Let’s class this up with some retrospective posts. Like The Reconstruction, I Miss the Sunrise had a mammoth cast, so let’s try to make sense of their purpose in the narrative.
Inquiry Crew
Ros Ouranos
Ros is a weird mix of blank-slate player avatar and a protagonist with her own agency. I mentioned at the beginning that the game tries to balance the demands of a customizable personality versus a straightforward narrative, and I’m still not sure how well it does so. In the beginning I can influence almost everything she says, but Ros increasingly becomes her own person as time goes on, to the point where she makes the important decisions to withhold information about Lazarus, pursue the superweapon, and duel Lazarus on her own, without my input. I’m only allowed to influence her at specific, isolated points – the Important Choices™ that never end up mattering for the most part. Regardless of which ending I pick, she’s the one who makes a big, preset speech about her motives and philosophy, with no input from me – not even variation based on my past actions with her. Ros provides the illusion of control but is more of her own character, I think, especially in the endgame.
What is that character? Well, let’s see. She was the product of a science project sponsored by Thomas, which is what gave her her time dilation ability. She had her memory wiped, so she’s a blank slate when she wakes up on the Inquiry. Though I am allowed to make her act reluctant at first, she very quickly becomes a diehard loyalist for the cause, but this mostly manifests in her being extremely passive and doing everything she’s told. This changes in episode 4, where, in the absence of a commanding officer, she suddenly gains very strong opinions on how she should assist the war effort and what should be done with Lazarus. She is so devoted to the cause that she is willing to break the letter of the law (Sorenson’s orders to have her sit on her hands) to uphold the spirit of the Inquiry‘s ideals (peace and order). She’s devastated when the Inquiry is destroyed.
She is very attached to Lazarus and acts like they were actual family who grew up together despite the fact that she should have no concept of that and also that her only interactions with Lazarus involve him threatening to kill her. She seems extremely committed to dealing with Lazarus personally, without interference from anyone else, to the point that she hides all her conversations with him from the rest of the crew and goes behind Sorenson’s back to duel him personally. We’re allowed to choose the reason why, but none of the possible motives are very convincing. The idea that makes the most sense to me is that it’s a matter of respect for Lazarus – she wants to give him the dignity of being killed by someone who understands him rather than just impersonally vaporizing him with her army. Why she has this respect for a violent murderer I don’t know, but I don’t see why else she’d go to such lengths. Perhaps she identifies with him? Which would say a lot of things about her, honestly. She’s certainly very sad when she kills him.
She can choose to accept the Progenitor’s plan and become the god of the new universe. She says it’s because the world isn’t worth saving and that she’s sick of being used as a tool, even though the whole point of the plan is ostensibly to save the world and totally involves her being used in yet another scheme, so I don’t understand why she says that. If she opposes the plan, she is pretty quiet during the mission itself but volunteers to go on a suicide (?) mission afterward under the belief it’s her God-given purpose in life, and also something something optimism for the future.
I think it’s clear that the incisive moment for Ros is Lazarus’ appearance. After spending the rest of the game being a mute doormat she’s suddenly bursting with opinions and independent action. Her history is also unique to her and thus unrelatable to the player; this is something unique to her that she must deal with on her own terms. There therefore must be something the developer was trying to do or say there, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what. Ros is given just enough personality and agency to get really involved with Lazarus, but not enough for us to understand why. She just sort of does it out of the blue. Was it to draw a parallel between them? Or the opposite, to contrast them? Was it just to prove that Ros could be capable on her own in the first place?
I think, as it stands, Ros is too far in-between the fixed and open player character extremes. Is she her own character telling us her own story, or is she a vehicle for our control on the narrative? Either one could work, but you’d have to commit to one instead of waffling back and forth. Right now she veers more towards the former, except her personality is the most generic inoffensive thing ever because we’re still ostensibly supposed to project onto her. She could make for a good story if she was allowed to be more overtly her own character – she’s an artificial being created to serve someone else’s purposes, that’s a well-tread sci-fi premise you could do something with. How does she really feel about being used, even if it’s for a pretty objectively good purpose? What are her own wants and desires? What does Lazarus really mean to her? Does she drink his kool-aid and think she’s a supreme being too? There are a number of avenues you could explore.
Alternatively, of course, we could have a more heavily-branching plot that is more receptive to her decisions. Have her rapport with the crew actually be influenced by her decisions instead of automatically ending up at “best friends forever”. Do you trust them? Do you like them? How do you feel about being used for this? Are you content to follow orders or do you want to do your own investigations? Do you trust Sorenson? Do you even agree with the Inquiry Project’s ideals at all? There are a lot of opportunities for interesting decisions and moral quandaries here – far more interesting than “do you save the terminally ill kid” or “do you take the time to beat the boss the easy way or the super-easy BUT EVIL way”. This would probably require a much more complex plot, possibly even multiple complete branches, but the story needs more complexity anyway.
But in terms of the game we have, Ros is just kinda bland. The developer gave up on giving the player real agency midway through, but couldn’t come up with a complete character to fill the void.
Marie Sarazon
The developer considers Marie to be the true protagonist of the story, or at least the deuteragonist. I don’t think I agree with that assessment – I’d say that distinction goes to Tezkhra. It’s true that Marie does get something of a character arc within the main storyline itself instead of having to get all her development from the side conversations, but it’s pretty simple and is abruptly truncated since the conclusion gets offloaded to the optional chats anyway.
