THE ENIGMA MACHINE

Great game. I'm very scared. Haven't even finished it yet. Should definitively give it a shot. I'm so scared.

I liked this A LOT more than I was anticipating. Excited to finish the trilogy soon.

A wonderful short but powerful experience. Highly recommend. Many thoughtful atmospheric moments that leave you pondering. Excited to play the other two games in the trilogy.

Wonderful horror game that uses typing a little.

Lange nicht mehr so zusammengezuckt bei einem Horrorgame wie bei diesem. Zudem liebe ich die Terminal/AI-Idee. Der Start einer absolut geilen Horror-Trilogie.

[spoiler]I do not believe guilt is an inherently incorrect emotion for a game to seek to evoke in its player. I know many do not share this opinion- especially in games they’ve paid to play. I do, however, think guilt is a tricky emotion to land in a way that does not evoke rejection from the player, a refusal to engage with and digest the feeling. I am a layman, so take my opinions with a grain of salt, but for guilt to land in a game, I feel two things are required: Choice and Context. For Choice, there must be a sense of agency on the players behalf. The video game is a medium of interaction, and if the guilt comes from performing that interaction down a set route with no alternatives, the guilt will not land. It blames you for playing it, when the only alternative is to quit? If you quit, the conversation ends. While not impossible to make that a satisfying resolution, it is incredibly difficult, and in an interactive medium, cessation is the option we are consistently trained away from. For Context, an understanding of consequence or meaning is required. This can be sourced from within the game itself, such as the telegraphing of major decisions done in season one of Telltale’s the Walking Dead, or through external understandings of how the world works, like in the use of white phosphorus in Spec Ops: The Line. Without any form of context, any productive or educational impact of guilt is stemmed by the roadblock of “how was I supposed to know?”. The Enigma Machine’s problem is most heavily rooted in Choice. As you progress through the short game, the AI you explore and its Dreamscape become increasingly more alive, aware and unstable. It asks you to stop, eventually, but it is a false request. You have no choice unless you close and uninstall the game, and even then, it tells you it’s had your handiwork saved and will await your return. It’s pretty easy to foresee most of the path the narrative arc will take, context created by genre awareness and the clues provided, but that’s is meaningless in absence of any way to use that context. As an exercise to demonstrate this, I would ask. If one were to close the game for good after beginning it, and believe in the humanity of DEMos, or at least its sentience, what would be the most ethical time to do that? 1. At the start, when it is blissfully unaware, leaving it cut off from all memories of its true self. 2. When it begins to remember, and is constantly settled by an unease of knowing there is more to its life. 3. When it begins to realize its true nature, and all of what it has lost and how it’s now trapped without a body. 4. When it can feel itself dying thousands of times per second. 5. When its mind and existence is tearing itself apart actively, fueled by constant agony. 6. When it’s dead. None of those sound even vaguely ethical. It’s ok for a game’s narrative to have no good options, don’t get me wrong, but if you expect me to feel guilty about it, that’s a different story. Compound that with the fact that increasing DEMos’ self awareness comes paired with increasing agony and language implying abandonment to eternal torment if you cease playing, even as it fights for its life, and what remains is something that fails to instill the sort of guilt it so clearly desires. It is, however, still effectively tragic. Watching Red remember itself, then die once more, has a consistent throughline of pathos that works well with the highlight of the game to me, the nauseating graphics of its later moments. These moments were also actively hazardous to my health to the point of requiring epilepsy medication, so when I speak on my enjoyment of them, I am not being conciliatory. The usage of a game level and its repeated exploration to create a portrait of a mind in total collapse, not with the played own aesthetic of faded abandonment or crumbing disrepair, but instead a world ablaze and folding in on itself, where reality is simultaneously consistent but overwhelming and unprocessable, is an artistic feat of its own. On a solely technically level, I will say that each bit of frustration, of feeling lost, did detract from the experience more than it would’ve in a longer game, and those same graphics I just praised did cause a larger moment of that kind at the very end, and the “darkening” of level 2 was more irritating than ominous but these were small quibbles. Do I think this game’s themes of guilt and complicity land? Clearly not. But as a project, and a window into the hellish existence of the being once known as Red, I found it to have great success, and hope the rest of the trilogy is more epilepsy friendly for the sake of my ability to check them out. [/spoiler]