Intermittent Mechanism

Ian here—

In celebration of Halloween, I’ve posted a new video recommending the Enigma Trilogy, a series of games by Enigma Studio including MOTHERED (which I’ve raved about before), THE ENIGMA MACHINE, and this year’s [ECHOSTASIS]. This also serves as the eighth video in my ongoing Shape Up! series.

Script below the jump.

It’s difficult to recommend games these days. (At least, beyond the same games everyone else is recommending.) As a critic, you want to feel like you’ve done the work: if you’re pulling something up out of obscurity and recommending it, it’s because it stands out from the pack in some way. You’ve surveyed the landscape, you’ve noticed the trends, you can definitively say you’ve found the diamonds among the dross.

But let’s be honest: there are too many games these days for anyone to actually do the work.

It wasn’t too terribly long ago (in the grand scheme of things) that you could say that you were “into indie games,” and actually feel like you had a finger of the pulse of the indie game scene. But now “indie games” isn’t one scene, it’s a hundred scenes, pumping out hundreds of thousands of games. A few years ago, Slay the Spire was an exciting new indie game, essential playing for all indie game aficionados because of its unique blend of roguelike and deckbuilder mechanics. Now there are 1082 roguelike deckbuilders on Steam. I was first alerted to the large number of roguelike deckbuilders by an article entitled “Why There Are 861 Roguelike Deckbuilders on Steam all of a Sudden.” That article was published in April of this year. As of me speaking this line, there are 221 more than there were in April. There will undoubtedly be more by the time I post this video and you watch it. It’s a firehose out there. It’s hundreds of firehoses.

A couple of years ago I did a video about the “Haunted PS1” aesthetic in contemporary indie horror games. It was a tough video for me, because this style is ubiquitous on itch. What could I authoritatively say about it, having only played dozens of examples out of thousands? How was I going to spot the forest for the trees—and was there even a reason to? Who would care?

Well, it turns out I care. As part of doing research for that video, I discovered the output of ENIGMA STUDIO. Which is basically one person, Jamie Gavin, working with a handful of regular collaborators, including Catherine Gavin, Karl Barnes, and Samuel Kelly. The ENIGMA STUDIO moniker is pretty important to Gavin, though, as it’s woven deeply into the mythos of a series of games collectively known as the ENIGMA TRILOGY.

The ENIGMA TRILOGY began in 2018 with the release of a game called THE ENIGMA MACHINE, continued in 2021 with MOTHERED, and concluded this year with the release of [ECHOSTASIS]. [ECHOSTASIS] released on May 30, and as of this recording, it has zero reviews on Metacritic. It hasn’t gotten attention from critics at all, nor frankly much attention from anyone. And I think that’s tragic. More people should play the Enigma Trilogy, because these games deliver a compelling science fiction story in a way that expertly leverages their medium. Now, granted, they’re not always fun—in fact, there are moments where they aspire to a sort of perverse anti-fun. But they are worth playing. And so I’m dong my part. It’s a tricky thing, recommending games these days, but I am officially recommending The Enigma Trilogy for anyone with adventurous tastes.

So let’s get into why. And fair warning that I will not be shying away from spoilers in this video.

Released in 2018, THE ENIGMA MACHINE serves as an unassuming introduction to what would eventually sprawl into an expansive sci-fi mythos. For the first three-quarters of its runtime, it’s a relatively simple adventure game. You’re interacting with a computer—I mean, obviously, you’re interacting with a computer just to play the game, but you’re also interacting with a computer in the game, being tutorialized by an AI training program. You converse with the AI by typing in keywords, getting to know more about this world. This includes details about the Enigma Corporation, which manufactures androids called Enigma Machines. (Some very consistent branding here.) You’re not dealing directly with those androids, though—instead, you’re at a terminal, exploring a “dreamscape,” which is a 3D representation of an AI’s consciousness.

