#syke

August 6th, 1986 is a really special day, and Demake86 is an homage to that day :^)

The conceit: Pack a Metroidvania into 8^6 pixels! 8x8 pixels per tile, 8x8 tiles per room, 8x8 rooms in the whole contiguous map.

Mermay 2026 day 21: amphibian

Piece of paper

Billy Bones (Tom Hopper) in Black Sails 1x1 I (2014)

Peter Pulkka (Emil Kihlström) in Syke 15x18 Vääränlaista kemiaa [Wrong type of chemistry] 2/ 4 (2023)

He's been Captain America for like a decade. People see him and remember he had played the pinnacle of moral decisions wrapped in spandex. It is painfully obvious that Ransom is the killer the longer the movie goes on, but there's this little voice in the back of your head that goes "but this is Steve Rogers we're talking about! He didn't do this!"

He works alongside Marta, offers to keep her secret of 'killing' Harlan in exchange for his part of the inheritance, and does all these things with an asshole-ish smile and just enough rudeness to keep him distant and suspicious, but this is Steve Fucking Rogers. He didn't do this.

Prosymna is one of three naiad daughters of the Greek river god Asterion. Along with her sisters (Acraea and Euboea), she served as a wet-nurse for Hera. The name Prosymna means "celebrate in song," which explains her harp-like design.

(Prosymna is also a genus of snake!)

Erytheia is one of the three (or four, or seven) Hesperides, nymphs who presided over evening and sunsets. The name Erytheia means "the red one." There doesn't seem to be much mythos surrounding Erytheia specifically, but her name was assigned to a small island northwest of Gilbraltar. (Nowadays it's part of Spain! The city of Cadíz can be found there.)

Preceded by Leucothea, Erytheia is one of the two (possibly 3?) P5X Persona to be rendered as a masculine entity despite being based off a distinctly feminine mythological figure. Not sure why they're doing that, but hey, the designs are great!

Syke is a bit of an oddball. While it would be easy to presume it's meant to represent Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul…Psyche has already appeared as Metis' Persona back in P3 FES, so it's possible this one is a different entity. However, something worth noting: like the other Greek myth Persona in this post, Psyche came in a set of three, having been the youngest of three sisters.

Of what I've been able to dig up, Syke (or Syca) was also the name of a town in ancient Cilicia, a region in southern Anatolia. Another name for Syke was Setos, possibly based off the primordial sea goddess Ceto. Ceto is considered one of the oldest-known deities in Greek myth, and was mother to a myriad of monsters, such as the Graiae and Gorgon sisters.

Meng Po is the Chinese goddess of forgetfulness, tasked with ensuring that souls headed for reincarnation are reborn with no memories. To accomplish this, she serves a memory-wiping soup to souls crossing the Naihe Bridge out of Diyu, a subterranean maze that serves as an equivalent to hell in Chinese mythology.

This lore explains both the bowl and lantern in this Persona's design. The bowl represents the soup, obviously enough, while the lantern can be interpreted as symbolic of "guiding the dead."

Cleodora was one of the three Thriae, prophetic nymphs who lived in the Corycian Cave of Mt. Parnassus. Though the Thriae are often considered to be the "bee-maidens" (women bearing human heads/torsos and bee wings/lower bodies) described in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, it's possible they're different trios; the Thriae predicted the future through throwing stones (pessomancy/mantic pebbles), while the bee-maidens predicted the future through casting lots (cleromancy).