Marie was a member of the Breach, the exodus from the ravaged planet Earth. Her sister Alicia didn’t make the cut, but snuck aboard anyway and the sisters were separated after that. She feels… guilty, about this? I think? Despite being there when humanity blew itself up the first time, she only talks about pre-Breach life in terms of vague, wistful reminiscences and has no opinions on or insight into the conflict in episode 4. The most important thing about her backstory is the sister guilt, presumably because she’s a wimmins and women are all about emotion and family and stuff, right? She finds Alicia in episode 4 and is smotheringly overprotective of her until Alicia shows that she’s top dog among her own crew and can hold her own.
Marie’s personality changes at the drop of a hat; I get the impression the developer had no idea what he wanted her to be like at first and only settled into a defined personality later. She keeps Ros in line with murder threats in the prologue, then as early as the next episode they’re buddies and all her hostility is directed at other people, but then in the optimist “pessimist” ending she reveals she apparently considers Ros her property and once again tries to cow her with murder threats, so I guess she’s a fair-weather friend.
Despite this, Marie is the emotional center of the team. She’s the only extrovert in the initial crew, she keeps things together whenever Sorenson gets a terminal case of the stupids, and she’s the first to speak out when Thomas tries to kidnap Ros (presumably because he’s stealing her property). Marie starts off as an uncomfortably stereotypical “woman” role – overemotional, fixated on a personal relationship, acts the stern mother hen to everyone. Though she grows out of the “overemotional” part pretty quick, the rest of her character still feels very much defined by her gender. Though I am grateful she is at least defined by a familial relationship rather than a romantic one, she’s still pretty stock and stereotypical.
I’m not even clear what her character arc is supposed to be. She spends 70% of the game just waffling about her emotions before abruptly accomplishing her goal the first time she actually tries, then her development gets rushed through at a breakneck pace and she ends up realizing she needs to step back and let Alicia be her own person, then after all that she just lets Alicia disappear on her again without a word and gives up on everything? It’s dormant for so long and then you blink and it’s over. I do like how discovering Alicia is made to look like the endpoint but is actually the true beginning of her development, but in order for that to work discovering Alicia needs to not actually be the endpoint; recruiting Alicia should have happened much earlier. In episode 2 Marie says she plans to use the Typelog databases to search for Alicia, so maybe then? That would make episode 2 not complete filler, and would even give us an emotional subplot to contrast with the cerebral Typelog atmosphere, which would be good.
Marie could have been a lot more. With Sorenson so tight-lipped, she’s our biggest window into the time of the Breach. I’ll talk about this more in the Final Thoughts, but we really, really needed to see what the earlier stages of society were like, and a Marie flashback would have been the perfect opportunity for that. She should have everything to do with the Typelog-EROS war; she’s seen it before, hasn’t she? Why does Sorenson, who I’m still not even sure is actually pre-Breach, get the dramatic exposition speech and not her? Instead of her being too traumatized or apathetic about political matters because of her frail womanly constitution, she should have been an active participant in the philosophical and political sections. What does one of the originals think about this? How does she cope with the weight of all this knowledge? Can she come up with any solutions to the problem? Those are all vital, important questions during episode 4 that could have added additional insight to the story, but instead her pre-Breach wisdom ends at really liking sunrises. In addition, her teaching Ros about pre-Breach life could place her in a mentor role to Ros, which would justify their being attached at the hip and allow Marie to develop in directions other than just the incredibly simple family plot.
Rami Ransend
Medical doctor for the Inquiry. Discovered Tezkhra and performed his augmentations. Other than that, he is pretty much a nonentity. He has no opinions on any of the major plot events and makes no important decisions. I believe he exists just so the developer can have a Witty™ character to spice up long scenes. He does sound a bit like a meeker and less dickish Qualstio. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, I suppose – not everyone can be a mover and shaker – but if a character could be removed from the story without affecting anything, that does strike me as poor writing.
He has more of a personality in his optional conversations, where we learn that apparently being a cyborg makes him personify machines and leads to Deep Thoughts about whether we’re treating machines with dignity. This is later revealed to be an extension of the setting’s cyborg racism, as he thinks people view him exactly the same way they do machines so he gets defensive when they treat machines badly. That sure sounds like some internalized ableism more than anything else. While the basic premise is a standard sci-fi plot, it’s a cliché one that does not make sense here. He also constantly rambles about everything having a “purpose” and there being a “natural order of things” but that comes out of nowhere and makes no sense as a belief that would exist in their society so I have no idea what the game is trying to say with that. It’s particularly weird for a doctor, of all people, to be a fatalist – if you care so much about the natural order why don’t you just let people die, Mr. Lifesaver?
Granted, he did need something to fill the chats, and I can’t think of much else to give him. He could have served an expository role, perhaps, talking about Tezkhra and Lazarus? It would make sense for him to feel guilty about Lazarus and conflicted about enabling Tezkhra. I’m also extremely disappointed more wasn’t done with the fact that saving Tezkhra means he knows Lessers can be good peop… er, he knows Lessers can be people. He should have more strongly and consistently opposed the rest of the team’s racism, which would give him more presence and foreshadow the final reveal. Taking all these things together, perhaps he would have been better off taking Marie’s “emotional heart” role? Still cliché for a doctor to fill that role, but it would work.
