Dean May - Week 1 HW

E.Y.Ǝ Divine Cybermancy is a first person shooter set in a distant future dominated by megacorporations and secret orders of cybernetic warrior monks. You play as one such monk, carrying out missions against the antagonizing Federation under the orders of your Mentor or the bloodthirsty Commander Rimanah. The story begins simply enough; your character has amnesia, side characters explain that a mission went poorly, and you go about your business fighting enemy soldiers. A few missions in, the monsters of the metastreumonic force make their first appearance. Research in-game reveals that the monsters are conjured as aspects of specific human emotions; one represents rage, another grief, and so on. This is where inconsistencies begin to appear. Your accompanying sergeant goes unnoticed as others tell you to stop talking to yourself. Said sergeant dies during an escort mission, then returns upon reaching the next segment, handwaving his death in a brief conversation. The skeleton king beneath the surface of Mars offers you a position in his army of the dead (if you accept his offer you die). After a few disjointed missions, the game can end in a few ways. You can follow your commander in instigating a cleansing civil war within your order, you can follow your mentor and kill the commander before he can start the war, or you can betray your order as a whole and join the Federation. No matter which you choose, at the conclusion of the final slaughter you are returned to the home of your order as if nothing has happened. Conversations reveal that your commander died in a failed mission months ago, and you’ve been talking to yourself in his office. No one remembers your mentor. Returning to the place of the final battle, you find an arcane portal that wasn’t there before. Walking through returns you to the beginning of the game. Going by the game’s documentation, it should end there. However, if all three endings are completed, a path to the true ending is revealed: the monster representing guilt, which has taken the form of a woman in white, reveals that she is your wife, who you murdered. Carrying on, she explains that you have been trapped in a hallucination, locked in “cycles of guilt” as you relive old escapades. The only way out is to decide to end your guilt; if you refuse, you are sent to the beginning of the game. Should you accept, you are transported to an otherworldly dimension, trapped on an island that is empty save for an ouroboros-marked door. Enter the door, and you return to the beginning of the game; stop playing, and you win. The game itself, despite being fun, is a poorly translated, buggy mess that I wouldn’t seriously recommend to anyone without a heavy disclaimer, but I can’t help being impressed by how the game handles the concept of replayability – explaining your character’s reappearance at the beginning as the consequence of some outside drive to reach a perceived end, when the only real way to end the game is to walk away. I have yet to escape my cycles of guilt.