In which Luke becomes very slightly less terrible and everyone else treads water.

He’s tripping balls. Rami gave him some drugs to calm him down, but he took more than he was supposed to. Well, I guess we know where Rami’s getting his ideas from now. Ros drags him to the med bay, where he recovers. Chac has a breakdown and says he was trying to escape from his emotions; he’s not coping as well as he thought he was. He wants to find a way to make the memories less traumatic, but he doesn’t want to forget them either, so he’s at a dilemma.

This is not as shippy as it seems at first; he just needs to voice his unresolved feelings about her death. Unfortunately, this just makes him go into a spiral over how he’s nothing without her and needs her strength to help him through this. Whoops! Well at least it’s nice to see a guy going through this for once.

Oh, and also this:

Chac: “I’m sorry I agreed to the suppression.”

That definitely sounds like it’s an externally imposed process rather than a gradual, voluntary state of mind. Combined with Marie’s assertion that early humans had no choice but to suppress themselves despite what had to have been a stress-filled environment, I have to believe it’s something more than just meditation. Maybe Tez is the only one who achieved it through willpower alone and just assumed everyone was the same way.

He’s been told to look on the bright side and think about the good things that came from the Shine. So I guess they do have functional therapists? Where have they been for all the other characters? He tries listing good things: he met Ros, society has become more active again, scientific progress has started again (it stopped before?). But he feels it’s not enough to focus on society at large, he has to reflect on his own outlook. He doesn’t entirely know how to do that yet, so he returns to his thoughts.

That’s the end of his chats — a decent enough endpoint, I suppose. I also get the opportunity to upgrade his weapon, and the requirement is… interesting.

“Loss of life has become a real possibility, and barring that, damage and injury are felt on both sides. What I wish to say is, do you understand the costs associated with battle? I want you to prove it, if so. Speak to me when you have verified that your allies have taken a combined total of 50,000 damage.“

o_o My damage counter is currently at 36,000, and I’m most of the way through the game. I’m never going to hit this. And this is only a first-level upgrade! This is just ridiculous. The developer really needed to balance these numerical requirements better. I wonder if part of that is my fault? When I was a beta tester I played tons of random missions while I was waiting for episodes to be released, so of course all my numbers ended up ridiculously overinflated. I was probably able to upgrade Chac’s weapon on my first pass without batting an eye, so I never realized it would be a problem for normal players.

This is true, but sadly I am a completionist.

He was putting the moves on Kara and she slapped him. Poor baby.

Luke: “The thing is, she apologized right after. Like, she didn’t know why she did what she did either.”

I want to take a moment to examine exactly what this means. The rest of this scene characterizes Luke’s behavior as impulsive and irrational, to the point that even he doesn’t really understand it. While I would be skeptical of this excuse in real life because many abusers pretend to be irrational while actually being very deliberate and calculating, let’s go along with the game and say it really is just an impulse. (The suppression break making people in general unable to control their emotions does lend credence to this, I will admit.) And right here, he has just explicitly compared his behavior to a woman’s reaction, saying they are the same.

Or in other words, he considers rejection of and retaliation against a sleazy guy to be totally emotional and irrational behavior. It’s so baffling, they just do it for no reason! Women, right? They’re like wild animals sometimes.

He is never called out on this or contradicted by the narrative; Ros lets it pass without comment. Because of this I am forced to conclude the developer shares this belief, at least in part.

This just confirms exactly what I suspected right from the start: the sleaziness of this plot is due to ignorance. The developer sees flirtatiousness as a harmless outgrowth of the male psyche, and thus doesn’t understand what reason women could have to react so harshly. So when he tries to fair-and-balance it up, he dips into false equivalence — surely we can agree we’re all being irrational here, right? I suppose it’s somewhat encouraging to know the game does not intend to come off as this upsetting, but I mean… if you’re an adult and you still think women are mysterious irrational fairy people, that ignorance starts to look pretty willful.

Moving on. Kara is apparently just the most recent in a long line of people who have done this to him, and it’s finally starting to sink in that this might actually a problem he has to do something about. I try telling him to just stop doing it, but he genuinely doesn’t seem to understand what he did wrong. I find that hard to believe… Words and actions are much more conscious and defined than instincts and emotions. With such a large sample size, he should be able to pick up on what specific actions trigger negative responses — unless, again, he is engaging in willful ignorance, in which case why should I feel bad for him?

Luke: “Oh man, Ros… please don’t get rid of me if I mess up again! I’ll… I’ll find a way to fix it!”