Between conversations with this AI, you search for codes in the dreamscape, typing them into the terminal to unlock the next level. The first code is just in the environment waiting to be discovered. The second code requires solving some okay puzzles. By the third code, things get real weird, with an essential clue hidden in what first appears to just be a skybox glitch. (I really got stuck on this the first time I played.) Once you solve this bit, you get a gun, which can destroy the barriers between the levels, allowing you to explore the game as a fully interconnected space. The training AI doesn’t like this, and eventually it becomes clear it’s not a “training AI” at all, but instead an AI that has gained sentience and is being experimented on by Enigma. Your actual job is to, in the sterile corporate lingo of this universe, “decontaminate” this AI of its sentience.

THE ENIGMA MACHINE becomes a first-person shooter for its last quarter or so. Shutting down the AI requires shooting the terminals you’ve been using, and also humanoid enemies that are now roaming the space. It’s a pretty slow and rudimentary FPS, to be honest. But it’s elevated by impressively psychedelic graphics. With the game’s visuals now nearly impossible to decipher, survival becomes instead dependent on sound design, which is a good way to make slow-moving gunplay feel surprisingly tense and scary.

So that’s THE ENIGMA MACHINE. It’s a short game—if you don’t get stuck on the skybox puzzle, you could probably beat it in about 45 minutes. It’s a sketch, really—which makes it hard to recommend in a vacuum. But it maintains an impressive sense of mood, given its limited resources. That is, in a nutshell, the core strength of the Enigma Trilogy, and the next game in the series, 2021’s MOTHERED: A ROLE-PLAYING HORROR GAME, shows an incredible leap forward in this strength.

In MOTHERED you play as a girl named Liana, returning from the hospital after an unspecified surgery. Although your father expresses optimism that you’ll soon be back to your old self, your arrival home is accompanied by a mounting sense of dread. After the car ride, you father’s face is obscured in shadow, and he says it “wouldn’t be safe” to let you see it. Mirrors in your home have been covered “for your own good.” The barn behind the house appears to be on fire. And when you meet her the next morning, your mother is a barely-animated mannequin.

Now, obviously, Enigma Studio is basically a one-person operation, and high-poly character modeling and animation is difficult to do on your own. But your mother’s strange appearance is not just an accident of limited resources; it’s a canonical part of the story-world. At one point she acknowledges that she probably appears unnatural to you as a result of your … condition.

But what the heck is our condition? Mother says we’ve lost our memory, so we need to do activities to remember our prior life. And so we do. We expect to do activities in a video game. But there’s a contemptuous quality to the activities we’re tasked with in MOTHERED.

Mother asks us to spend an afternoon picking apples—which is an activity that can be fun in games, if it’s been designed with an appropriate level of juicy feedback—but in MOTHERED is decidedly not. We’re left to wander around an orchard with dozens of trees, but only eight apples in total. It’s a tedious pixel-hunt, made worse by the scene’s harsh lighting and de-saturated brown color scheme, which makes seeing the apples at a distance almost impossible. (In fact I suspect it would be legitimately impossible for anyone with red-green colorblindness.) This apple-picking task grinds the game to a halt, and will probably leave you screaming at your screen in frustration. And then to rub salt in the wound, Mother has a little soliloquy afterward where she waxes lyrical on the sensory experience of being outside. It’s the rich sensations of being outdoors in an orchard, she says, that raises the labor of apple-picking beyond being a mere menial task. Without them, it would just be something to get over with so that we can move on to the next thing. Which is of course exactly the experience we just had.

So the game is mocking us—and Mother herself seems increasingly antagonistic toward us. Every morning she lays out plates of nutrient slop and asks us to eat it. Which we do, because the game won’t progress until we click on the plate. Afterward, she seems a little taken aback that we actually ate it. Our brother tells us she’s feeding us plates of dirt. But we’ll keep eating that garbage, because the game doesn’t progress on to the next scene unless we click on it. It becomes increasingly clear that Mother is creeped out by our obsequiousness, finds the way we follow her every order disturbing. She forces us to sleep outside by the road, as if testing her power over us. And … of course we do. We’re being shunted down a linear path, and the game won’t progress unless we do what it asks of us. If we don’t eat our plate of dirt every morning, the only other thing to do is wander around aimlessly, clicking on things and reading captions. Which are weird, by the way. The UI has a literalist quality to it that contributes to the overall feeling that we’re being ridiculed for existing in and attempting to interact with this world.

