Tag: consequences

PREY – This Article Is A Mimic:

Posted on by in Gaming

In the eternal time-vortex that is the COVID-19 lockdown and pandemic, I realised that I had never finished my playthrough of the game PREY. Considering I’d had a tonne of ideas for articles about the spooky space adventure, I decided it was time to remedy that. However, when loading up my save, I realised that I had left my Morgan Yu in a corridor with a Nightmare and no real way out. So, like any normal person, I decided to watch an in-depth lets-play and scream quietly into my pillow at every jumpscare. I’ll go back and officially finish the game myself one day, maybe as a Halloween stream if that is something that you’d be interested in.

One of the main features of PREY is the enemy type called the Mimic. As its name suggests, it mimics objects in its surroundings and blends in, until you get too close, at which point it tries to eat your face. Personally, my coffee cup becoming sentient and trying to consume the flesh from my bones is on my list of “Things I Never Want to Happen to Me Ever on The Face of The Planet”. Then again, that list isn’t particularly long (yet). Mimic’s can take on the form of nearly any object, forcing you to constantly scan your surroundings for anything that is out of place. That additional coffee cup? Mimic. That oddly angled chair? Mimic. That person trying to kill you? Not a mimic, just a jerk.

…I love my coffee but am not a fan of getting my face consumed.

You are Morgan Yu, a tester of devices known as “Neuromods”, which allow the user to gain new abilities and skills instantly, though it does involve inserting a needle into your eye which is scarier than most of the game’s monsters.  These abilities fall under two categories – Human, such as improved medicine, attack power and hacking ability, or Alien – which gives you access to the Typhon’s abilities like telekinesis, morphing and telepathy. This wide skillset allows the player to choose how they wish to approach each scenario they face, be it with stealth or an overpowered shotgun. My default approach is to try and be as stealthy as possible, then get discovered and panic until the enemies are all dead or I am dead.

Despite the outer-space surroundings and endless swarm of jerks, mimics, and phantoms, it is the atmosphere that makes PREY such a fascinating game. From the moment you start it up, you are consistently shown not to believe your eyes. Your apartment is a simulated environment, that you have been living in for three years, following the same daily routine (a la Groundhog Day). Three years of your memories have been wiped out from the use of Neuromods, and the entirety of Talos One has been overrun with the Typhoon menace. Every shadow seems to contain another monstrosity and you can’t trust what you see or hear.

You’ve heard of tall, dark and handsome. Welcome to massive, horrifying and demonic.

This look into what it’s like to not trust your own senses, gives us all a slightly glimpse into what people with Psychosis deal with every single day. Every individual’s experience with the mental illness is different but there are three main symptoms associated with a psychotic episode:

  1. Hallucinations
  2. Delusions
  3. Confused and Disturbed Thoughts

The mimic’s ability to imitate the world around you, forces you to distrust everyone and everything in sight. Your senses are heightened, every shadow is an enemy lying in wait and every unexplored corridor seems too dangerous to risk exploring. You are surrounded by death and chaos, followed by long stretches of eerie silence where every clang of metal or hiss of air causes you to jump ten feet in the air out of panic. It’s a remarkable combination of panic, distrust, and paranoia, lumped in with a healthy dose of genuine fear.

Nope, nope, nope, nope nope, nope nope NOPE

When the Nightmare shows up for the first time after entering the Arboretum, you catch a glimpse of your greatest threat yet. Sure, the mimics and phantoms all want to kill you, but their existence doesn’t revolve around it. The Nightmare, however, only has one sole purpose in life – to hunt you down and tear you limb from limb. It really should get a better hobby, I’m just saying. Try fishing or something.

These things are fast, strong, and capable of swiping your head off with one hit. No matter how powered up you are, these things are more than able to take you out. Those Neuromods I mentioned earlier? Yeah, the more of the “Alien” ones that you use, the more the Nightmare will show up. It’s not worth fighting these guys. It’s a waste of ammo for a one-time reward, with a high mortality rate.

GET BACK SATAN

Encountering your first nightmare, you’d probably assume that it’s just a set-piece and that the abomination will probably turn up as a boss fight near the end of the game. A logical assumption but an incorrect one. These things will stalk you across Talos One, destroying everything and everyone that is in their way. To quote the in-game description – “If all else fails, run.”

