So hey everyone! Somehow Blogger overwrote the next two posts with a different one while I was editing it, so I lost the whole thing and had to rewrite it from scratch. I did not even know that was possible and I still don’t have any idea why it happened. Fun!

And it really sucks because this is the part where all the plot happens! Sorry if my disgruntled rewrite can’t do it justice.

There’s no announcement when Ros returns, but I can hear people talking when I approach the briefing room.

Sorenson is absent. Neff’s initiative paid off: the bug he placed on the abandoned lab just received a message. It was badly scrambled and they lost most of it, but they did get the source location. They’re currently debating whether they should investigate on their own or inform Sorenson.

Kara: “I have done some investigating, and our researchers are definitely aware of the experiments conducted there.”

Kara also brings this up, which is interesting. Willis must have been lying back there, then. If he knows everything that happened there, that adds some interesting background to a later plot point, and if the administration at large knows about it, that could actually provide an explanation for why they don’t allow lacertians into their ranks. Unfortunately this doesn’t really come up again; I feel the game could have done more with exploring how much of it is forgotten history vs. how much is still relevant.

Anyway, Neff argues they should sneak out right now, because he has a feeling EROS would shut them down if they tried to go through proper channels. Kara starts to protest, but it’s clear she’s having a crisis of faith after learning that Willis was keeping such a massive project secret. She’s curious too, so she agrees they should take the initiative. With that, everyone’s on board, but Ros still has to get Tez from the lab.

Geez, how much blood did they take? Is that red vat all his? They shouldn’t need that many samples, but maybe they’re exploiting this opportunity to study Tez as much as possible. Tez actually says he was hoping for as much:

Tezkhra: “There is something not right with me. I’d suppressed the notion before, but now I know… It’s not just the energy, or the environments. At first I thought if I agreed to help EROS, they would study me. But now there is more to this latent energy theory than I suspected. It’s… a feeling now.”

So yeah, he definitely has some magic energy sense that’s driving him crazy. Normal people don’t talk this way.

We then get a rare treat: a man learning How Do You Emotions!

Tezkhra: “How do you do it? How do you cope? How do you make sense of something that can’t be quantified?”
Ros: “You don’t have to make sense of feelings. That’s why they’re feelings, and not thoughts.”

Uh, what? No, you definitely can and should make sense of feelings. They’re concrete chemical processes just like thoughts, and there are distinct reasons and patterns to how they happen. Letting your emotions be ~free~ may sound nice, but that’s the kind of mentality that leads to their current situation where everyone is panicking and fighting over scraps because they don’t know how to cope. Stop putting terrible advice in my mouth, game!

Seriously, are there no psychologists in this? Understanding feelings is a science, darn it!

For some reason Tez likes this advice. He gets a relationship boost before saying that he hopes I can teach him more How Do You Emotions in the future. How shippy. And… that’s it. Ros drags him back to the Inquiry and the scene ends.

You know, when I started this review, I misremembered this scene. I thought Tez’s suppression broke here, not after the theft of his research, and this scene was him discussing that. And I can’t help but feel that that would have been so much more significant and meaningful, both to Tez and the themes as a whole. Every other character regained their emotions through trauma, so they see emotions as a painful, negative thing that came at them too suddenly and strongly. So wouldn’t it be beautiful if the emotionless robot who couldn’t be broken by trauma was instead cracked by love? Love for his creations, at the wonder of making new life. The whole time he was worried that something even more terrifying than the Shine would destroy his resolve, but instead he is reawakened by a positive emotion. From that, he and by extension us could see that emotion is not all good or all bad. We would see a different perspective, a different journey; nuance. It would rhyme with Chac’s soliloquy in episode 1 rather than just feeling like an inferior knockoff version; thematic continuity. It would actually engage with the themes and leave him room to grow in an interesting direction.

Instead… he didn’t snap from a galaxy-destroying disaster, but he did when victimized by a petty white-collar crime? That’s ludicrous, and it makes him look unimaginably petty and selfish. Apparently he only feels emotions when he’s personally affected by something. It’s meaningless. It feels like the game is just hastily piling on Spock cliché so it can rush him out the door.

I also believe this contradicts his behavior in The Reconstruction. He acted pretty emotionless there, and lacking emotions is pretty much the only non-evil explanation for why it took him so long to realize that planetary destruction was wrong. We will also learn shortly that he is absolutely enamored with the shra and the idea of creating life, so it’s particularly bizarre that he’s capable of seeing their oppression without batting an eye. If he’s no longer suppressed by the time of The Reconstruction, he should have acted far more flustered and emotional throughout, and been far less skilled at concealing his true identity and goals. This is doubly inexcusable because that would have made him a truly interesting character instead of a robot with no purpose or personality outside of The Twist.