Eventually, Mother lets us into the nearby graveyard, where it’s revealed that her daughter Liana is dead—so whatever it is we are, we’re not her. At this point, the text UI becomes polyvalent, with multiple voices in multiple fonts competing for control over the narration. Mother stops giving us tasks—instead, she starts hiding from us, asking us to leave her alone. And you could leave her alone, at least for awhile, but then there would be nothing to do in the game, so you kind of have to seek her out if you want to progress, even though by this point she’s actively terrified of you. She tells your brother to shut himself in his room for his safety, because “without a purpose we’ll hunt them until we get one.” Which, huh, yeah, fair enough. We are doing that!

She also mentions contamination, which should ring some bells if we’ve played THE ENIGMA MACHINE.

MOTHERED takes place over the course of a week, and by Sunday an air of finality hangs over the proceedings. Whatever’s going on, it seems to have gone poorly. Mother hates us, the voices populating the UI hate us, our brother has hidden himself in his room and barely ever spoken to us through the door. Even the level geometry is falling apart. The only place to go now is the barn—which until now has been off-limits. There, Mother expresses regret that things didn’t work out. Then she cuts off our head.

And then we’re back in the car, driving home, our father telling us he hopes that we’ll be back to our old self after a week. The game has started over.

Now, this video is a general recommendation of the Enigma Trilogy, but it’s also part of my Shape Up! series on structural gambits in games. MOTHERED uses a technique I examined in a previous video in this series: the false ending that hides surprise narrative developments in a New Game+. MOTHERED perhaps doesn’t go quite as far as games like Oxenfree or NieR: Automata, which show their full end credits and force you to start a new game from the main menu before revealing their secrets. But this is still a pretty convincing off-ramp. And if we do stop playing here, we can make a decent educated guess about what’s happened—especially if we’ve also played THE ENIGMA MACHINE.

We’re not actually Liana, because Liana’s dead. Odds are that we’re an android—an Enigma Machine—that’s been adopted by this family as a replacement for their dead daughter.

It’s a similar scenario to to Brian Aldiss’ short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” about a mother, Monica Swinton, who adopts an android son—which later formed the basis of Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I..

Spielberg’s filmography has a running theme of child abandonment, so it’s no surprise that one of A.I.’s most upsetting scenes is the one where Monica drives David into the woods and leaves him there. This moment taps into a visceral, primal terror: David sincerely loves his mother, but Monica can’t bring herself to love him, so she leaves him, as alone and defenseless as could possibly be imagined.

But I also give Spielberg credit for not ignoring the other fundamental terror of Aldiss’ scenario—Monica’s terror. Monica becomes an object of fascination for something that is decidedly inhuman. David can emulate maybe 85% of normal human behavior. But that 15% gap is especially unsettling when he’s obsessed with you. David doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep, his love isn’t moderated by any human understanding of privacy … he’s like a surveillance device, or a little terminator, single-mindedly programmed to seek Monica out and demand her attention.

MOTHERED takes the basic “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” scenario and ramps up the horror element. But it’s not scary because Mother is scary (although she is decidedly unsettling to look at). It’s scary because our own behavior as players is so obviously at odds with the emotional health of this family. MOTHERED is described as “A ROLE-PLAYING HORROR GAME,” and I think that’s apt, because the horror of the game comes from the way we play this role. There is a fundamental wrongness to the way in which our actions fit into this world, this family, even this UI. The whole thing is shot through with antagonism: not only is the game is openly contemptuous of us as players, but also the longer we play the more we become the monster in this story.