Another aspect of PREY that I absolutely MUST mention, is it’s ending. The grand finale of the game has you facing down an enormous Typhon called an Apex, which is threatening to consume the entirety of Talos One. You have the choice of trying to escape, neutralising the Typhon, or setting off the station’s self-destruct sequence and sacrificing yourself. Your actions earlier on in the game, will dictate whether you survive your stay on Talos One.

…Please don’t eat me

Throughout the game, when you encounter other humans, you don’t have to kill them. You are provided with plenty of non-lethal options to deal with your non-supernatural foes. After all, everyone on Talos One is also fighting back against the Typhons. They just don’t want their coffee cup to eat them, is that too much to ask? Each person you spare or kill, whether you choose to free or rescue those in danger, as well as the ending you choose – will be laid out in front of you in a post-credit scene.

The whole game was an experiment. Morgan Yu, your player character, is a captured Typhon entity with Morgan’s memories implanted into it. Every part of the storyline that you played through, was a memory and a test to see whether Typhon’s were capable of developing empathy and human emotions. Dependent on your choices throughout the game, the experiment is either deemed a success or a failure. If you fail, then you die.

Is anyone else getting a James Bond villain from Alex?

However, if you succeed, then Alex (Morgan’s brother) reveals something to you. The Typhons have already invaded Earth. The efforts you went through to contain the Typhon threat, were for nothing. However, by showing that you as a Typhon can develop empathy and emotions, proves that peace could be brokered between the remaining members of humanity and the invading Typhons. It is up to you to choose whether you want to be that bridge between the groups as a hybrid of the two.

We all know that I love games that have consequences for your actions. It forces you to care a bit more about the world you are exploring and the character’s you interact with. That fear and paranoia that you experience throughout the game becomes tenfold when you realise that your anxious trigger finger could be the end of a genuinely good person’s life.

Anyways, apologies that this article took so bloody long! I made it a bit longer to make up for the delay, so hopefully it was all that you were hoping for. If you have other games that you’d like to see my take on (eventually), leave them in the comments or message me on Twitter (@OurMindGames).

CaitlinRC.

Stories Untold – We All Must Face What We Have Done:

Posted on by in Gaming

As we have covered many times over the last year, I am not a fan of horror games. Any enjoyment that could be derived from being scared, is ruined by the paralysing anxiety that accompanies it. I tend to avoid any and all horror like the plague – better than safe than sorry. However, when it comes to psychological horror, I’m a bit more open minded. Psychology has always fascinated me. People often like to joke that those who like to study the inner workings of the human psyche, are either wanting to understand the “unstable” or are “unstable” themselves. Obviously, it’s a whole load of rubbish but there is a grain of truth in there.

Humanity, as a species, strives to understand what we often deem impossible to comprehend. We quantify and label, document and test everything and anything we can get our grubby little hands on. There’s so much we know about the world around us yet so little we understand about how our own minds work. With words alone, we can change a crowd into a mob, start a rebellion, incite cruelty and bring joy to those who seek it. I’ve never been good at understanding emotions, particularly my own. Anger, hatred and cruelty are all foreign concepts to me.

So, when a game claims to be a psychological horror, I am curious as to what hidden truths it will strive to extract from the gold mine that is the human mind.

Stories Untold, is one such game. Presented as a four-part episodic experience in the style of old school text adventure games, it weaves such an intricate web that when the finale arrives, it knocks you flat on your back and holds you there – controlling every rise and fall of your chest. Even when you know what is coming, repeat playthroughs allow you to notice every subtle link and minute detail that builds such a vivid picture in your mind, it’s as if you are standing there, watching it all unfold in front of your eyes but are powerless to do anything to stop it. I love it.

Now, if you haven’t played it and want to do so without any spoilers – stop reading now, go play it and then come back with the experience fresh in my mind. Do come back though, I’ll be lonely otherwise. For those of you who are still reading, lets talk spoilers. The first three chapters each seem to have their own standalone story, meanwhile the final chapter links all of them together. I’m going to talk about each chapter in turn. The four chapters are titled – The House Abandon, The Lab Conduct, The Station Process and The Last Session.

Don’t pick up the phone. You never know who is on the other end.