He ends the game by achieving ultimate doormat status and hopping aboard Marie’s apathy train, but will presumably help her investigate Tezkhra’s notes in the sequel. If it ever comes out.
Tezkhra
Tezkhra.
You already know my feelings on him, I think. He’s a knockoff Spock clone who only superficially acts cerebral and emotionless but is actually the pettiest and most emotional member of the cast whenever something can help or hurt him. He’s a cowardly drama queen who puts on massive productions of how very guilty he feels when his technology is misused, but never lifts a finger to actually mitigate the damage, instead choosing to run away and force other people to clean up his mess every time. Despite constantly hogging the spotlight to the point he’s practically the protagonist, this never changes. He never atones for his mistakes, he never changes his outlook, he never develops as a character. Supposedly his suppression breaks in episode 3, but his behavior doesn’t seem to change at all.
He was originally a lesser lacertian who Rami found irradiated half to death in a ruined laboratory. He somehow had the gift of speech (let’s assume it’s a bodyhopper thing) and convinced Rami to not only keep him alive but modify his body to be more like a regular lacertian’s. Because he’s a special snowflake who gets everything he wants, the surgery and cybernetics worked even though they shouldn’t have. From there he became a theoretical physicist and devised an energy collection mechanism he called “Stardraw” which seems to be at least partially magic but I can’t tell because the game never explains the mechanics in detail or much at all, really. Typelog steals his schematics and uses them in their brain uploading project; ignorant of EROS’ sabotage, Tez believes the Stardraw components were the reason for the failure. He delivers an impassioned speech on research ethics and how he feels personally responsible for this, followed by running off and leaving Typelog to fix the mess on their own. EROS also uses his tech to create a Death Star, which he wrings his hands over but does nothing to stop or mitigate. Finally, the Progenitor uses Stardraw tech to construct his compression device, which just makes Tez flip out and run off (again) even though he’s the only person who could possibly know how to deactivate it. His cowardice forces a quarter of the crew to kill themselves defending and disposing of the device, not that he notices or cares or will ever get comeuppance for it.
He is also hounded by The Black One, who eventually kills him, but who even knows what the deal is between them. He’s the same type of body-hopping energy ghost, presumably, but that raises more questions than it answers.
I really don’t understand what purpose Tez serves to the narrative, as a character. He’s nothing but a delivery mechanism for a plot device. He never interacts with that plot device in a meaningful way or uses his unique talents to accomplish anything. The Lesser reveal could have been interesting as I mentioned previously, but it’s completely meaningless thanks to the joke that everyone already knew. That could all be forgiven if he had some kind of character arc with some thematically important message, like I outlined at the end of episode 3, but he’s a static character. The only way to fix him is to either completely change his personality to make room for character subplots that aren’t present in the current narrative.
…Or you could rework him into a villain, which I think could work really well. The Progenitor is an extremely boring villain we have zero emotional attachment to; wouldn’t it be so much more interesting for the universe-ending extremist to be someone we already knew? He could be the Havan, a character we initially assume is on our side only for him to snap and reveal that actually he’s not so heroic after all. The callousness, the arrogance, the obsession with scientific progress, the Stardraw knowledge – he already has every single one of the Progenitor’s character traits! He should be the one using Stardraw tech to further some lunatic plan that might actually work – especially because the plausibility seems to rely on latent energy stuff, and guess who has a much better claim to understanding that than the Progenitor? And that would give the final choice a lot more weight: instead of choosing whether or not to help a crazy man who appeared out of nowhere and murdered all your acquaintances, it’s choosing whether to trust your friend or backstab him. It’s perfect! The only problem is that The Reconstruction’s ending had him still on good terms with Rami and Marie, but that conversation is already impossible in the story we got, so why let that hold you back?
Mahk Sikohlon
Mahk is a member of the Sikohlon, an insular group of weapon crafters and traders. He is sold to the Inquiry crew by the president of the company, and though initially hostile, he quickly warms up to the rest of the crew and eventually pledges full loyalty to them.
His main purpose seems to be to provide the government-mandated quota of Witty™ dialogue; he is by far the snarkiest character. However, I think this actually works well and fits his character. It makes perfect sense that he would feel angry and uncertain after practically being sold into slavery and that he would direct that anger at his new coworkers as a coping mechanism. It must be terrifying to have lived such a rote, insular life surrounded by family only to be suddenly thrust into a new role surrounded by unfamiliar faces, and betrayed by someone he thought he could trust absolutely, no less. Why should he play nice? What reason does he have to trust these people?
Unfortunately the game never seems to acknowledge this angle. His objections are always portrayed as comic relief, as if he chose the job willingly and is just being grouchy about his new coworkers and not that he was forced into this without warning. That has an easy fix, though, if we remove the oh-so-hilarious exchange of Ivoronus dropping this on him in his introduction and instead say he consented to this. It still makes sense that he would be nervous and frightened at being placed in a new environment, but this would remove the uncomfortableness of the setup.
