Purgatory Theory

Author: Awsome2464

The entire premise of Another Chance is straightforward if you've made it past the Introduction: a down-on-his-luck loser with nothing to his name is given another chance at life when a mysterious texter sends him back to his senior year of high school. Using his knowledge of the past and future to his advantage, he aims to give himself a better life. Again, straightforward to anyone who's played the game. But the issue I take is in what the game wants you to think: that the MC quite literally travelled back in time to change the future for everyone. While it seems cut and dry on the surface, I propose that there's enough in-game evidence to point to what's really going on here. MC isn't in the past; he's in purgatory.

Clarification

When I say "purgatory", I don't necessarily mean the literal one held by Catholic beliefs, but rather a similar realm between life and the afterlife. Essentially, what I'm proposing is that at the start of the game, MC died in some way, whether it be suicide, some sort of accidental overdose, etc. and is now in a different realm where he can live the life he always wanted to before he's sent either to Heaven or Hell for eternity. Yes, I'm aware that this just screams "bad creepypasta", but just hear me out. As I stated, I feel there's enough in-game evidence to support this idea, from my own observations to expanding upon already-existing fan theories.

Maxine

What truly started this train of thought was the opening of Hooking Up. While talking to Maxine at the start of the quest, MC asks her if she believes in time travel. The answer: no, she doesn't, even going so far as to state that travelling back in time is impossible. Now, sure, I acknowledge that this could just be for the sake of comedy, as MC immediately points out afterwards that she "believes in all sorts of wacky shit", yet time travel is supposedly too far. And I would chalk this up to a quick gag if the next phase of the quest wasn't centered around Maxine breaking into our house the next day to find proof of time travel, only to come up empty-handed. Again, this could be played up for laughs, but the fact that the game is really hammering in our face that Maxine, of all characters, is calling time travel impossible is curious to me.

Let's not forget that Maxine has been proven right about her beliefs on multiple occasions. Sure, maybe we haven't seen a soap goblin in the vents or a trollita in the forest, but the climax of Dethroning the Queen proves that The Glowing Spider Eggs do exist in the school, as well as the Saucer-Eyed Doll's existence if you didn't already find and contain it in The Ley of the Land. Topple that with the entire adventure in The Dive and you have the game making it very clear to us that Maxine is very sound with her crazy conclusions. So if she says time travel isn't possible, then we have reason to believe her.

Why Purgatory?

So if it's not time travel, then where the hell is MC? Well, he may not have been sent to the literal past, but I believe that he's definitely in some sort of recreation of it. But why some form of purgatory or afterlife rather than, say, a pocket dimension or the Matrix? That all comes down to the amount of religious symbolism and references we get in the game. Specifically, the demonic implications from Mrs. L. It's a popular belief in the community that Mrs. L has some sort of demonic control over her, if she's not a demon herself. For those who don't know the theory, let's take a quick detour to explain it.

Mrs. L the Succubus

Another Chance has a lot of fetishes listed on its download page to the point where it feels more like a checklist. But among those tags is the "Succubus" tag. The game has yet to acknowledge the existence of a succubus, so why is it there? Curiously, the tags that surround it are "Busty" and "MILF", almost as if they're all describing the same character (such as how the grouped-together "Fit Girls", "Tan Lines", and "Virgin" all correlate to Lindsey).

If it's not clear by now, the implication is that the succubus in question is Mrs. L, and the reasons for that are clear in the game. She went from being closed and reserved in the original timeline to being sexually open and flirtatious in this new one. Once she gives you the Courage Badge on the first day, you start getting weird, lifelike wet dreams featuring a few of the girls, starting with Kate and Jo before finally herself. Plus, nearly every sexual encounter with her is either revealed to be a dream or implied by her to have not happened, such as the swim tryouts in Poolside Story. And the biggest smoking gun is the dream during Hot My Bot, where when MC gasps "Oh, god", Mrs. L responds "far from it". Maybe it's sexy talk, but maybe she's being honest. In fairness, the ending of that same quest ends with a sexual encounter that does not imply/reveal to have not happened, but as of now, there's no continuation of that storyline to see what Mrs. L's reaction to it is.

There will most likely be a full page dedicated to the theory, but all you really need to know for the sake of this one is that it's all but confirmed that Mrs. L is meant to be a succubus.