But enough of that, let’s move on. Since this is an unofficial exploration, there’s no mission briefing screen. It’s a nice touch, if a lazy one.

Uh oh, busted. Turns out they picked a bad time to leave; Willis needs the fleet right this instant and is pretty pissed about it. Neff convinces him to at least let them decrypt the relay, which reveals…

Everyone gapes in horror before saying it looks like the Shine.

While this is an effective visual reveal, I can’t help but feel hoodwinked. We got descriptions of the Shine back in episode 0 that certainly sounded weird, but we’ve seen what the effects of the Shine look like in all the ruins throughout the missions, and they look nothing like this. They’re cracked and broken, but it looks like normal damage, none of this trippy warping. None of the evidence we’ve seen before now implies the Shine was anything like this. If the ruins throughout the game had been similarly warped but not to this extent, this would still be an excellent wham while also logically building off of what came before. But this feels like the story quietly changed the rules of the game when we weren’t looking, and that’s not playing fair.

Sorenson: “This is not a result of the Shine. Its calculated centerpoint is in another Splice. This is something else…”

Wait, what? I thought the fact they didn’t know where it came from or if there even was a singular source was a big deal just a single episode ago! If they know its source why haven’t they investigated it?

Willis hops on the line to tell the crew to leave it alone and let EROS investigate. His communication then conveniently cuts out, and Sorenson tells them to investigate anyway.

This mission introduces a new BGM. It’s fittingly warped and dramatic, and the distortion effects are jarringly different from the clean, ordered tracks that we’ve experienced previously. It also plays continuously, even during battles, which is a nice touch. This scene definitely deserved special music, and the soundtrack delivers.

The MOD units here are also warped. They have practically no defense but are still functional otherwise, somehow. While they’re fitting enemies to encounter here, it doesn’t make sense for them to be in such good shape when the landscape is such a mess. If the Shine affected smaller things less rather than more like I keep advocating, this would work a lot better.

And thanks to how easy they are to toy with, I finally get this really stupid achievement. It’s a clever idea in theory, but anything that relies so heavily on random chance is bad design in my book. Nobody in their right mind would stumble upon this accidentally; from this range, even beam weapons have only a ~33% chance to hit. If it was >5 squares I could see the reasoning, since that’s the cutoff point for everything getting a range penalty, but that extra square just cuts the accuracy too much for this to be reasonable.

And you would think that investigating the void in the center would do something, but it doesn’t, even though the battle background implies its a black hole. Kind of a letdown. What does “zero energy space” even mean, anyway? Is the Shine so freaky that it creates and maintains a point in space where no energy can exist, not even those ghost particles that spontaneously appear and disappear? For something that seems to be a one-shot deal, such a powerful long-term effect seems bizarre. Possibly the game is trying to say it’s a zero matter space, judging from the graphic; I’d be willing to believe that the Shine vaporizes everything in its origin point.

And ooh, that’s a level 9 component! They were keeping good stuff here.

Every three nodes you investigate, you’ll get research notes. They’re compiled at the end in a more convenient form:

Huh. This probably all sounds like nonsense to a first-time viewer, but with the benefit of later context it actually makes a lot of sense… except for the idea that this isn’t the Shine’s origin. If you assume it was, this makes perfect sense: the first note seems to be preparing the experiment that resulted in the Shine, then they proceed to say “whoops” and do it “in the other direction”, resulting in a second burst that imploded their facility. I don’t see how any other sequence of events is possible – this is clearly referencing events after the Shine, so if the Shine occurred in a different, unrelated facility, shouldn’t this place have already been destroyed by it? The only way this works is if the centerpoint wasn’t affected by the Shine as badly, which they proceeded to squander by doing the same thing in reverse.

I really don’t understand why the game is so insistent that this was something totally unrelated. What’s the point? We’re most of the way through the game now, we deserve some real leads. This would have a much bigger impact if it was what we were searching for, only to discover that the full answer still eludes us. Insisting it’s something else just muddles everything and creates a loose end that doesn’t connect to anything and is never tied up.

Unfortunately, the characters are too busy reeling over the knowledge the Shine was manmade to concern themselves with these details.