In Mahk’s introduction I said I would judge whether I could see him becoming the Mahk of The Reconstruction, and… I don’t think I can, honestly. It seems like his character arc was supposed to be about him gaining maturity and sanding off his rough edges, but it didn’t do that at all. He does learn to question the Sikohlon and the weapon trade, but he never gets over his dependency problems or general whininess. His first scene involves him blubbering about how he can’t bear to leave his family, and his last scene is him blubbering about how he can’t bear to lose his friends so he’s going to go off on a wild goose chase to find the only one he still has a lead on. Nothing has changed there. I can’t see how he goes from distraught childish loser to composed stoic father figure. Honestly I can’t even see him devising his pacifistic fanaticism; he becomes disillusioned to weapons and fighting after Colony 503b, yes, but he never makes the leap to “all fighting is bad”. The war in episode 4 could have done it, but he has absolutely no reaction to anything in that episode! The game just completely forgot about his development after episode 3.
But if we ignore The Reconstruction, I actually think Mahk works pretty okay as-is. He’s a disruptive element that challenges the crew’s interpersonal skills, and he provides not only an outside perspective but an insight into one of the major factions. I just wish that we had gotten more of the latter – he’d be perfect for spilling some of the Machinatorium’s secrets, but his personal subplot has come and gone and they’re still just as opaque as they were at the beginning.
Neff Crenshaw
Too good for this world. Neff was a brilliant technician who designed Ros’ command interface and created a private communication network for the Inquiry after they went to war with Typelog. He was a weird anomaly among the cast, in that I’m pretty sure he was the only scientist who was portrayed 100% positively while still being allowed to do science. While everyone else had to either renounce science, adopt a kind of vague watered-down “science”, or be demonized, Neff was allowed to nerd out about IT all he liked and even criticize Rami’s “machines are people!” lunacy without being turned into an absurd caricature. He displayed a boundless optimism for scientific progress and worked tirelessly to help everyone out, especially in episode 4 when the crew (thought they) had to track down Lazarus. I can confidently state that he was my favorite minor character, possibly even favorite character period. And then he blew himself up for no reason. I’ll just assume Ral rejecting his life’s work made him decide life wasn’t worth living anymore.
Chac Tlaloc
The only survivor of a ship that was wrecked by the Shine. He lost his legs in the explosion and fell into a deep depression fueled by survivor’s guilt. Ros reaches out to him and designs prosthetic legs for him. From there, he works with Ros to overcome his depression… and fails, joining Neff’s suicide pact in the end because he feels he doesn’t deserve to live.
I don’t think there’s much I can say about Chac that I haven’t already. He was a good, poignant character who gave us great insight into the emotional state of everyone devastated by the Shine (it’s pretty weird and disappointing that no one else in the crew seemed to have any problems, now that I think about it) and I liked the tact and nuance with which his depression was handled… right up until the end, where it all fell to pieces. I don’t know what the developer was thinking, but a depression victim sacrificing themselves is not a fulfilling, heroic resolution, it’s a tragedy. The only satisfying resolution to his arc is for him to survive and overcome his illness, but instead he’s claimed by it.
Luke Martinez
Kill it with fire.
There is one notable thing I can say about him, and that’s that his personality undergoes a very abrupt change at the end of episode 3. Is it too much to hope that the developer realized his archetype was really messed up and changed it to be more tasteful? Still, kill it with fire.
Deirdre Renea
A member of Purity Point, a colony that got nuked or something and also removed all their stasis tanks, causing their brains to turn to mush. Deirdre found an overlooked stasis tank and used it to stay sane until the Inquiry crew found her and took her in. Also she wasn’t fully grown before being exposed to emitters, so she’s stuck in a child’s body. She mentions once that this makes people take her less seriously and that annoys her, then this fact is never explained or brought up again. She becomes interested in science and takes it as her mission to save the other colonists, but for some reason spends all her personal conversations waffling over other stuff until they deteriorate too much to be saved. Except in the ending it looks like they’re not nearly as far gone as the doctors said so who even knows.
I have no idea why Deirdre is here. She’s our liaison to Purity Point, and a potential insight into the effects of emitters and stasis tanks… but none of that ever ends up mattering. Purity Point is a dead end, a mystery with no answer, and so is she. You could remove Deirdre from the game and it wouldn’t matter. She doesn’t even have a character arc, and her approach to “science” is so godawfully condescending and childish. She is childish, really – which is really weird when one of her conflicts is supposed to be that she doesn’t want to be seen as childish. But she never changes her behavior and is never given a real opportunity to demonstrate responsibility, just “sorry kid you took too long, might as well give up”. She’s an interesting idea, but she just… never goes anywhere.
One way I think she could work is as a contrast to Chac. If the colony’s collapse was due to the Shine rather than EROS’ machinations, she could be in a similar situation to Chac but choose to stay optimistic and fight for solutions instead of falling into despair. There could even be bonus interactions between them (which is something the game needed more of in general) to highlight this. Deirdre would therefore show another demographic of the post-Shine world: a sort of “new generation” that looks on the bright side and wants to take society in a new direction instead of drowning in the past.