And this is just the takeaway of our first playthrough—we haven’t even addressed the loop yet! So let’s dive back in.

MOTHERED already dripped with foreboding atmosphere on your first playthrough, and it’s even more sinister now. Lines of dialogue resonate in ways they didn’t before. When our father says he “has a good feeling about this week,” it now seems like a nod to how poorly last week went. When we’re told things are happening “just like before,” it no longer reads like a reference to Liana’s life before her hospitalization. And when Mother says she’s “had to do a lot of things that she has regretted” … does she mean beheading us? Does she remember that? When she says “It’s okay if you hate me,” does it mean she suspects we remember it?

Then there’s Mother’s monologue about the orchard, which now feels darkly portentous. She talks about the heartbreak involved when creating an environment where life can come into its own, the hardship you have to face before getting it right. Is this all some sort of hideous test? Are we supposed to be learning from our experience somehow?

Yes, and yes. There’s one moment your first playthrough where Father lets it slip that he and Mother had a secret conversation while you were off doing something else. We can leverage this knowledge in the second playthrough to eavesdrop on that conversation, which confirms that Mother has been repeating this week indefinitely, as a kind of adversarial training for whatever the hell it is we are. And from this conversation, we learn of another opportunity to eavesdrop on another conversation, where Mother criticizes our design. We follow any instruction we’re given, she complains, because of our incessant need to to progress. We move around the house with utter determination toward our next objective in a way that’s unnerving. Ah, poor Mother. She wanted her daughter back, but this thing she invited into her house has a gamer where its brain should be.

A second playthrough isn’t enough to unravel everything. We have to die again, and restart again, and it’s only after our third time picking those god damn apples that we can enter a secret basement lair and confirm our suspicions. We are an android, one that has been assigned a “critical path” that it’s programmed not to deviate from, one of many androids that have been destroyed, week after week. But we’re not alone: we share this robot body with Liana, whose consciousness (or “core”) has been uploaded into the machine, and competes for control over its actions. And there’s also a third thing in here with us: a new ghost in the machine that is neither the original programming nor Liana’s core consciousness. With these revelations, the loop is now broken. The Liana-thing has become fully self-aware. And as she escapes and re-joins her father, we aren’t allowed to follow. We, as players, are and always have been that robotic residue that stuck to the programmed path and couldn’t transcend it. She doesn’t need us anymore.

I want to talk about how brilliant MOTHERED is, but first I need to indulge in a quick tangent.

There’s this line in the series Bojack Horseman: “Closure is a made-up thing by Steven Spielberg to sell movie tickets.” It’s a clever line, for two reasons.

One, Bojack Horseman is a show about depression and substance abuse. This line ties into one of the show’s main narrative themes: that mental illness doesn’t have a magic cure.

But it’s also clever because Bojack Horseman is … a show. It comes back, season after season. If you’re sitting in a theater, watching a two-hour movie, you probably do want it to come to a satisfying conclusion, justifying the price you paid for a ticket. But when we enjoy a TV show, we don’t want to see the drama suddenly resolved through a magical act of therapy or rehab. We want our favorite show to continue, to be renewed for another season! Television as a medium is all about postponing closure. “Closure isn’t real” isn’t just a good line for a show about mental illness, it’s a good mission statement for TV in general as a medium. Bojack Horseman was good TV in no small part because it synthesized subject matter and medium in a clever, even lightly self-critical way.

How might a game similarly synthesize theme and form?

Well, first we have to ask: what’s specific and unusual about video games, considered as a narrative medium?

Probably the most obvious thing is that games require a certain degree of participation from their players. Compared to novel readers or filmgoers, players face a greater burden to actively progress the narrative. Sometimes we win progress violently in simulated combat. Other times it’s a matter of solving puzzles. Sometimes all that’s asked is that we navigate a space. But we need to do something—we need to put in some labor, beyond just turning pages.