The first episode, The House Abandon, follows the more traditional style of text adventures. You, the player, drive up to your family’s holiday home. After starting up the generator and unlocking the front door, you’re given the chance to explore the building – reminiscing about your childhood and the fond memories that the old walls hold. Eventually, you find your way to your bedroom and find your old computer – that your father dug out of the attic, along with a copy of a very familiar game, the House Abandon. Upon booting up the game, the power goes out. When everything flickers back to life, it’s all changed. The welcoming house becomes filled with stains, broken windows, dead carcasses and ominous writing on the walls. Instead of a kind note from your father, the note in your hand spits cruel, terrifying and hateful messages – to the point where it seems to burn into the palm of your hand.

A phone rings, breaking the uneasy silence that you have fallen into. You hear breathing down the phone and soon you realise that you are not alone anymore. Creaking floorboards, flickering lights and blaring alarms all echo around you, as if the house you are sat in, playing the game, is the same one as in the game itself… You struggle to distinguish between the actions of your player exploring the house and those of the individual sat controlling those movements. Negative emotions and memories pour out of the protagonist like a tidal wave, culminating in the door behind you creaking open. The computer accuses you of an unknown crime, demanding that you admit that it was all your fault. It barrages you with insults, hurling abuse until you at last type the words “It was all my fault”. It’s response? “Finally.”

Not an ominous setup at all.

In The Lab Conduct, you play as Mr Aition – a volunteer who has agreed to take part in a series of experiments conducted by Dr Daniel Alexander. These experiments are performed upon an object called “artefact 23”, which was recovered from a crash site for further study. Locked in the isolated laboratory, you use various machines such as an X-Ray, sound wave generators and high-powered lasers on the object. At first glance, the artefact appears to be an animal heart of some kind, whose heartbeat we restart. However, upon exposure to extreme frequency sound waves, it explodes and reveals a metallic sphere.

As a child, you’re always told not to stare at the sun, or it’ll hurt your eyes. Well, in Stories Untold, don’t stare at the hovering metallic sphere or it’ll knock you over, draw some blood and “connect” you to its inner core. You know, just normal things. Once connected, you walk through the spheres memories – reliving the crash, reaching out to a silhouette for help and waking up in a hospital bed, covered in wires and recovering from a torture session. When you pull out the wires, an alarm goes off. You, Mr Aition, hear that alarm as well. Yet again, the events seem to be occurring at the same time. Once you instruct the creature to leave their room, Dr Alexander recognises that you are causing this and begs for you to stop. Yet, you do not stop. You release all the spheres. They converge on you and as the world fades from around you, the last words of Dr Alexander ring in your ears – “Someday Mr Aition, this will haunt you.”

Don’t go out in the snow alone. People don’t come back.

The Station Process is a chapter that leans into the love of puzzle-solving that echoes in the hearts of most gamers. Using a microfilm reader with a guide on it, you, only known as “James”, must decrypt a series of signals and submit the correct code in order to pass on the relevant messages. The puzzles involve decrypting Morse Code, observing patterns and adjusting frequencies. Nerd that I am, I adore them. After all, what’s the point of studying Computer Science if you can’t show off your understanding everything occasionally? As you complete the puzzles, your fellow communication tower operators talk about something coming, attacking supply teams and ripping entire cabins out of the earth.

One of the signals you intercept is a distress signal that details how the rest of the world has been collapsed by the creatures that now stalk the mountain range that your cabins are situated on. They beg you to lock your doors and stay inside, but fate has other plans for you. When the main transmitter is knocked out of place, it’s your job to go fix it. When you’ve done so, you hear the voice of Station 2, a kind female voice, seemingly going into shock – unable to feel her legs and just wanting to rest. You can’t help her; you can’t help anyone. When you finally get back to the cabin, it’s not the one you left. It’s the bedroom from The House Abandon.

One of these things is not like the other, one of these things does not belong.

Clearly, there’s an overarching plot between these episodes. These lingering threads are all pulled together in The Last Session. As the opening credits play, they pause and pull back to reveal that you’ve been watching a TV show. Your character, James Aition, is wheeled by Dr Alexander into an empty room with a cassette recorder and prompted to try and recover the memories of what happened before he arrived in hospital. It is revealed that you were involved in a nasty car accident and had been in a coma for two weeks prior to the events of the game. Your last three attempts at recalling the accident had ended in panic, with the truth being mixed in with fantasy such that you couldn’t tell which was which.