Jessamine Tecuani
I also don’t know why Jess is here. Comic relief, I guess? She runs a group of rogues she calls “Jazzy’s girls”, and is basically kidnapped by the Inquiry crew after she loses a battle to them. She never bothers to update her old crew on this until the war happens and she literally can’t because [not found]. When she eventually tracks them down, she discovers that they still love her but she was such a great leader that they were able to become self-sufficient and they’re totally fine, except when she visits them in the ending twenty minutes later they’re all dead because LOL consistency. This is all framed as part of a character arc that involves her learning the importance of order and organization in leadership, not that it matters because her group’s dead now and also it had nothing to do with the themes in the first place so I’m not sure what the point of it is.
Who are Jazzy’s girls? Are they violent rogues or are they really good guys? What have they been doing all this time and why? What was Jessamine’s leadership style actually like and why was it important? What is she actually trying to do? We never get these answers, so Jess remains a baffling anomaly with no greater purpose. I honestly can’t think of a way to fix her other than folding her traits into Alicia; she’s just taking up space. God knows the game has enough spunky snarky characters already.
She also gets the special distinction of being the only female lacertian in the game. After the godawful way that was handled in The Reconstruction, I’m really disappointed we didn’t get more of those.
Daszk Monene
A half-Lesser half-lacertian hybrid. He is initially trapped after investigating a quarantine vessel for Lessers, and is imprisoned after the Inquiry crew discovers him due to racism. After his credentials are verified he immediately joins the crew with no complaints. His origins are unknown but it’s hinted that he might have been made in a lab, and wouldn’t that have been so much more interesting than what we got?
Daszk is pretty clearly an expy of Moke, a character archetype the developer seems fond of, which is strange given that he doesn’t do anything with it. After the recruitment kerfuffle Daszk becomes a nonentity with no opinions or influence on anything, not even lingering resentment over his imprisonment. He never asserts his rights or opinions even when people are being racist dicks to him. I’m pretty sure he has fewer lines than Rami, and those lines consist exclusively of reminding you he exists.
He does serve one important role, which is to guilt trip you if you kill the Lessers with the superweapon, but characters need to be important for more than one optional scene. His lack of presence before then also undermines the attempted gut punch – I think a lot of players could be forgiven for forgetting he’s part Lesser by that point in the game, which would make it feel like it comes out of nowhere. And they would be right, because it does. Even passive doormat characters need presence and influence to justify their place in the story – besides, isn’t it just plain good storytelling to push your characters outside their comfort zones? If Daszk was more assertive and overtly uncomfortable with his treatment, his eventual freakout would carry more weight. He could even have been used to make a nuanced point about racism, if the crew does warm up to him but dismisses him as one of the “good ones” and continues treating other Lessers horribly. That would make targeting the Lessers a conscious, meaningful betrayal.
Like most characters Daszk’s character development, such that it is, is wholly sequestered in his side chats. It’s still not much more than we get in the main plot; he mopes about how terribly people treat him, but instead of him pushing back this just leads to some internalized racism that makes him think changing his body is the solution. At the last minute he gets the sudden epiphany that he shouldn’t let other people dictate his self-esteem, even though leading up to it he seemed to personally dislike his body rather than only being concerned with outward appearances, so he’s so meek he undermined his own narrative. And nice job sidestepping an important societal issue to focus on a tangentially relevant individualistic narrative that didn’t even make sense, game.
Daszk is completely extraneous to the story. He doesn’t add anything that the Lesser habitation couldn’t, and while he has a potentially intriguing backstory it never goes anywhere. (Remember how he was a part of a rival peacekeeping force that left him for dead? Sure would have been cool if we got to actually meet those people, huh?) I seriously forgot he existed in some scenes.
Kara Fatima
Kara starts as the Inquiry‘s liaison to the EROS project, but defects to the crew after discovering that her superior was keeping creepy projects secret from her. This seems to coincide with her deciding that all technological progress is evil, as she later tries to sabotage Willis’ biogenesis project pretty much just ’cause. However, she is also the only crew member to not give into despair in the ending, and searches for the Progenitor’s notes in the hopes of deactivating the Core and saving Ros. For that, I must respect her.
I think Kara marks the point where the developer stopped caring about representing science fairly. She is the most cringe-worthy B-movie stereotypical representation of a “scientist” that has only a passing resemblance to anything in reality. Do we even know what her field is? We know everyone else’s: Rami is a medical doctor, Tezkhra is a physicist, Mahk is an engineer, Neff and Ral are computer scientists, Willis is a biologist. Kara is… nothing. And that nothingness tells us exactly what she really is: the idea of a scientist. She is a shorthand stereotype for us to fill in the blanks ourselves; a cultural phantom. That’s acceptable if you’re writing some flashy B-movie where the character’s exact profession isn’t important. It’s not acceptable if you’re trying to write serious sci-fi that’s supposed to be a serious commentary on scientific progress.
I do like the idea of what Kara is: like Mahk, she’s an outside perspective and a window into an enigmatic organization. Her snarkiness also makes sense from that perspective, as does her softening toward the crew. But like Mahk, that never goes anywhere. She barely tells us anything about EROS before episode 4, at which point her subplot gets subsumed by Willis’ before fizzling without any meaningful resolution. She falls from importance after episode 3, just becoming yet another Witty™ character with nothing more to offer. The best use for her would be as a foil to Willis, allowing us to learn about the degradation of science theme from a heroic viewpoint instead of having to constantly filter it through Dr. Crazypants.