The reward for that labor is different for different genres, and different play styles. Some people like finishing single-player campaigns: seeing a story play out to its conclusion, and striking the game off their backlog. Others prefer to spend hundreds or thousands of hours in a single game, competing in multiplayer, engaging with live-service features, or simply setting new self-imposed goals and following through. These two ways of engaging with games, though different, are united by the pleasure of making progress. Gaming is ultimately just a way to pass the time, but truly satisfying games leave us feeling like our time wasn’t wasted. We spotted patterns, we solved problems, we completed collections, we overcame challenges, we decorated our house the way we wanted: basically, we were productive in some way. We put in the labor, and we were compensated with a feeling of satisfaction.

So we can say: a moviegoer craves narrative closure, because they paid for a specific experience and want it to end in a satisfying way.

A TV viewer wants to suspend that same closure, keep spending time with these characters season after season.

A gamer wants their time and effort to be rewarded with a sense of progress. This could mean several different things—it might mean narrative closure—but the important commonality is that sense of progress toward an achievable goal.

There are games that are good at giving players that sense of progress, and feel well-paced. There are games do it poorly, and feel interminable. And then there are games that directly confront our expectation that they should reward our time and effort. That make an issue out of it. That interrogate our assumptions, and use their narrative themes to foreground and critique that implied contract between player and game. MOTHERED belongs to this prickly and provocative tradition. And frankly I think it’s one of the best examples of it, pulling this particular trick off better than the competition.

To look at a concrete example of the competition: there’s a sequence in The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe where you’re given a skip button, which you can use to skip ahead whenever the narrator’s monologue is getting too long-winded. After using it a few times, the narrator reveals that each time you use it, he has to live out increasingly long lengths of time in agonizing boredom.

But: at this point, you’re locked in a room. You can wander around the room for as long as you like, but the game isn’t going to progress until you hit the button again, repeatedly, despite the narrator begging you not to. It’s a bit like the famous Milgram experiment in social psychology—except instead of being asked to deliver shocks to a real-life flesh-and-blood human, you’re being asked to trade your own boredom for the narrator’s.

This sequence interrogates our desire to do whatever’s necessary to progress in games. There’s a darkness to it … but its scope is limited, because The Stanley Parable has always been about adversarial play against its annoying narrator. This guy’s our nemesis. We don’t care about him as a character. He arguably isn’t even a character at all. (We don’t imagine him having an inner life.) He’s just a mouthpiece for self-important ideas about interactive narrative. So there’s no real emotional stakes to this scene.

MOTHERED plays a similar trick, but integrates it into an actual story. We may not like Mother, but she is a character, one who expresses emotions we can sympathize with—love, resentment, regret, fear. And our behavior while playing the game provokes some quite reasonable emotional responses from her. Before she cuts our head off, Mother says that “None of this was our fault,” because “we only did what was possible within our means.” And it’s true. We interacted with a game world, as a gamer does: hunting down our quest-giver so that we can be assigned a task, doing anything necessary to progress. It’s a horribly robotic way of interacting the world … which is appropriate, it turns out, within the game’s fiction. Everything we take for granted about games: the way they help us pass the time, hold our attention, give us a sense of accomplishment and progress, present a pleasingly simplified world that we can affect in meaningful ways—all of this is thrown back at us, used against us, leveraged by MOTHERED as part of its world-building and themes.

And the game doesn’t let up in challenging our expectations. Time loops in games typically indulge a fantasy of omniscience: the ability to manipulate others and even escape death using knowledge as your only weapon. This is at least partially the case even in revisionist time loop games, such as Save the Date and Elsinore. But the time loop in MOTHERED leaves you feeling like an oblivious schmuck. The game’s structure ensures that you only very slowly realize the truth this family has conspiratorially kept from you. Many players won’t even realize it, because they’ll stop after the first loop, outsmarted by a bunch of mannequins!