The game proceeds to take you through the previous chapters. You return to the communication tower and examine the microfilm – which now displays a police report about the traffic accident you were in. Your sister, Jennifer, was trapped and critically injured and the other driver was found dead, with an empty bottle of whisky in his hand and stinking of alcohol. However, upon solving a puzzle, you hear a testimony of a friend of said driver, claiming that the guy had never spoken about alcohol before and would never imbibe like that – especially considering he was a former police officer. He accuses James of foul play.

Never been a fan of hospitals. Don’t think I ever will be.

We burst into the emergency room, to James’s heart stopping on the gurney and a haemorrhage threatening to destroy any chances of resuscitating him. Upon the doctor’s orders, you restart your own heart and drill into your skull – saving your life. As the drill approaches, you startle awake in the computer desk from The House Abandon. It details a leaving party being hosted by your family, to celebrate James going travelling with his friends abroad for several months in the new year. After having a few drinks and being gifted a nice bottle of whisky from his dad, Jennifer asks James whether he can give her a lift home. Unfortunately, you can’t say no to this choice (trust me, I tried).

As you stagger to the car, forget to take the handbrake off the car and drive faster than is safe, even when sober – Jennifer slowly realises that James is drunk. She begs him to slow down, to pull over, to just stop, but he does not listen. He goes faster, eventually crashing directly into oncoming traffic. When he awakens, he drags himself out of the car – leaving his sister in the burning wreckage. Terrified of going to jail and wrecking his reputation, James decides to frame the other driver by pouring alcohol on him, removing his fingerprints from the bottle and planting it in the dead driver’s car. When the police arrive, James collapses from his injuries and wakes up in the hospital room with Dr Alexander. The doctor takes James back to the TV room, stating that he will report what James said to the police.

Sometimes telling the truth, is the hardest thing to do.

More than anything, Stories Untold is about consequences. You must live with the consequences of your actions. Your choices affect more than just your life. They ripple, like pebbles on a lake’s surface, spreading further and further out until they form tidal waves that threaten to consume the lives of so many. In this case, James’s actions caused the death of his sister, the grief of his family, as well as the death and attempted framing of an innocent man. His panic at reliving what he had done, his refusal to accept the horrifying reality of his memories – all these lead us on this journey through the shattered remains of a young man’s mind.

Anyways, I hope you’ll all think a little about the stories that you tell and whether they are stories that you’d want people to hear about or not. If not, make positive changes. I believe in you. Like, comment and follow the site – both here and on Twitter @OurMindGames for future articles.

Much love,

CaitlinRC

Dishonored – The Temptation Of The Outsider

Posted on by in Gaming

The Dishonored series has always been of intrigue to me. It was the first series that I watched a full let’s play of on YouTube and a game world that fascinated me. I spent countless hours digging through the lore and dialogue, searching for answers and a deeper understanding of the events that occurred in the game. However, the concept of Dishonored is a bit hard to explain – especially considering its success and sequels, as well as the countless DLC’s.

In my mind, Dishonored is the result of locking Telltale, Assassins Creed, Hitman and Thief in a lift and refusing to let them out until they produced a profitable game idea. It is a perfect blend of assassination, stealth, chaos (looking at players like Mike Channell from OutsideXbox) and the consequences of player’s actions. It is these “consequences” that we will be focusing on in this article.

Every decision we make in our day to day lives has an impact on the world around us. For those familiar with mathematics, Life Is Strange or Until Dawn – the concept of Chaos Theory tends to be what springs to mind when a game warns us about our actions having consequences. It is a concept that tends to be beaten within an inch of its life in most forms of media, but some games do handle it quite delicately and Dishonored is one of these.

Until Dawn is a famous example of the use of Chaos Theory in video games.

In Dishonored, you are provided with special powers from the Outsider, who observes your actions through the world and judges you. He provides you with the means to bring the world around you to its knees, to bathe the streets with blood – or to silently slip past unknowing citizens, working in the shadows to achieve your goal without a drop of blood spilt. Kingdoms will prosper or collapse based on your decisions – will you let the rats consume the city in your quest for vengeance?