Tezkhra: “If these notes are up until the moment the procedure was carried out… It may be safe to say that whoever is responsible did not survive. The problem may have solved itself.”
Rami: “I dunno… if he

Wait, what? Why are they assuming it’s a single guy? This looked like a pretty big research station. (And of course it’s a guy. Of course it is.)

survived the big one… then maybe not.”

There is no logical reason to assume this, so obviously he’s right. I have no idea how he could have possibly survived, and the game never explains it. If the guy was a barely-functional Darth Vader-esque cyborg I could maybe accept it, but we will see him later and he’s a 100% vanilla human with no injuries. When I first played the game, I assumed this was a completely unrelated facility (you know, like the game stubbornly insists is the truth) staffed with completely unrelated researchers and the guy we meet later merely took inspiration from them rather than literally being there. But apparently he was? And yet this still wasn’t the Shine’s centerpoint? How??? None of this makes any sense!

After this Willis gets his communications back, which he uses to yell at the fleet to get back to base and help him already.

Willis explains that there was an incident in one of their colony blocks, but they have it under control now. Marie asks what he’s talking about, and shockingly, we actually get elaboration! Willis is the best plot dispenser. They’re isolated, simulated environments where EROS can observe and experiment on people; it seems to be the prototype for the terraformed planets of the PLSE project. Kara immediately says this sounds unethical as all get-out. Willis’ response is absolutely baffling:

Willis:: “They are not people, I assure you. They were never born. They do not live. They cannot die. Now, enough about that.”

What on Earth is he babbling about? This sounds really deep but it doesn’t seem to be at all true or accurate – the fact they can indeed die is going to be a major plot point shortly. I’m starting to wonder if he’s just babbling nonsense in the hopes people will get confused enough to stop asking questions.

Mahk: “I beg to differ! Unless, you are saying these are artificial beings, which I find quite hard to believe.”
Willis: “You do, do you? Of course they are not real people, like you and I. They do, however, have a purpose. And do you?”

Yeah, I think I’m going with that. Notice how he uses his word vomit to hastily shift to a new topic as soon as people start asking questions he can’t answer.

What does “artificial beings” even mean here? Are they, like, AIs approximating human behavior? That’s what I originally assumed Mahk was referring to, but they’re pretty clearly biological. Are they robots? Test tube babies? “Artificial” could mean anything and nothing. I guess it doesn’t really matter; Willis is clearly portrayed as in the wrong for treating them this way, so his excuses aren’t important. Still weird, though. Tezkhra just thinks all this ethics talk is dreadfully boring and what’s really important is that he gets to see his babies.

No, seriously.

Tezkhra: “I see. So long as the need is purely biological, and they have no scope of the outside world… I must ask. The genetic material I donated… you are using it for a non-human alternative, I presume?”
Willis: “Yes, of course. Ten billion subjects, born from your blood. Well, figuratively speaking, of course.” Actually, given they seem to have gotten the DNA from blood samples, I’m pretty sure that’s literal.
Tezkhra: “Can I… see them?”

Oh my god I can’t even. THERE IS A TIME AND A PLACE. To recap: They’ve just learned that not only was the Shine man-made, EROS had something to do with it. Their liaison with EROS just told them to shut up and ignore it before revealing he’s been hiding hideously unethical experiments and then cackling about how it’s funny his subjects think they’re people. Tez’s only response to these shocking developments is to agree with the evil mad scientist before asking to see his babies. This is why you’re a horrible person, Tez.

The plot then comes crashing in to mercifully interrupt this WTFery. Mission control says EROS has been trying to contact the Inquiry, but something’s jamming the signal and they can’t get through. Willis muses that Typelog must be responsible for the interference.

Willis: “They must have traced back the sabotage of the Mind/Machine Interface Project to our agent on the inside.”

So we’re now 2-for-2 on villains casually revealing they were behind major catastrophes like it’s no big deal. At least this one is actually evil.

Willis: “It had to be done. They were careless. Their method of encephalo-augmentation was completely wrong. We perfected the technology long ago. We were not about to see it garner a negative reputation like that.”