And even when he acknowledges it’s a problem and promises to change, his primary motivation seems to be fear of repercussion. What a charmer. Incidentally, here’s his idle dialogue for this episode:

Luke: “That Kara chick is feisty! But not Marie-feisty. The subtle kind. She’s all quiet, and then… WHAM!“

And so we see that he isn’t doing this in good faith. The moment I stop monitoring him, he goes right back to leering at people. His idle dialogue really should have been altered based on the progress of his plotline like Mahk’s was last episode if Luke’s repentance was supposed to be taken seriously.

Not really, actually. I’m more concerned about what those thoughts are.

Rami gave him another checkup, but this time he actually pinpointed the problem: he is indeed hormone-addled. He claims it’s supposed to be normal outside of suppression, which is impossible to believe when nobody else in the entire game ever acts even close to this. Even when the crewmembers start getting lovey-dovey over Ros next episode, there are zero sexual undertones to it. I assume this is a symptom of him being a cameo character from a universe that operates on different rules.

Luke: “I dunno if I can go through with it, Ros. It makes me aggressive… and protective, apparently. Gyeh… what do I do? I don’t wanna do somethin’ to bring down the project, but I like the feeling!”

…Hm.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the stereotype that feminists want to castrate all men. That’s silly, of course, but… sometimes I do find myself seriously wondering if humanity would be better off if we could just magically turn off the sex drive. Obviously there are concerns like rape and how it might influence things like misogyny and transphobia, but even putting aside the external effects, you really have to wonder how much harm it’s doing to the individuals themselves, especially those on the far end of the bell curve.

Look very closely at what Luke is saying here. He knows it’s dangerous and unpredictable behavior that could jeopardize his responsibilities, but he still wants to keep it around because… it makes him feel good. He sounds exactly like a drug addict. That is not how a fully rational person in complete, responsible control of their emotions and desires talks. And the thing is, he knows this. He’s disturbed that he can’t control himself and he’s upset by its consequences, if only because it inconveniences him personally. And yet he’s not willing to let go, because he’s thrall to sensation. His emotional brain has usurped his higher reasoning. If people talked this way about a crack addiction, or even a mental illness like depression, we would instantly recognize that there’s something wrong with them and they need help. But when people talk like this about their sexuality suddenly it’s a sacred component of the human condition they just have to accept and deal with on their own? That doesn’t make sense to me. A world where we can give people a drug that completely shuts off the sex drive with no ill effects sounds wonderful.

It is possible to make this offer to Luke, actually; they do have emotional suppression chemicals. Luke rejects this as too extreme at the moment, however.

Luke: “Uh, whoa, hang on. Go back to the way we were?”

Aaand confirmation that suppression was chemical, not mental? Who’s right, Luke or Tez? Make up your mind, game.

Luke: “Marie… and Kara… and even you sometimes. Somethin’ about you just makes me sound crazy.”

TMI, Luke. And I thought he said he wasn’t attracted to lizards.

He concludes by deciding he’s not actually going to take any concrete steps toward solving the problem, he’s just going to “be more careful”, even though he said he couldn’t do that last conversation. Your web of lies is showing, Luke.

Time to shift gears to a completely different subplot, because that’s not an incredibly jarring thing to do for the last personal scene at all. He got a memory flash recently, and he remembered what he did before he joined the Inquiry. He refuses to elaborate, but lets slip that he’s hiding from people, so definitely something sketchy. He says he thinks he can maybe spill his secrets to me later. Okay, as long as it’s not in a dark alley, little creep.

Yes, that’s really the last of Luke’s scenes. Onto someone who manages to be a much better character despite being pro-genocide.

Right now she’s just complaining about how low-tech the Inquiry is. She spouts off a lot of technobabble about more advanced systems that sound really cool but probably would have been too hard to draw. For some reason I can only give snide or sappy responses instead of just telling her that it was made on a shoestring budget so of course it’d be a mess. Apparently Purity Point was a lot more stable and advanced, which is why she’s so surprised.

Deirdre: “Too bad the others aren’t sane enough to enjoy what they’ve got. Kinda funny, isn’t it?”

“Kinda depressing, actually.”
“They’re safe for now.”
“It’s where they are meant to be.”

Ros is a robot again. I pick the only non-terrible option, but that just makes Deirdre sad. She finishes by saying she’s glad I’ll talk to her.

Deirdre: “Everyone else seems… afraid. Maybe ’cause I’m an AUG.”

