#housemarque

RAHUL KOHLI as ARJUN DEVRAJ

There is something so, so beautiful about a rogue like game where you fight and die over and over again being a story about the cycles of violence particularly relating to toxic masculinity, and how people tell themselves stories about the roles of themselves and the people in their lives without accepting the truth.

Bravo. Loved it.

And it's so, so pretty.

Dismantling this beauty piece by piece—from the fire mechanics to Arjun's psychology, through cinema and literature's lens— is the best thing I could ask for at this point in my life.

My precise location is early into the second biome for those who've done more.

On the surface Soltari is every evil megacorporation ever with zero depth or complexity. But on the surface this was just a mining operation, and even with just the Passage conversations, audio logs and databank entries from the first area(got almost all the logs thanks to taking forever to figure out the Prophet's patterns and thus the bios on every character you can get from there) and a few from the second I can already tell that's not at all what's happening. Echelons II and III each had multiple thousands of crew? Even if Echelon I sent back nothing but lies, there's no way that everything was magically fine and unsuspicious to enable Echelon III to be sent to this hellscape. Lucenite's supposed to make Soltari fortunes beyond imagining, but it's like they sent out the later Echelon missions to die. Like they were...sacrificed to something. To someone.

And the unreliable narrator, really just the potential of one at this early stage, takes care of the rest. The ass-backwards, too-stupid-to-live file note that Soltari considers a psychologist irrelevant to a mission's success chance, that they're so farcically evil that they won't care about their employees' lives even when doing so actively harms their chances of mining Lucenite and becoming the richest people to ever exist, suddenly has not only a get-out-of-stupid-free card but also becomes a potential sign of what's really going on. If this stopped being a mining operation and started being a series of mass sacrifices, then not only would the deaths of the Echelon crew be seen as meaningless(how could any life have meaning compared to the glory of the King?) but someone who's an expert in keeping people sane would indeed be superfluous. But it's not like he'd have a chance at saving anyone, so they sent him anyway. Random crewmembers, the toughest or smartest in their field, Soltari executives, children of the rich who paid passage for themselves; all that matters is whatever is gained by their sacrifice.

And all this indicates something way, way scarier. If Soltari is using the Echelon missions as sacrifices, then either the madness has already spread off Carcosa and infected Soltari's leadership, or it hasn't and they've made the conscious decision to do all this for whatever they think will happen as a result, and boy does the question of which is worse not have an easy answer. I mean, it's not like there's any true safety anyways; the Passage is supposedly a safe zone, but Stack is clearly losing it, and I'm not sure that botanist guy is actually real. I'm on the second biome and I'm already going this lore-crazy: this is some good shit.