Cassidy Turnstone
A member of the Breach. Unlike Marie, she remembers the Beforetimes. Just not enough to give us any actual details.
Cassidy is so incredibly disappointing. She’s connected to EROS and the weird databanks, she’s ancient and should be a cornucopia of pre-Breach information, finding and recruiting her is such a dramatic sequence… but she’s just a whole lot of nothing. I expected her to be able to tell us so much, but instead she just whines about Kids These Days and tries to stick her head back in the sand because no one is allowed to do anything in this game. Oh, except commit suicide because if you’re not going to live forever, why bother?
If Cassidy isn’t going to give us any supplemental info on the databanks – which makes sense, if they’re supposed to be something we have to figure out on our own – then she doesn’t provide anything that Marie can’t and the two characters should have been consolidated.
Cole Turnstone
Appears to be a convincingly human robot remotely controlled by Cassidy. Communicates only in grunts and Midwestern slang. Seemingly exists only to prove that Cassidy is married.
The only way I can think to justify his existence is if he has some unique perspective on the Beforetimes (or philosophical outlook in general) that Cassidy doesn’t, which could actually be justified by the “opposites attract” thing they have going on. But we’re given so little about the Beforetimes that I don’t know what that could be, specifically.
Alicia Sarazon
Marie’s little sister. Was rejected by the Breach selection program, but snuck aboard anyway and was separated from Marie. Doesn’t appreciate Marie’s overprotectiveness and just wants to be left alone when Marie finally tracks her down, but she secretly cares deep down because family relationships are forever. Eventually demonstrates her leadership and independence skills to Marie in a really underwhelming scene that mostly happens offscreen. In the ending, she slinks off back to her group of rogues without a word, and Marie respects her autonomy enough to leave her alone this time.
Other than her relation to Marie, Alicia is the rogue version of Mahk and Kara. She has the exact same problems and I would propose the exact same fixes. This is especially important if her character arc is supposed to involve her defining herself as her own person; to do that, she needs some elements to pursue that aren’t her relation to Marie. Alicia could teach us a lot about rogues, especially since, by their nature, they would be hidden from the lawful Inquiry Project. She could easily take on Jessamine’s story about leadership, which would be particularly meaningful when proving her independence is a secondary goal.
Ivoronus Sikohlon
Ivoronus is the president and “father” of the Sikohlon, whatever that means. He was the first lacertian ever created, and presumably escaped the lab of his birth along with the second batch of lacertians to found the Sikohlon. How he escaped detection for this long is never explained. His long life has made him too bored to live, so he joins Neff’s suicide pact after passing the secret of his origins on to Ros. Is kind of a dick. Also he knew Sorenson somehow but this is never elaborated on.
Ivoronus has the same problems as Mahk, magnified tenfold. I can accept that Mahk does not know all of his family’s secrets and has other things to worry about besides, but the president of the company? The final ultimate party member in The Reconstruction completely changed the narrative and provided us with numerous shocking tidbits that required us to recontextualize everything we knew; the final ultimate party member in I Miss the Sunrise just serves as the developer’s mouthpiece for a little bit, tells us something that’s already obvious, then goes out with a whimper.
I’ve said before that I got the impression there was supposed to be a major plotline or mystery involving Ivoronus and the Sikohlon that got shafted, but in that case why are his personal events so empty? What does he think of his origins? Where did the Sikohlon come from? Why did he go into weapons? Why does he “regret” that and what triggered his change of heart? How did he know Sorenson and why is that important? How is he “imperfect”? And we know what he believes, but why does he believe what he does? Give me some answers, darn it.
Everyone Else
Virgil Sorenson
Commander and director of the Inquiry Project. Ros’ direct superior. Incompetent, impotent, obfuscating, obstructionist, and just plain stupid.
He is clearly supposed to be the voice of reasonable authority who provides Ros with the resources to do good works, but he’s so very, very not. He accomplishes absolutely none of his goals, but his inability to vet his business partners or ask useful questions leads to him causing far more problems through his blind faith and incompetence. Every time the crew subverts his authority and does something on their own, they accomplish more than he does in the entire game. Based on what we actually see, the Inquiry Project – and probably the whole galaxy – would be objectively better off if he stepped down and let Ros or Marie run everything.
The only useful thing he does is die – when the Inquiry is under attack, he stays behind to let Ros flee to safety. But this carries very little pathos, because we’re given no opportunity to learn more about him as a person and thus have no reason to like or care about him. He begins as a stern, distant authority figure, and… that never really changes. We never get to look beneath the mask. Where did he come from? Is he pre-Breach or not? Why does he care so deeply about this? How was he affected by the Shine? How does he know Chac and Ivoronus? What is he actually trying to do by partnering with Typelog and EROS? Why is he so nice to Ros for 3 episodes before suddenly hating her and then just as suddenly being willing to die for her? It is a mystery.