Demons vs Angels

An ongoing mystery with Mrs. L is that she's constantly butting heads with some mysterious figure. We never see them, but MC repeatedly comments on how they sound familiar. It's clearly not anyone we'd be close enough with to recognize, with Poolside Story bringing up how MC would know if it was Jo, of all people. So who is it? According to the community: Ria.

We know that Ria, aka "the janitor", exists from the very beginning of the game, yet we only see her once as of now. When is that? During Hooking Up, the same quest that started this whole discussion. When we do meet her in the flesh, she's very kind and sweet to us, and interacting with the Janitor's Closet will reveal that she was one of the few people to not look at MC "like he's dirt". It makes logical sense for a demon's adversary to be an angel, and if kindness and compassion aren't the two stereotypes of an angelic force, I don't know what is.

It's also worth noting that Mrs. L is open about her distaste of Ria, commenting during her Talk and Flirt dialogs that she hates the lemon-scented soap she uses. General colleague bickering or foreshadowing of something more?

Endgame

Alright, so far I've set up the premise that MC is stuck in a feud between an angelic and demonic force while in a purgatory state reminiscent of his old life. So what's the end goal here? Well, In for a Dime, In for a Dollar gives us a clearer insight to that. While eavesdropping on the two in this instance, the voice (whom I'll refer to as "Ria" going forward) accuses Mrs. L of endangering MC and Maya's lives during Big Witch Energy while Mrs. L accuses her of saving Lindsey from her fall at the end of Season 1, with them both then accusing the other of "not playing fair". Not only does this further cement the "angel vs demon" motif, but it implies that there's some sort of game or competition being held between them.

I believe that this "competition" is to see which realm MC will end up in at the end of his time in purgatory: Heaven or Hell, with Mrs. L being the temptress bringing him to darkness while Ria is the guardian bringing him to the light. From the very beginning of the game, MC can either be a nice person or an evil one. He can get revenge on those who wronged him or fix old wounds with those he cares about. Only MC can decide whether he ends up in Heaven or Hell due to his actions, and if Mrs. L is "cheating" by changing the playing field with things like hospitalizing Lindsey or directly influencing his lustful desires, then of course Ria would be angered by this, potentially fighting back by foiling Mrs. L's attempt to kill Lindsey.

Admittedly, what's truly holding this back for me is that we simply don't have enough Ria content to work with. Most of what we know about her is secondhand information, but the fact that she is mentioned a lot could be evidence in and of itself. The game wants us to know that this character exists. The question is why. Is she like Chad and only there as a mysterious void character or is she like Maya, teased all throughout the game until becoming an active part of the cast when the storyline calls for it?

Texter

Having said all of this, it leads to one question that Another Chance fans have had since Day 1 (in-game and in real life): who is the Mysterious Texter? It's entirely possible that it's Ria, as well, given what we know of them. They make it clear that they want MC to use his second chance for good, gaining or losing Love points when he does or does not comply with it. The fact that the Texter has their own stats at all implies that it can't be any of the main cast, so time will tell if Ria gets that liberty. But what I find truly fascinating is the ending of Poolside Story should you decline the swim tryouts with Mrs. L. If you ask the Texter for help afterwards, they'll simply tell you that they can't sway your decisions one way or the other. If it's not Ria herself, then it's most likely a true neutral third party playing Virgil to our Dante.

Speculations

Now to wrap this up with some bits and pieces that don't necessarily have evidence to back it up.

• At the start of this, I said that MC died at the beginning of the game. Given how miserable he is at this stage of his life, having no human connections outside of Jo and having no sense of purpose, it's not out of the realm of possibility that he took his own life or had some sort of health complication (alcohol poisoning, drug overdose, etc.) As sad as it is to say, if his "old life" continued without him in it, nobody would seem to care in the long run besides possibly Jo, but even then, based on what we see and hear, she'd get over it quickly.

• Several of the girls have children during MC's old life, namely Kate and Flora. If, hypothetically, MC literally travelled back in time and ended up with one of those girls instead of their prior husbands, then those children would cease to exist. Frankly, that's fucked up to think about, how someone else's life would literally be over because of butterfly effect shenanigans. So I'd like to think that we're dealing with a separate reality so that innocent bystanders aren't caught in the crossfire.

• As mentioned in the last section, the Mysterious Texter is playing role similar to Virgil in the Divine Comedy, guiding our protagonist on his journey. What was one of those locations on that original journey? Purgatory. Whether or not the theory is true, the Divine Comedy symbolism is too blatant to ignore.