I thought we established it was because she was a child? But no, let’s throw out her entire character conflict so we can shoehorn in more special lessons about how prejudice is wrong.

She’s a bit envious that people don’t treat Ros any differently even though she’s a mutant too. She decides to go full mad scientist and design a whole new robot body for herself so she can be as big as she wants. I approve! Discard your useless flesh and join the robot overlords!

Deirdre: “Yeah… I could be tall as I wanted. Taller than Tez! […] Thanks for the idea, Commander! Next time, I bet you won’t even recognize me!”

I think this is really cute. Deirdre’s optimism is pleasant to read.

Obviously it doesn’t work because this game hates hope. Rami just said it was a silly idea without providing any further explanation because he’s a lazy dick. I have to cover for him by speculating that he must have had a reason, probably, maybe, which calms her a little. Why can’t I agree he was being a jerk??? Deirdre feels like she’s stuck in a catch-22: she can’t be taken seriously enough to get to a point where people will take her seriously. She decides that, if she can’t get bigger, she at least wants to find other small people, to know she’s not totally alone. That’s very relateable, but a pretty poor coping mechanism when she lives in a world where technology can actually solve her problem. Surely they can give her growth hormones or something to restart her maturation? Supposedly cells still grow and divide even with emitters, so it should still be possible for her body to change. They’d have to adjust the implants of course, but we can already do that in the modern era, surely it’ll be a cakewalk for super future surgeons.

It just feels very wrong to me for the final moral of a science fiction plot to be “Give up hope that things can get better and learn to cope with the status quo.” The very premise of science fiction is that we can overcome our limitations and cross boundaries everyone thought impossible to achieve our wildest dreams. You can temper that depending on where you want your story to fall on the gritty realism vs. wish fulfillment scale, but to reject it outright, to say that science can’t solve personal problems even though it’s clearly achieved miracles for society at large, seems like a betrayal of the genre. Everyone else gets to live forever and survive fatal catastrophes with awesome cybernetics, but Deirdre is doomed to a marginal life even though we could fix her problem with modern technology? Why? Going full-out gritty realism just doesn’t make sense for a science fiction story, I don’t think. Science isn’t magic; it’s a real thing with hard rules and demonstrable effects. We know that people can improve things with science, if they just work hard enough. Telling people to give up on science is the one thing that will make it fail us — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s such a depressing and above all toxic message; I can’t condone it.

Sigh. Well, let’s take a break from all this moping and have some fun times with Jess. She questions why I want to be a commander in the first place.

Jessamine: “Seems like an awful lotta stuff to remember… ‘specially for one person. I mean, why bother?”

“I was asked to do it.”
“I wish I wasn’t, really.”
“Nobody else stepped up.”

The first one is the most truthful, but she’d obviously like this response far more. You know, it’s funny, I feel bad about bending the truth around other characters, but with Jess it feels par for the course. She constantly projects a carefree attitude that implies she doesn’t take these conversations as seriously as my other crewmates, so I don’t mind joshing her a little. I’m okay with turning this into a game where I have to predict what she’d like me to say rather than being totally honest all the time; it honestly seems like what she’d want. She seems like the kind of person who respects attitude over the actual words.

This time, though, she seems to be seriously pondering if it’d be good for her to become a big shot, and how she should go about doing that. She asks me for advice, but I can’t give her any, can I? I was just selected right off the bat because I was special. She realizes her folly a second later, but decides she wants to learn from me anyway, since she respects my tactics. That’s nice.

The decline option for this one is “Apparently, you can’t.” Ouch, Ros. (And huh, the first part is pronounced “yoo”? I always pronounced it like “or”. How can the O be silent?)

Jess gives me a thought experiment: if your group encounters another, is it better to assimilate or stick with the people you know? I decide to be optimistic and say we should all be one big happy family. Jess likes this, but is all “BUT THEN THEY ROB YOU MWHAHAHA!” The real point to this comes back to her thoughts on leadership: the problem is that the other group already has their own leader, and they would have to be pretty tough and uncompromising to have survived this long. If they assimilate into another group, they’d have to change and lose a part of themselves by necessity. It becomes pretty obvious she’s talking about herself, but she says she’s actually happy to work under Ros and has learned a lot. She just hopes her old gang still feels the same way about her.

She’s been trying to get in touch with her old gang, but they haven’t responded. She immediately panics and jumps to the conclusion that they got a new leader and that they don’t need her anymore. I would be worried they might be dead, myself, but I guess things haven’t gotten quite that violent yet. She flips out a bit but says she’s happy she can talk to Ros about this. Okay.