I can sort of see what Sorenson was supposed to be, but the bottom line is that there needs to be something more to him. Just giving him a more active role in the plot might be enough; clearer explanations of what he’s doing would make him feel more useful, and more direct interactions with the crew would humanize him. I do like the idea I mentioned at the end of episode 3 of him going behind the superpowers’ backs and using the crew to investigate them in-between the official missions: that would give us a neat front-side-and-underworld interplay, and make him a lot smarter and more proactive. You could also embrace his obstructionism and make him an overt villain, but that might overcomplicate things if we add proper villains elsewhere. And the whole theme of this is supposed to be that civilization and cooperation are good things, so maybe we should let the authority figure not be evil for once.
The Black One
A mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in infuriating crypticisms. He’s an energy being (?) who can transfer his essence between host bodies whenever he dies, but he can only inhabit Lessers for some reason. He claims this erodes his memories every time, but he retains a colorful vocabulary of inscrutable jargon right up until the end so I suspect he doth protest too much. He wants to kill Tezkhra but never explains why. Tezkhra somehow causes the end of reality if the universe collapses with him in it? But he claims he’s already lost and gives up on Tezkhra as soon as the Stardraw tech is leaked, but then goes and kills him anyway in the ending because he was lying back then I guess? Idek.
I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to leave The Black One as an open sequel hook. I do think it’s wrong to do so when he is pretty much the only plot in the entire game. If there were other things to focus my attention on and he was a more minor mystery, the lack of resolution would be less grating. The problem is that he’s front and center; other than the question of the Shine (which just sort of gets handed to you at the end), he’s the only big mystery in the plot, which makes us expect that he’s going to be important and we’re going to get answers in the end. But we don’t. The structure actively encourages us to invest in the mystery because there’s nothing else to spend our mental energy on, then yanks the conclusion away from us at the last minute. It’s nothing but cheap, sadistic, and lazy storytelling. You can’t just keep kicking the can down the road and dangling the promise of resolution in front of your audience; the individual entries in a series have to be satisfying self-contained stories in and of themselves.
And for the love of God what is with his love of stilted cryptic dialogue? You don’t get to keep using those right up until the bell, you have to explain your jargon at some point.
Lagarto Desperado
Lagarto is A Criminal™, but he has a Code of Honor™ and will help you if you spare him. He speaks Spanish and is coded Hispanic even though that makes no freaking sense. He is a serviceable and surprisingly smart early-game villain; he’s not good for anything else, but he doesn’t need to be. Drop the awkward racism and maybe do more to acknowledge the fact he’s a murderer and he’s perfectly fine.
Ral Maha
Director of Typelog’s mind/machine interface project. Is a very dumb scientist and uses herself as the first test subject. Due to EROS’ sabotage of the project, this destroys her memories and puts her in a vegetative state, though Typelog’s memory storage allows them to reconstruct her personality later on. This process makes her incredibly depressed and nihilistic, and she tells Neff he’s wasting his time by trying to make the world a better place with his inventions because everything is doomed to failure. Suspiciously, she does not take her own advice and perfects the brain uploading program in the ending. I thought she said using science to create a better world was a fruitless endeavor? Maybe she saw Neff as a rival and was trying to push him to suicide.
Despite the sabotage being the inciting event of the war and it presumably being waged primarily as vengeance on her behalf, she is against the war because she doesn’t care about anything so she’s totes okay with being a casualty in EROS’ petty sabotage. This is not enough to get her superiors to stop the war. Why? I don’t know, because the developer never bothers to tell us why they’re actually fighting.
Ral is a pretty boring character, and basically just exists to be the chump screwed over by EROS. The transhumanism stuff is interesting but is pretty tangential to the themes and main conflict of the story so it doesn’t fit in very neatly. Maybe it could be used to make a point about how the elite are putting the cart before the horse and engaging in these complex high-minded projects while people are still suffering. I would have liked to see her be a more active presence; using her as the guinea pig is dramatic and all, but it would have been more interesting in the long run if she stuck around and perhaps was the one responsible for declaring war in the first place. Because it’s kiiinda sketchy that the only major female NPC is reduced to a prop and knocked out of the running almost as soon as she’s introduced while her male counterpart gets to stick around and stay important.
The Lesser Horde
What even is this thing? Why does it exist? Everyone and their dog insists that this is totally impossible and unprecedented but we never get any followup. Is it a hive mind? Are Lessers just secretly the best at cooperation and no one ever noticed?
The horde basically just shows up whenever the game needs a diabolus ex machina for some quick conflict, which is incredibly lazy and boring. Either the horde needed a suitably important and thematically relevant reveal – and I can’t see how it could, honestly – or it should have been cut and its role fulfilled by a villain we could actually care about. Besides, if the whole point of the Lesser plot was supposed to be “racism is bad”, it’s rather undermined if the Lessers truly are the ultra-violent boogeymen everyone assumes them to be.
Willis Jameson
Head of biological research at EROS. Performs unethical experiments and sabotaged the mind/machine interface project to prevent Typelog from competing with EROS. Current pet projects include throwing people at magic radiation to see what happens and creating lifeforms to serve as his slaves. Kinda nutty and seems to do a lot of stuff just because he can. This behavior is inverted in episode 4, where he is suddenly very responsible and concerned about misuse of science and begs Sorenson to destroy EROS’ Death Star. After the emitter flaw renders his research moot, he just kinda mopes a bit and wanders off while refusing to help Kara because he’s a dick.
