameson, Joe has been a prisoner in Golsja for many months.  He's kept in a comfortable room.  One of his captors, Vesj, will visit Joe if he examines the door out a couple of times.

Vesj and Joe have a by-now familiar argument: Joe is convinced that they know who he is and that they're holding him for ransom.  Vesj insists that the attack on the navy base was a false flag by Joe's own country in order to provoke a war with his people, which is ongoing, and that they're holding Joe in order to protect him.

The argument is interrupted by commotion outside the cell, which Vesj takes a moment to investigate.  With Vesj's back turned, Joe can use his training and seize the moment, like he seized the moment to nick Jameson with the sharpie, to cut Vesj's throat and escape.  If Joe takes the opportunity, he kills Vesj brutally and is traumatized.  If not, Vesj is killed by gunfire from outside.

Either way, commandos rescue a confused and terrified Joe.  If Zoe chose to gain Lavina's favor, then she shows up here.  If not, then it's Jameson who is responsible.  Whoever it is gives you a newspaper and a letter.  The newspaper is the Clarion Call, and the headline is the destruction of Joe's father's flagship in the war.  Joe is stunned, but there's room here for him to think something is fishy.  A flagship doesn

The letter is news from Zoe about the destruction of the house and mother being ousted as editor of the Call.  It's followed by a sexually suggestive invitation to join her in the ruins, crowing about how, now that their parents are out of the way, there will be no more barriers to their love.

Joe suspects a trap, but knows he has to accept the invitation one way or another: if it's not a trap, then he will either have to kill her to prevent his worst nightmare from being true or succumb to what he fears are his secret desires.  If it is a trap, then he will have to kill her to defend himself, or he'll be killed trying.

If Lavina is the messenger, then she casts this as Colibria doing Zoe the favor they promised her, but one of the commandos seems to feel a sort of sympathy for you and wishes you luck.  If Joe is sharp-eared, he'll remember a turn of phrase that he'd last heard from Jameson in training.

If Jameson is the messenger, he'll reveal himself to be a special forces intelligence operative.  Joe will overhear his superior over the radio giving him orders and might vaguely recognize the woman's voice.

Either way, they return to him his sidearm – the same one Jameson painted red – and fly him home.

Chapter 9

We're back in the incinerated storage rooms under Carnation Place, and Zoe is facing down Joe's smoking gun.

If Joe picked up the toy gun earlier in the story, painted close enough to his real weapon to be confusing, then in his wounded delirium he grabbed the wrong one.  He shoots Zoe again with a blank.  In this case, Zoe regains the upper hand and has the option to kill Joe before he regains his wits.

If she doesn't, Joe resigns himself to her mercy.  They both think the other wrote them a seductive invitation to Carnation Place.  Zoe was willing to believe it after their confusing last night together, and couldn't bear the prospect of her parents being right.  She knew that she and Joe would suffer if they succumbed to society's vision of what they wanted from each other, so she took it upon herself to terminate what she became convinced was a toxic relationship.  Whoever set them up knew them well enough to realize they would behave this way.

If Joe didn't pick up the toy, then Zoe falls back against the wall, mortally wounded.  Joe and Zoe can still have the reconciliatory conversation, but it's too late to save Zoe.  Zoe can use her remaining strength to take Joe with him, since she's still got her gun.  In a way, it's a mercy, but the game will end there, in tragedy.  She can also forgive him and die content to finally love him and be loved without guilt.  Joe is not so lucky when it comes to the guilt, though.

Chapter 10

If one or both of Joe and Zoe survive, their last scene is at their father's funeral.  The war is over; the country has captured more territory from the Golsjan "aggressors" and their Colibrian allies that it claims struck first; and a coup has resulted in the 'moderate' politicians represented by Joe and Zoe's parents being replaced by hawks, in the interest of increasing national security.

Nonetheless, relieved of its patriarch, the family seems almost happy.  Well, maybe not Uncle Graham, who fears for the future and has been divorced, or Carla, who knows her lot has only worsened.  But with her brother in law out of the way, Aunt Marion has left Graham and finally hooked up with the widow Carnation – who seems happy for the first time – and is plotting a new statue of the dead admiral.  And Jorge is recently engaged to a woman named Qara, who seems good for him.  Better than Zoe was, for sure.

Joe and Zoe (if she is alive) tell an eager Jorge about their adventures.  They are amazed, but Jorge feels compelled to point out a couple of inconsistencies: there never was a Colibrian Resistance; the country are famous pacifists like he is.  The term was historically a bogeyman invented to scare nationalists and justify retribution.  Similarly, Colibrians don't have a spiritual attachment to their artifacts that drives them to destroy them if they're appropriated.  (Zoe should have known, if she saw Jorge's casual attitude in her father's study on the night of the dinner party.)