That said, I really like this reveal. Too often in science fiction, the universe just hates science. Every new invention or breakthrough is doomed to failure and catastrophe for no other reason than because TAKE THAT, NERDS. It looked like the plot was going in that direction last episode, but now we see that the real cause was human pettiness. I said before that privatization and factionalism can only hurt science in the long run, and now we see the extreme consequence of that: EROS could have worked together with Typelog to fix the problem, but instead they set all of society back by hoarding the knowledge for themselves. We now see the true face of EROS: raw hypocrisy. They preach the merits of free information while sabotaging competitors and cloistering their own secrets in order to preserve their elite status. This is the dark side of the emotional coin: you get passion and creativity, but you also get selfishness and pettiness. These so-called scientists are now more interested in sniping at each other than they are in actual progress. There’s a parallel that can be drawn here to what’s going on in the background: the rogues, too, are tearing each other apart over scraps when they could restore society if everyone just worked together. The Inquiry has been desperately chasing after the larger authorities in the hopes that they were above such savagery, but now it sees there is no hope. From the lowest dregs of society to the highest, everyone has succumbed to corruption and infighting. Civilization has become a sick joke.

The moral here isn’t that science will always fail us and we should just give up – it’s that we should never give up, because we need to work together to be capable of great things. If EROS would just direct all the energy it puts into subterfuge into logical cooperation, society would be back on its feet in an instant. Science is not a problem in and of itself, but humanity’s flaws hold it back. That’s a much more nuanced and respectful view of the situation than we normally see in fiction.

This charitable reading will go straight to Hell by the ending, but it’s good while it lasts.

Incidentally, this provides yet another mechanism for how the Sikohlon leak could have worked: Typelog cracks the Machinatorium’s encryption and steals the formulas, then the EROS spies, bleating their “information wants to be free!” mantra, leak it to the world. Or they try to steal it for themselves but botch it and end up leaking it to the internet at large. That would have made for a great reveal here, and it also would have made Typelog partially culpable, which is important for something that happens later.

Anyway, the crew finally has a sensible reaction and is appalled by all of this. Kara feels particularly betrayed, as she sincerely believed that EROS pledged never to interfere with external affairs. Willis just clucks his tongue at her naivete before tossing out another supervillain quip:

Willis: “Soon, there will be only three superpowers left. Then, two. Then, one… Order, as you call it, Sorenson?”

So was he planning this, or is he just rolling with the punches? It sounds like he’s not confident EROS will be the last one standing. I’m guessing he did plan for this to happen in the expectation he could win the war with time to prepare, but it blew up too soon. But he also seems pretty unhinged in general, so it could be he didn’t consider the consequences of his actions and is just saving face now.

Sorenson is disgusted by this, as it runs counter to his ideals of helping all people, not just his own faction. He puts his foot down: after this, the Inquiry is done with EROS.

Then mission control finally patches the communications through.

Looks like they don’t have the situation under control after all. The colony isn’t responding to their controls, so Willis orders the Inquiry crew to shut it down for them.

Willis: “That colony needs to be stopped by any means necessary. They could ruin hundreds of trillions of credits in research.”

Oh wow, a “not my precious moneys” line too? He’s really making sure to check all the boxes, isn’t he.

Sorenson agrees to the order, but makes it clear this is the last thing he’s doing for Willis. Why does he go along with it, come to think of it? He knows that not only has EROS betrayed them, they’re an enemy of Typelog and continuing to aid them will probably make the Inquiry an enemy by extension. He has no reason to honor this last request, especially since the threat doesn’t actually seem that dire. Perhaps he’s just a good person who doesn’t want to enable wanton destruction purely out of spite.

This mission features one of my favorite tracks, “Abandoned”. I’m a sucker for slow-build themes that end up grand and terrifying, and this one is suitably dramatic. It plays during the battle, too! I’d even go so far as to say that the BGM really makes this mission. Taken objectively, this sequence isn’t actually anything special; it’s even more out of the blue than the previous final missions, and doesn’t have direct relevance to anything. The enemy isn’t even a direct threat to anyone like Lagarto or Ral was. It’s just another job. But the music makes it feel like much more than it is, probably because music like that feels like it can’t possibly be used for anything but significant and dramatic moments. This is a case where flash really can compensate for lack of substance, I think.

Kara has an attack of conscience and wants to let the colonists escape. Willis just says they’re too stupid to survive on their own, and tells me it’s easiest to defeat them with pilot weapons.

Rami: “These are unshielded civilians! Pilot weapons will kill them, even if you have engagement failsafes enabled!”

I bet he planned on them not knowing that. Creepy. But I am annoyed that this is the exact opposite of how it worked last episode, where Ral was totally unaffected by pilot damage despite having nothing but a glass tube protecting her. Individually, they’re both neat concepts, but you can’t pull the same trick twice in two mutually exclusive ways.

Willis just reiterates that they have to be stopped, and Kara leaves the final decision up to me.

The colonists also got their own communications channel, and they say a new message every node I advance by. Very dramatic!