Willis is a perfectly serviceable mad scientist character, but the game should have committed to that instead of insisting he’s suddenly become reasonable right at the end. It would also have been nice if the whole mess with Dena happened in the main plot and didn’t consume Kara’s personal subplot.
Thomas
Does this guy have a surname? I don’t think he does.
Thomas is a “major” even though I don’t understand why military titles existed in their perfect utopia, and sponsored the random flailing ah, “scientific” “project” that led to Ros’ creation. The Shine struck before he could claim his prize, and now he’s very grouchy that the Inquiry found it first. Despite presumably a lot of time passing between the Shine and episode 4, he doesn’t find the Inquiry until the endgame. Despite putting so much effort into buying Ros, he totally just wants to lock her in a jar and never use her because she’s just so dangerous and he’s such a responsible citizen.
He needs to show up earlier. Episode 2, maybe – resynching with Typelog broadcasted the Inquiry‘s presence to the galaxy, he connected the dots, there we go, we can get that instead of brain uploading as the major plot there. If he’s a constant presence throughout the second half of the game, that gives us more time to understand his motivations and personality instead of him showing up out of nowhere for some quick drama and leaving just as suddenly. Or cut him entirely and do something different with Ros’ origins, because frankly the whole explanation is idiotic.
Lazarus Ouranos
The first Ouranos sibling to be awakened. He was incredibly violent and uncooperative. He tried to escape and Sorenson flagged his craft as hostile – not sure what he hoped to accomplish there, because that decoupled it from the Inquiry as a rebound point and should therefore have made it even easier for him to get away. Then he ran into our favorite diabolus ex machina, the Lessers, who blew up his craft except actually he survived in some unspecified manner and in fact he’s still using the same craft and it’s completely fine so what, did he just fake the whole thing?
Lazarus was contacted by the Progenitor, because he apparently thought the unstable sociopath would be a good director for his new universe for some reason. He is content to sit in the shadows and conveniently only contacts Ros after someone else has already informed us of his presence. It’s almost like this whole plot was not planned out in the slightest and got thrown in at the last minute. He has to kill Ros to prove he’s the stronger Ouranos, but Ros ends up killing him instead because the battle engine is slanted ludicrously in her favor.
All the other characters believe Lazarus wants to blow up the galaxy, but the Progenitor’s plan really does seem to be all he cares about, so he’s actually a really passive and unthreatening villain. To fix that… man, I don’t even know. Like Thomas, have him show up earlier, I guess? Maybe he could even be like some kind of overarching mastermind who sets all the minor villains like Lagarto and Willis against you. Or hey, we could actually make something of the insistence that defeated craft always escape by making him a recurring boss you can never capture until he does the jamming pulse!
But… I’m not sure what that conflict would really add to the narrative, thematically. Perhaps he could be the Progenitor’s antithesis, someone who believes that since the universe is going to end anyway he might as well destroy everything? That would demonstrate the dark side of nihilism, and show it’s dangerous to take the final message too far. And it would give us a proper justification for the widespread destruction in episode 5 – it actually makes a lot of sense for him to be the one to destroy the Inquiry! Yes, I think that would be a good progression: petty rival to Nietzsche, Destroyer of Worlds.
Also Ros should not be sad about killing him because, seriously.
The Progenitor
A brilliant EROS researcher who snapped when he discovered the twin devils of emitter failure and the imminence of the Big Crunch. He first tried to push the contracting universe back, but this just resulted in the Shine. He then decided to use Stardraw components to accelerate the Big Crunch instead, which would somehow turn everyone into immortal ghosts who could influence the new universe because something something magic. He wants Ros to be the god at the center of the new universe, but he’s also totally okay with Lazarus or some random Lesser taking that role because he has no standards. Also he’s a murderous dick who kills a ton of people for no reason, and despite being a scientist ignores the objections of someone who’s obviously way more qualified screaming that this is a terrible idea. It’s just a thought, but I somehow get the impression the dev doesn’t like scientists very much.
The Progenitor is a villain so lazy and terrible the developer couldn’t even be bothered to give him a name, and the whole endgame is a train wreck because of it. Why should I care about some nameless nobody showing up out of nowhere at the last second to wreak some havoc? There’s no investment, no emotional connection, no understanding. The endgame of The Reconstruction built on threads and elements that had been a part of the narrative from the beginning; it rewarded our investment with a satisfying payoff. We knew Fell and the watchers for so long that their sudden deaths were genuinely shocking and game-changing. We knew Havan – or we thought we did – and that gave the villain reveal so much meaning and pathos. If the Lord-God really had just been some random dude we never met the endgame would have been a complete farce, and that’s exactly what happens here. I do not care about this man. His presence and motives come out of absolutely nowhere. A good story has an endgame that builds on the themes it’s been exploring throughout the story and which logically follows from the preceding events. This does not do that.
As I mentioned above, the only way to fix the Progenitor is to let Tezkhra devour him whole. Yes, let’s even have him be responsible for the Shine – that would give him a real reason to be so paranoid about his memories! Or say it was his past life that did it, which would make the abandoned databanks be really relevant foreshadowing: we don’t realize it at first, but we’re actually learning the backstory of the villain while simultaneously interacting with them in the present! Think of what a glorious reveal that would be! Tezkhra for villain, all the way.