These clues, if discovered, point to Lavina having lied to Zoe to gain her sympathy, and to have "liberated" Joe from Golsja's protection deliberately so she could deniably force the siblings into mortal combat with the letters she forged.  Jameson had been reading Joe's mail the whole time, as we knew, and he was there during the rescue.  Lavina had helped raise them.  They were special intelligence operatives like those Joe always suspected were lurking around Carnation Place.  They set up the too-moderate family for a fall, manipulated the susceptible Zoe into the role of radicalized child elite, assassinated their father, and architected their mother's removal from the newspaper – a literal and figurative coup.

It's a lot to consider, but the day is about remembering their father, and all the conflicted love and war he represented.  The officiant facilitating the funeral, who Zoe might recognize as the guard at the kitchen door from the dinner party, gathers them to the burial site to deposit his empty coffin, and ruminates on which types of love are worth feeling.  Everything else, he says, is out of scope.

Themes:

The title, "Out of Scope," is meant to connote several ideas: immanent, deliberate violence (the implication of a rifle), and boundaries, outside of which lies the irrelevant, the impractical, and the impermissible.

All the characters in "Out of Scope" share the same core conflict:

1. Joe and Zoe: they love each other.  The nature of their love is up to you, but they don't have a framework of their own for what love means, so they are susceptible to their parents', a philosophy shaped by their own experience as colonizers.  They only really understand love as a form of ownership.

Joe is in awe of Zoe, and Zoe is protective of Joe, who she recognizes is less of a warrior than her family would want him to be.  For Zoe's part, she is quick-tempered and a fighter, and a better shot than Joe, but her sexist father "loves her too much" to let her pursue those impulses, an impulse which of course she resists with an impulse to violence.  The only solution that Joe and Zoe can think of when they are finally convinced that their affection is unnatural is violence, because that's the solution used by their family and their country.

2. In addition to his children, father Carnation is clearly conflicted about the direction of his country.  He gets drunk and maudlin before the dinner party because he sees the growing factional urge to conquest among his colleagues, and he's getting old enough to wonder if it will ever end, especially now that he's pushed his children into it.

He also clearly "loves" Colibria, now a childlike vassal state like Joe and Zoe are vassals.  He is a connoisseur of their artifacts, culture, and mythology, and he has a romantic weakness for Lavina, who identifies herself as Colibrian.  Depending on how Zoe converses with him, she can see that he approves of Jorge as a companion for Zoe.  This is, by the standards of their culture, open-minded, but it also serves his wish to protect Zoe by pairing her with a pacifist, like he protects Colibran artifacts by locking them away in his study.

3. The Carnation matriarch, likewise, "loves" her children enough to want to keep them from the incestuous urges she's convinced they have.  Her relationship to her husband is a possessive one, too, and sexist, such that she sees his role as the enforcer of her right standards.  She defines these standards for her servants, for whom she would profess nothing but love even while dressing them down, and she defines these standards for the country in her role as editor of the Clarion Call.

At the end, her happiness comes from being released, albeit by enemies, from those responsibilities, and given a chance for a different kind of love that grows while she's staying with Aunt Marion and Uncle Graham after her house burns down and her husband is assassinated.

4. Uncle Graham's gluttony is how his love manifests – it's primarily through his cartoonish hunger, but he also loves a good debate.  Hunger is a kind of destructive desire, and his insatiability is a good ambassador for the whole country's hunger for territory, culture, and growth.

5. Aunt Marion's lifelong stalking of Joe and Zoe's mother leads to the acquisition and disposal of the individuals she marries.  They serve her as stepping stones to getting, and staying, close to her love interest.  Her victims are captured, used, and discarded, black-widow-like.  The statue gallery is as much a web of violently devoured husks as it is an exhibition of love and tribute.

6. Jorge and Vesj serve as foils to the family, in terms of their more generous interpretations of love and violence.

Jorge is a kind and patient lover, naive with inexperience, and a pacifist.  It takes some time for him to comprehend that Zoe's use for him is more as a reservoir for Joe's jealousy and as a validator of her self-image as a progressive revolutionary.  He doesn't hold it against her, and eventually finds a more symbiotic partner.

Vesj knows Joe's father has been assassinated.  He believes the best thing for him and his country is to protect Joe from that knowledge until the war is over.  Vesj is more pragmatic about violence than Jorge, but they both have a compassion for others that Joe can't understand in any terms but through his relationship with Zoe.