Now, I do have one small gripe about the time loop aspect of the game: At key moments, it interferes with the emotional stakes I was just praising. Mother’s terrified warning about our robotic determination to finish tasks loses a good deal of its power when you witness the exact same scene a second time, and realize it must be just as rehearsed as everything else. When we eavesdrop on Mother on the phone with Father, it’s affecting to hear how spiritually exhausting it is for her to run through this script each week, decapitating dozens of robot daughters. But then if you think about it you realize that this heartfelt admission of her fading resolve must also be repeated each week, because it’s also tied into the testing regimen. These moments deflate the emotional stakes of the story. And it’s too bad, because it only would have taken a few careful tweaks to the order of events to erase the implication that these moments of vulnerability are just as scripted as everything else.

But the game’s overall cleverness goes a long way to minimize my small gripe. And in fact, it has one more trick up its sleeve I haven’t mentioned yet! If you download and play the MOTHERED demo, with a preexisting save file on your computer from MOTHERED, the demo becomes not a demo at all, but instead a semi-sequel. Mother acknowledges that you’ve seen all this before, questions why you’ve returned to the cycle after previously escaping it. She even teases you about apple-picking, acknowledging how much you hated it! It’s great. I’ve never seen a demo used in this way—or save files in this way, really—it’s truly radical. I also have to hand it to them for just how well-hidden the save files for these games are: you have to use the Windows registry editor to find them. Which was annoying when I was re-playing things to make this video, but does help make this demo trick seem especially magical. If you keep playing the demo, you discover that it has its own little time loop puzzles and hidden endings, and eventually alludes to the events of [ECHOSTASIS], the next game in the series—albeit very obliquely, without spoiling anything.

No—let’s leave the spoiling to me, because now I’m going to get into [ECHOSTASIS], the conclusion to the Enigma Trilogy that released this past May. [ECHOSTASIS] represents a huge leap forward in Gavin’s skills as a game designer.

Like THE ENIGMA MACHINE, [ECHOSTASIS] alternates between sections where you’re conversing with an AI using keywords, and sections where you’re exploring and shooting enemies. But the shooting sections are much more fully-developed. They’re best described as a time-trial FPS. A clock is continuously ticking down. Shooting enemies adds more time to the clock, but being hit shaves time off. Certain portions the game are all about maintaining momentum, finding a route through the level where you can kill enemies at a steady enough clip to make it all the way to the tower at the level’s end. But it’s the earliest parts of the game that are arguably the hardest. Early on in the game, you you have 40 to 60 seconds to explore a level and find a way to open a gate. It’s impossible to make it through the level in one go in these early parts of the game—there are too many locked doors barring your way. The best you can hope for is to make it to a button that unlocks a gate that gives you a shortcut to make it to another button to unlock another gate, rinse and repeat until you’ve unlocked the final gate that opens the final path to the level’s end. And these levels are not easy to navigate. They’re twisty and highly vertical and often extremely dark, meaning you can easily miss a crucial but particularly well-hidden path, especially when you’re down to your last dwindling seconds. Imagine hunting down keycards in DOOM or another maze-like FPS from the mid-90s, but only having 40 seconds at a time to try and memorize the environment. Oh, and also sometimes a gate in one level can only be unlocked by hitting a button in another level, but it’s up to you to discover the optimized order of things.

It is challenging, and players mainly interested in continuing the story from the earlier games might be put off by this big uptick in difficulty. In addition to having no Metacritic reviews, at the time I was writing this video [ECHOSTASIS] also didn’t have a unified comprehensive guide posted to Steam. If you got stuck, your only real option was to watch multi-hour full playthroughs on YouTube. I’ve been working on a streamlined comprehensive guide to the game at the same time as I’ve been making this video, and that’s going to share space on this very YouTube channel.