So yet again it looks like the personal chats are going to have a consistent theme before the last one totally derails it to talk about something different. Focus, game.

And finally, our most recent additions. The Turnstone couple has their scenes together, though Cassidy initiates all interactions since Cole’s not very talkative.

Cassidy just got the memo about Ros’ amnesia and everything.

“I have a past… or I did.”
“Your Commander is who I am.”
“So who are you on the run from?”

Hm, none of those are very good options. I’ve said before that I want Ros to focus on the present; the second option is closest to that, but the emphasis is actually on Ros being aggressive and domineering, which I don’t want. I’ll just change the subject, then.

Cassidy says they were afraid EROS was coming for them when Ros showed up, but they can now see EROS doesn’t care about or even remember them. Seems a little odd they’re that paranoid, since her notes start by saying she was inspired by another guy who didn’t suffer any consequences for leaving. It seemed like they knew EROS wouldn’t care.

She finishes by saying she’s glad she came back, because she wants to whip humanity back into shape. Well, it’s good to have motivation, I suppose.

She starts by talking about the gravity, since that should have been the first thing Ros noticed. She asks how it felt.

“Not too different.”
“I’ll take a clean habitation.”
“It felt right.”

Hmmm. I’ve said before that planetary gravity should logically be better for people since that’s what we’re adapted for, but maybe after so long under artificial gravity their bones would have turned to mush? No, if Deirdre can’t grow up emitters must stop that from happening. It should indeed have felt better, then. They both like this response, of course.

Cassidy: “That’s cause it’s natural. You can’t run from nature forever! Your body never forgets!”

BRB, just let me smash my glasses and walk off a cliff to remove myself from the gene pool like nature intended. I believe I’ve already said everything that needs to be said on this subject in my Fatal Hearts review, but I will note it’s particularly baffling for a cyborg to say this. If you love nature so much why’d you stick computers in your eyes, Cassidy?

She ends by reflecting that maybe running and hiding from everything was a bad idea. Well, it’s good to see characters taking responsibility for once.

Lacertians hadn’t been discovered back when the Turnstones were active. They knew about them from the radio, but they’ve never seen one until now.

Cassidy: “Guess that answered a lot of questions. ‘Are we alone’, and whatnot. Nice to get closure.”

Hmmm. Is that something she feels, or is she parroting #1213? It’s possible she just doesn’t care enough to piece it together, but it would be really nice to have another character be in on the secret.

She apologizes for calling me a lizard thing, but I decide to play up the outrage anyway and say “LACs are people too.” They both appreciate me calling them out.

Cassidy: “Just humans and Lacertians so far, huh. Even with them, it’s kind of lonely out here…”

Hrm. I’ve been noticing this is a recurring theme: people still feel lonely and unsatisfied even after discovering one other species. I’m not sure how I feel about that yet from a narrative point of view. I’ll have to think about it more later.

Cassidy: “We got your back, though, alien or not. Plus, you sound close enough to pass for human anyway.”

Uh, what? So if lacertians weren’t humanlike she’d hate them? That’s a pretty messed up thing to say.

On that lovely note, personal chats are over. Pretty disappointing, honestly. Last episode I thought they were finally building toward something, but here they just drop all of that in favor of an incoherent scattershot approach that doesn’t take the time to develop anything. Once again, the game needed focus.

As per usual, we end with the bounty hunts. Hunts are fun.

Mr. Left: “A creation known only as ‘The Wall’. An experimental MOD gone haywire.”
Mr. Right: “Supposedly, large.”
Mr. Left: “Quite large. And tough. A serious threat. But nothing you cannot handle. Correct?”

Once I get halfway there, it’s revealed that the space junk is my actual target. I like it — I always find the “landscape turns out to be alive” trope to be clever and impressive, even though the game doesn’t really have the graphics to pull it off here.

Oh, come on, it uses the same standard attack as low-level chumps? Well, that just killed any chance it had to be a real challenge. As per usual, I destroy it in one round, before its zone of control bonus can become a factor. Enemies needed to be way more resilient in this game in general, but it’s particularly egregious for bosses whose gimmicks require the battle to last multiple rounds.