Depending on your actions during a level, you are assigned a chaos level. This is given a value of either High or Low, with the previous level’s chaos factoring into the contents of the next level. For example, if you use your powers to murder many guards in several horrific ways (looking at you Devouring Swarm), then there will be more guards, more rats and more Weepers – making your next mission more difficult.

The ending you receive at the game’s climax is also decided by the total chaos you caused throughout the game. This chaos level is deemed by your choices throughout the game, for example, if you take the non-lethal route of dispatching your targets – such as wiping their memories or sending them to work in their own silver mines as slaves (I didn’t say the non-lethal options were better), then you will receive a lower chaos level than if you blew them up with a whale oil tank.

The Outsider – some argue that he is the villain, the enabler of chaos. However, he is just an observer. Watching you.

A big flaw in a lot of games that claim to be influenced by player choice is that it limits the player to two or three linear pathways that they can choose from. So, gamers tend to be stuck on one specific route for the entirety of the game, such as a “Good” or “Evil” run. Now, this would be ok, if all the enemies you came across were clearly evil. Then, you wouldn’t feel a great deal of guilt or remorse when you sliced your knife through their neck. However, some of the people you come across are just guards doing their jobs or plague survivors trying to make it through the day. Do they deserve to die?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the plot of the Dishonored games, let me explain. In the first game, Corvo (you) is falsely imprisoned for the murder of the empress and the kidnapping of her daughter, Emily (who is eventually confirmed to be his daughter). You are sentenced to death but are broken out of prison by some people still loyal to you. You then proceed on a journey to find Emily and get your revenge against those who caused your downfall.

The second game sees Emily on the throne and deposed by a witch called Delilah, who turns either Emily or Corvo to stone (depending on who the player chooses to play as) and the remaining character goes on a journey to find those responsible for the coup and reclaim the throne. You as Corvo or Emily, have been Dishonored (roll credits) and seek to right the wrong against you. However, how you go about this is entirely up to you.

Dishonored 2 lets you choose between the young Empress or her father (the protagonist from the first game).

The chaos system in Dishonored is often considered a “punishment” to players, with many complaining about it restricting their gameplay options. However, this is not true. The Outsider acts like the Devil but instead of convincing Adam and Eve to eat an apple, he gives you the means to bend the world to your will – a tempting offer, especially considering how quickly situations can go awry. Yet as a player, you do not have to choose the evil path. In the second game, you don’t even have to accept the Outsider’s Mark and can play the entire game without any supernatural hijinks.

Throughout the game, you are offered opportunity after opportunity to take the easier, but the lethal route, yet there is always another path. Players who fall to the temptation, only have themselves to blame for the poor ending they get. As gamers, we have become accustomed to violence being the only route through a story, with games providing us with various weapons to mow down the countless enemies without batting an eye. Dishonored challenges this idea, actively rewarding or punishing you dependent on your actions.

That sweet little girl Emily you rescue from The Golden Cat? How she rules over her kingdom at the end of the first game, is strongly influenced by how you dispatch your enemies. If you use diplomacy and only kill when necessary, Emily will learn wisdom and insight. However, if you butcher all those who stand in your way – she will use whatever means necessary to get what she wants, becoming a ruthless dictator over innocent people. You are the catalyst that sparks the change in the game world, be that for good or evil. Dishonored gives you nowhere to hide from your actions and for that I adore it.

Emily Kaldwin – Who will she become?

After all, your actions in the real world have long-reaching consequences. If you commit a crime, you are punished for it. When you inflict pain upon others, society will judge you accordingly. As much as we tend to go to games for escapism, I don’t think we should be entirely free of consequences – an idea that the Dishonored series tackles head-on. The choices we make affect the world around us as well as our loved ones and our own psyche. Throughout the games, you can morph Corvo and Emily from being a wronged individual just seeking to reclaim what is rightfully theirs, to a horrific creature who tore through hundreds of innocents for no real reason other than bloodlust.

Anyways, that’s the Dishonored series for you. It hands you a knife and lets you decide what you use it for. What did you do? What other games would you like me to talk about? Leave feedback in the comments section, hit that follow button and follow me on Twitter @OurMindGames for all the updates!

Thanks,

CaitlinRC