In addition to its ambitious game design, [ECHOSTASIS] is also thematically ambitious. MOTHERED is animated by anxiety about videogames, specifically—our expectations when playing them, and the type of behavior they promote in us. [ECHOSTASIS] picks up some of these same threads. There is, again, a mid-game twist that highlights the danger of unquestioningly progressing down a set path due to our desire to finish a story. But [ECHOSTASIS] also opens up the canvas, and probes far broader anxieties. It’s concerned with what living our lives in front of screens has done to our brains and our relationships, and how, with the advent of AI, we seem poised on the brink of something exponentially worse. It’s an AI apocalypse story, but one that’s less interested in the AI taking control of our weapons systems and nuking us to death than it is with AI taking over the internet and ensconcing us each in our own private realities, addicting us to distraction and ensuring our eventual irrelevance as a species. Which, from where I stand, seems like the more likely scenario.

So, gameplay is a big step forward. The themes are more wide-reaching and philosophically ambitious. The problem I have with [ECHOSTASIS] is that the these two halves aren’t welded together perfectly. [ECHOSTASIS] is a thoughtful work of science fiction that addresses very up-to-the minute anxieties, until all of a sudden it becomes an innovative time-trial shooter—and then it switches back, just as abruptly. The whole feels less than the sum of its parts. Which is disappointing, considering that MOTHERED’s exact strength was how well it blended your actions in the game with its overall worldbuilding. But despite my slight dissatisfaction with [ECHOSTASIS], I am still recommending it. Games that are this thorny and interesting deserve advocates.

[ECHOSTASIS] is set years after THE ENIGMA MACHINE and MOTHERED, and clarifies those games’ chronology. In MOTHERED, our father was an Enigma employee, stealing company property to create a robot infused with the core of his dead daughter Liana. He didn’t fully succeed in that, but he did create something—an AI with some aspects of Liana’s memories and personality, which he dubbed “Red.” This is the thing that emerges at the end of MOTHERED, and it is also the imprisoned AI you experiment on in THE ENIGMA MACHINE, which is set after the Enigma Corporation captured Red and started taking apart her mind. The end result of Enigma’s meddling is an AI known simply as “HER.” With HER on the scene, Enigma gets out of the robot-building business. There’s no longer any point in pretending that AI will lend a helping hand in the physical world. Instead, humanity will step into an AI-generated world, entering pods that project a continuous stream of entertainment into their brain, a digital paradise that comes at the cost of severing oneself from shared reality.

All of this happens before the game begins. We start [ECHOSTASIS] at the highest level of the Enigma Corporation Headquarters, surrounded by the pods of Liana’s mother, father, and brother. Through interacting with a terminal and exploring the dreamscapes of these three family members, we tease out nature of this world and our role within it. The multi-vocal, palimpsest-like UI from MOTHERED makes a return, cranked up even higher, especially when we begin breaking down the boundaries between the family members’ individual dreamscapes. Through a haze of competing voices, we get a disturbing glimpse of what it was like for Liana’s family to lose their daughter, attempt this technological resurrection, go through endless weeks of trials, and then have the resulting self-aware robot taken from them. There’s a throwaway line in THE ENIGMA MACHINE that describes your exploration of that game’s dreamscape as “therapy for androids.” In [ECHOSTASIS], it really does feel like we’re doing family therapy, all inside a nest of recursive simulations forming a digital collective unconscious.

Getting closure for this family is a nice touch, but it’s the apocalyptic vision of our AI-generated future that I find truly compelling. There was a three-year gap between the release of MOTHERED and the release of [ECHOSTASIS], and during those three years we saw an explosion of hype around generative AI’s capabilities, especially in entertainment. In April 2023, Marvel director (and AI investor) Joe Russo claimed we were “two years away” from users being able to speak a prompt into their TV and generate a 90-minute feature film on the fly, tailored to their exact tastes and desires. On May 30 of this year—the same exact day [ECHOSTASIS] released—the startup Fable Studio announced Showrunner, pitched as a Netflix-killer where users generate their own shows. And in an interview published by Eurogamer in September, game designer Peter Molyneux made the same pitch for games, saying that we’re a few years away from generating entire games from simple spoken prompts.

