Stone to the Head by GarySavage

 

Fan cover made by me

Stone to the Head offers a retelling of the now non-canon Murder route with an original character to change the dynamic John has with the main villain of the route, Jack.

While a lot of people consider that this scenario wasn't successful in delivering what was aiming for, the individual ideas it has are worth mention and even worth playing if you are interested in the topic itself, I will mention some thoughts about my own interpretation of the story just as well.

Now, at the beginning of the scenario, Erica is introduced as a seemingly violent girl that John meets, he shows her the remote and she asks her to let her stay in his body for a while so she can go out with John's friends that going to the Karaoke soon since she doesn't have any friends and wants to go through the experience, John accepts and after the experience turns successful, they use a command including intuitive memory recollection to help act like each other, and they both go to the other person's home.

At this point of the story, the player is given the option to play an "experimental" route which has become infamous overall. While being in Erica's home, John is filled with weird thoughts since he's in Erica's brain and he has memories that are affecting him, Gary explains that due to the memory copy, they both suffer from Mind Contamination. If he doesn't find some pills Erica uses to calm himself down, his personality changes, and experiences a psychotic break. The next morning he kills Erica in his old body and mind controls Katrina so she tells the police she was the murderer.

While the idea in itself isn't necessarily bad for fans of Mind Contamination and Personality Change, the whole route feels incredibly rushed, getting reduced to not just a route in itself but just a bad ending, John's personality is totally changed by the next morning into some sort of calculating and calmed down psychopath, the reason he killed his old body isn't quite clear either. The quote the scenario is closed with "The one that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead." doesn't explain too much its reasoning and makes the scenario feel superficial and edgy.

If John is able to find the pill, a longer route starts, later Erica mentions seeing a photo of her uncle Jack with John's sister, Holly. Since John is still asking himself why his sister doesn't talk to him, they both team up and try to investigate what happened between the two of them, going one night to the school and check the school files about the teacher and unveil the truth.

The scenario is unfinished and according to Gary, abandoned. What is left of the route offers a mix of suspense that hasn't been seen a lot in other ST scenarios, while John and Erica are investigating the truth, John sees her hit Michelle violently in the head so they can recover the remote and he's warned by several people about Erica's nature, who is rumored to have murdered one of her classmates, Patrick, in her previous school, so John has to try and do the right choice about if she is dangerous or not before it is too late.

What the scenario has to offer in the state is in, is an enjoyable mix of creepy atmosphere and a story with decent enough mystery showing the dark side of what the remote can cause, even with good intentions. The overall theme would be "Using the remote in the mentally ill, brings misfortune".

Some people claim it shows a harmful depiction of mentally ill people since Erica is implied to be a dangerous psychopath in the experimental ending, it's a fair criticism, although personally, I feel the remote was the catalyst for all the events that follow, not just Erica. Since the ending is pretty vague, it goes for the interpretation of the reader. According to Gary, the purpose of the route was to raise the stakes and increase the tension, but the result could have been handled a lot better.

Another point worth mention is that Jack is also given a more human side, he is a good uncle for Erica and he, according to her, is always there to help, even when being despicable towards John and his family. A lot of the time villains are done in one note, without giving them any redeemable qualities on their own so the audience can hate them more easily, but the truth is that we are humans, and humans are not composed of black and white personalities, and there will always be ambiguity. Giving good traits to bad characters like Jack and giving bad traits to characters like Erica make the characters feel alive, not like perfect people but like actual human beings with defects but also qualities.

The other part worth mentioning of this scenario is the one that didn't make it into the final release, the part of the story Gary planned but abandoned afterward, and is mainly that Erica wasn't really Patrick's murderer, her friend, Becky, had a crush on him and tried to get him to join their group. At first, Erica was just annoyed by him but then she started to be left out with Becky spending way more time with Patrick than before. Patrick was always cheerful but since he had severe depression, Erica felt that he's not sincere and that annoyed her even more, when Patrick killed himself, Erica was tagged as the main suspect.

What I do think is that Erica had the task of teaching the player to not judge everybody by appearances and make people understand that even the mentally ill shouldn't be completely left out. According to Gary, Erica is violent and has schizotypal tendencies, but at the very end, she has empathy. One of the bad endings even happens when John decides to wipe her memory out after getting scared. John confronts Jack afterward, and since he has a remote just as well, he uses it and makes John kill himself. 

Even then, since Gary abandoned the scenario, nothing of this appears at the end. The tension added to make the character doubt her at first played out against her, and this also adds up to the rushed-out experimental ending that ends up being too vague and that could have been handled a lot better, leaving people with a lot less favorable impressions of Erica. She has gained the status of psycho, while the intention was to show the total opposite. Not that I can really blame them though, the scenario is unfinished, and the death of the author exists.