“Freedom! Freedom! The time is nigh! This world is a prison built to nurture our ignorance! But no more, I say. No more!”

“Soon, my friends, soon! Soon we shall feel the warmth and breathe the air on the other side of these glass walls!”

“To hold the light, the power, the fury of our sun in the palm of your own hand. It will be out-of-reach no longer!”

“First we must breach into the worlds of our neighbors. Blow open their doors and allow them to escape to freedom!”

“Some of you have claimed an invisible hand has guided our every move. Now, we shall know for sure!”

“The first lights of the heavens are approaching! Show them your newfound strength! Your right to freedom!”

Beautiful. I don’t know why the developer writes so little in this grand high fantasy style, he’s so good at it. And this is made even better by dramatic irony – they think the outside world is more of the same, but we know there’s nothing but the unforgiving vacuum of space outside their walls. They actually are endangering themselves and others, even if they don’t know it. It’s a clever reversal of the situation in the last game – now we’re looking down on the people trapped in their own tiny world. (Although now that I think about it, that just makes me disappointed that this wasn’t the endgame of The Reconstruction – just think about how cool that would have been! And it would have given this mission real significance by making it a direct parallel! But no, doing things is evil so the protagonists had to twiddle their thumbs and go out with a whimper instead.)

Before the battle begins, Sorenson orders me to defeat them with pilot damage, but he clearly has misgivings about it.

Will you look at that, an attack that’s legitimately dangerous! I actually have to manage my positioning carefully to make sure nobody gets KO’d! The colony’s MOD unit helpers are pretty weak, but – and I know this is hard to believe – some of them inflict the same type of damage and thus actually matter! It’s like the developer realized boss fights are supposed to be challenging or something.

Not challenging enough for murder to be an actual temptation, though. Like every prior boss, I can still win this in only a few rounds, especially since its weakling flunkies go down so fast. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has negative pilot defense, and it’s vulnerable to almost every property on top of that. Choosing to beat it through pilot damage turns the whole battle into a joke; it’ll go down even faster than normal enemies. That doesn’t feel like good design to me; boss battles should still be more challenging than the norm, even if they have an easy mode.

You know, when I first played the game, baby me thought it was so deep and clever to integrate gameplay and story like this and provide a selfish moral choice instead of the normal “well who can say what’s really right, really” wishy-washy dilemmas we get. The setup makes it clear that there is no good reason to kill the colonists other than that it’s easier… but in practice the battle is still so easy that you’d only ever kill the colonists if you’re trying to be evil, which ruins the execution. This should have been about as hard as the previous bosses if you chose pilot damage and a truly grueling gauntlet if you chose hull or systems damage. That would have made walking the high road actually difficult, in turn making this a meaningful choice, while still making the battle a suitably dramatic finale even if the player takes the easy way out.

(And on the topic of making this fight harder, this would also be the perfect opportunity to introduce the only thing in an RPG that’s actually dangerous: the area of effect attack. What, do you really mean to tell me that that massive cannon volley only hits one person?)

And oh come on, this garbage is all I get? Previous bosses always coughed up cutting-edge weapon components.

Anyway, busting the hull triggered the evacuation routine, so the colonists are all in escape pods now. Sorenson is relieved I didn’t kill them, but I am a little worried how they’re going to survive now. Do the pods all have emitters? This also counts as an Important Choice™ – Ros becomes more imaginative and flexible. For once I think this makes perfect sense.

Willis tells Kara to help with cleanup, but she’s had enough of his schemes and says she’s defecting to the Inquiry. He still requests one last meeting with the crew, and for some reason she’s not suspicious he’ll use that excuse to kill or kidnap everyone.

That’s the end of the gameplay for this episode. Shockingly, the ending sequence is actually pretty substantial this time, so I’m putting it in its own update.

Until then, let’s do an experiment.

Next update, we’re finally going to learn The Black One’s deal — or the part that concerns his abilities and abnormalities, at least. If you’re a blind reader, I’d like you to provide any theories you might have in the comments. I’m curious to see if it’s at all possible to figure it out in advance. To recap, the facts we know about him are:

1. Doesn’t behave anything like a normal Lesser; displays human-level intelligence and communication skills.
2. After being defeated at the comm station, didn’t reappear until the crew got close to a Lesser quarantine, and
3. Appeared to come from the direction of the Lesser quarantine.
4. Had a cyborg leg in his first appearance but a fleshy one in his second.
5. Seemed to be trying to commit suicide when we encountered him outside the abandoned facility.

Place your bets!

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