My reward is a ton of money and a hull defense boost I will never use. Maybe if the game would let you combine resists and boosts these things would see more use…

Mr. Right: “Cease to amaze? You? Never. But this time we have a very special assignment for you.”
Mr. Left: “Special. Yes. A human calling himself ‘The Drinker’. Drinker of what, you may ask?”
Mr. Right: “Energy. Pure and simple.”
Mr. Left: “Many have tried to best him. All have failed so far. Perhaps you would join those ranks?”
Mr. Right: “History has shown that simple brute force will not do. No, no. You must get creative.“

…I can walk right up to him without any tricks. So I guess the game has given up on the idea that finding these guys is supposed to be a puzzle.

This battle is very formulaic. At the start of the round, the four power fountains will soften you up with basic beam weapons of the property they represent. At the end of the round, The Drinker will absorb energy from the power fountains and let loose a powerful attack with no range penalties.

As the suits said, you can’t win this battle normally; The Drinker is practically invincible. You may notice, however, that the luminous power fountain looks a lot glowier than usual in this shot. The power fountains are also invincible, but if you hit them with a shot of the matching property, they’ll charge up. This gives The Drinker more power at the end of the round (upgrading his attack to the “Major Ejection” shown in the gif), but if you charge up at least three, he’ll draw too much energy and explode.

Yes, seriously. That’s it. Once you’ve figured it out, you can easily beat the superboss in one round, before he can even get off a single attack.

This is the kind of flimsiness I would expect from a regular enemy or a miniboss, but an optional superboss? No. You should have had to do this multiple times, possibly with him attuning to a specific energy type or even destroying one of the fountains to mix it up between rounds. Like the rest of the battle system, this feels way too half-baked.

I also discover that enemies are so bloodthirsty that they will target a vulnerable crewmember even if it is literally impossible to hit them. Perhaps we should call it “artificial stupidity” instead. Enemies really needed to be less obsessive in general, I think; all enemies of the same damage type always seem to target the exact same person. That could be reasonable if it weren’t for the fact that the range mechanic means it’s impossible to effectively defend against that — even if you move the injured party member all the way to the back like you’re supposed to, nothing is stopping them from continuing to fire, and your only defense is the accuracy penalty they’ll get. As ridiculous as The Reconstruction’s “THE PERSON IN FRONT MUST DIE” AI was, at least it let you juggle and defend people appropriately.

THE DRINKER DEFEATED.
Target has been captured and is awaiting questioning.

What, he survived that? Seriously? My reward is an auroral attack boost I will never use and a perfect (L9) auroral shell that I definitely will!

Mr. Right: “Outstanding work, as always.”
Mr. Left: “As always. That is why we must call upon you yet again. Have you heard of ‘The Cryocarrier’?”
Mr. Right: “A genius, and a menace. An AUG experimenting in cryogenic chemical weapons. Dangerous, yes.”

Once again I can just walk right up to him without going through a puzzle first. It does turn out to be a trap but come on, really?

As I mentioned with The Alpha Twin, Machinatorium auroral weapons cannot be chemical so The Cryocarrier gets a special snowflake award. I think this is cheating, though: just because you spray a jet of something doesn’t make it an energy weapon. I would consider this closer to a ballistic weapon, myself; it probably involves the same propulsion systems.

But hey, a boss that doesn’t focus on hull damage for once! The ice crystals use systems weapons too, and pretty powerful ones at that. Marie actually gets KO’d thanks to the amazing power of being able to hit the same health bar multiple times per round.

This battle is a callback to The Reconstruction’s fight with The Cryomancer. See the blue cloud thing? That advances by one column every round, and anything caught in it suffers heavy damage across all three health bars. I approve of automating this; The Cryomancer wasn’t terribly threatening if you stayed close to the front line, since that spell was basically all he did. This mechanic is also particularly threatening here, where the back line is your only source of healing and advancing the front line is more difficult.

…Or rather, it would be, if I couldn’t beat the boss in a single round like usual. When I get 10 attacks of ~150 damage each per round, the battle is a foregone conclusion.

Woah, that’s a nice reward! Level 9 components for all three types? You mean I actually get to choose what I make instead of cobbling something together based on the scraps I get from the random number generator??? It’s a miracle. (And yes, level 9 components — aside from weapon shells, which are all “perfect” — all get unique identifiers. I think this is a nice touch.) I also get a level 4 EROS card from this! Awesome, though I don’t know why EROS would care so much. I guess he’s one of theirs? Or they want to study his weapons, more likely.

Mr. Right: “Your loyalty is boundless, indeed. We shall keep this in mind for next time. For now, save your strength.”
Mr. Left: “Yes, strength. Strength is what you will need in the next episode.“

Nah, if this is anything to go by, I think it’ll be smooth sailing from here on out. Let’s find out!

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