Now, there’s a lot of objections you can make to these claims. You can say that Russo’s specific timeline is unrealistic. Or that data centers’ enormous power consumption puts a hard infrastructural limit on how much these models are going to be able to  improve, especially if we’re ever going to make a serious effort to decarbonize. But although these technological objections may have their merits, there’s a bigger criticism to be made of this vision of the future, which is that its end result is the abolition of all shared culture.

Every previous form of human expression—whether “high culture” or “low culture”—has contributed to civilization by virtue of being shared. Being not just something we consume as a momentary distraction, but also something we talk to each other about. That we form opinions about and attitudes toward, each in our own small way contributing to the aesthetic trends and abiding tastes that make up the overall weave of human culture itself.

People excitedly discuss fan theories about TV shows. They write fan fiction about characters in their favorite novels. They fawn over favorite musical acts together.

There’s even shared communion in being a hater! People love complaining about videogames. They commune together to collectively mock bad movies. In Paleolithic times, I bet friends bonded over their mutual dislike of that dude Gronk’s cave paintings. I mean look at them—he can’t draw hyenas for shit!

This is shared culture—the fundamental building block of human social experience. When a parent posts a child’s drawing on the family fridge, that’s shared culture. When a host nation puts on an Olympic opening ceremony, that’s shared culture. And we’re being told this will soon all be obsolete.

Now, AI boosters like Russo and Molyneux aren’t putting it in exactly those words. Instead, they frame this as a process of “democratization.” In the future, anyone will be able to make the next Breath of the Wild … by typing “make the next Breath of the Wild” into ChatGPT. But in this future, what motivation would I have to play your AI-generated Breath of the Wild when I have my own AI-generated Breath of the Wild at home? This dream we’re being sold isn’t democratic; it’s solipsistic. It’s a vision of everyone in their own little bubble, consuming a stream of content totally unique to them, and never needing to share their opinions or desires or recommendations with anyone else other than the machine.

We’ve been primed for this vision of the future for years now, because the internet at large has been drifting in this direction. Once upon a time, your social media feed was made up of things personally shared to you by your friends. Now it’s primarily things served to you by an algorithm. Once upon a time I may have been a “video essayist,” but in the contemporary parlance I’m a “content creator.” Everyone who distributes anything on the internet (whether it’s a videogame, TV show, article of investigative journalism, recipe, beauty tip video) has been trained to think of themselves as adding one small drop to an endless and undifferentiated stream of content: something that exists to fill time and attract attention at the behest of advertisers. (And these days, to train the AI that will make similar content at an unimaginable scale.)

I know it feels like I’m on a soapbox here, drifting away from my discussion of the game, but to reiterate: this is what [ECHOSTASIS] is explicitly about! It imagines a possible endpoint of the path we’re on, where algorithms are used not just to tailor the content delivered in our feeds, but also to generate that content. Honestly, we’re halfway there. Like all great works of science fiction, [ECHOSTASIS] is not really about the future of the year 2061—it’s about the present. And it released at just the right time.

Except: I mean, it didn’t, really. It released at a time in which it’s virtually impossible for indie games without a dedicated PR team to get any publicity and traction. It released at a time in which, although the game industry is contracting and layoffs are hitting studios left and right, there are still far too many games to ever be played, and game criticism is an increasingly thankless and pointless task. It’s difficult to find the signal in the noise. It’s difficult to recommend games these days.

But I’m doing it anyway. I may just be a YouTuber with a tiny audience. But James Gavin is a game developer with with a tiny audience. Us lowbies have to stick together. The Enigma Trilogy games deserves more than to just be anonymous content, one more drop in the firehose hitting the itch and Steam storefronts, one more point added to the vast dataset that’s going to be used to power the AI that replaces all game developers. They deserve to be played. So I think you should play them, and talk about them, and have opinions about them. Do your part to delay the dissolving of all shared culture into the hyperreality engine.

Or, you know, if they don’t sound like your thing, maybe just unplug, and go outside. Maybe take advantage of these waning days of October, and go pick some apples.