In stench there is a story.
A genuinely moving articulation of faith through virtual mediums. Hope dies in the vacuum of space and is found again through deep water, with horror stemming from the blood fuselage of sullen muscles stretched across the clockwork machinery of corporate empire; on the oceanic floor where my suns were drowned I emerge - a nü-man. I am a very smart bear now. I will see the sky.
The world of Stasis left a gash-wide imprint on me because like the dead genre that it is point’n’click needs a jolt, to be dragged across waves engines and into a space where flesh and interface meld into one - behold, my precious Bone Totem. The convergence point of adventure-play with a place vivid enough to make the trajectory of our clicks worth more than a mere curious inquiry of hidden nooks and crannies. My sea is no corporation, my sea will crush you. There can be no logical order of exploitation to the whims of the depth's currents therefore locating your story inside an environment whose hostility far surpasses any capital contempt, that will only deal in blood and iron as its sacred currencies; to make it through the day deeper truths need to be held - a belief in something other than broken ribs, powered by said-broken ribs. DEEPSEA15’s all rust and grime, a place for the true masochists, lovers of algaes and wire-grids alike, actively pressing down where it hurts and yet prodding at our insides with a great deal care - binding itself instead of shredding our characters, a slow-burn of cog-wheeled violence amidst stormy seas. Oil rig's always the play, because here it's the only play. Nobody wants to be down there yet we’re all exactly where we're meant to be - wound up in this great skeleton unfit for any sort of humane life, unable to function for long without our continued presence within itself. And in this mother of all contraptions “the only way out is through.”
The big question posed by Bone Totem's vast array of characters and computer terminals is as follows : Is survival even worth it in this world? Capital has become its own religion & theology, a literal promise of digital afterlife for the devout worker while their exploitation fuels the expansion of CAYNE Corporation and its Churches into further enslaving mankind. Liberation only exists in the glimpses of shadow organizations off-world whose motives may not even be all that benevolent and by the time the credits roll on the last act's torture porn, barely anyone is left alive to answer my questions. This is a story about what happens when you take the pay that's too good to pass and sink in the process anyway. In the derelict's underbelly Charlie, Mac and Moses make sickly sweet bed, a grieving couple and their teddy bear, each one pushed to go on by their faith in something larger than themselves - that could save them as much as it could swallow their body and soul whole. Mac is a true believer in Cayne's gospel, implanted with the technology that's supposed to transport his mind into the Nexus at the final hour; Charlie's the practical cynic, a clever and desperate engineer, while Moses sits in-between those two as Bone Totem's touch of uncanny valley genius : It's their dead daughter's animatronics bear, one infused with the artificial intelligence to match; a pure soul in the most profane body. The second stroke of ingenuity of the narrative lies in the use of each character's abilities throughout the game and the way they communicate with one another : Mac possesses the brute-strength to bend contraptions to his will while Charlie's the crafting expert who will make sparks out of the inert. Moses, due to its size and circuitry, finds wiggle room in ventilation shafts and back-panel motherboards to get its "humans" out of tight spots. But what binds this whole system together is the ability to AirDrop objects between the three of 'em in order to take advantage of their respective skills at any moment, swapping perspectives and squeezing the abstract bits out of gameplay, the actual pointing and clicking pushed to serve a constant state of fiddling and putting things together, connecting skin to metal and arteries towards their new orifices, making due of the broken state of it all just to get through the day in one piece. Shit’s a breeze for my monkey brain, as much as a slow, catastrophic systemic failure of corporate machinery can in any way be qualified as swift - spaces compressing and then stretching themselves, water-filled elevators in contrast to their air pockets, finding finality - always - in death puzzles whose fail-states splatter in grizzly 3D. Here violence is not so much a shock factor as it is the character-building exercise in which we partake with all its sloshing steel atrocity. Only the most broken and dysfunctional of families could get through this. But even then survival is not the point in Bone Totem. What sits at the heart of the game's troubled conscience is artifice and hesitation - how we may progressively find ourselves bound by the clauses of the new flesh. Everyone on DEEPSEA15 is kept on a loose leash, wanting out of the hurt that comes from being born in this putrid place called reality. And it's not happening. And it keeps happening. No one's got the answer - but we can't leave.
[This is a MULE Emergency Broadcast]
WATER PRESSURE REACHING CRITICAL LEVELS_
SEEK THE SUN OR DROWN IN THE DEEP_
BE A GOOD BEAR NOW_
Towards the end of third chapter, Moses discovers that one of the trapped scientists who's been helping him through radio in exchange for his own freedom was nothing more than a brain in the proverbial jar, condemned to sink with the rest of the station. We enter a room and find the cable-crucified approximation of a circulatory system atop which sits what little remains of Faran, a consciousness unaware of their own predicament. Eyes in the dark. It's impossible for me not to think of my first steps back in PATHOS-II, finding the robot body of Carl Semken and him looking at me, believing, truly believing, that he was still human - and then unplugging the cord because the only way out is through. Bone Totem walks a lot like SOMA - threading a bleak and complex existential line - but what separates it from Frictional's work mirrors the gap in emotional fortitude between the original Blade Runner and 2049. The question that gets its hooks into me isn't whether Deckard is a replicant or not and, henceforth, if androids do indeed dream of electric sheeps but rather the turnstiles of such an existence, or in other words, what meaning do you ascribe to the wooden horse that K finds in the furnace? Knowing you are a byproduct possessing the ability - however life-like in its fakery - to feel things and coming back to DEEPSEA15 with that same line of questioning, from Moses to Faran, presents a difficulty...the horse could, in essence, mean nothing - in fact it does. So why the struggle? Moses is remarkable in his artificiality because it grants him the most human quality a robot could have : Delusion. Contrary to Faran who scorns his watery prison as a physical manifestation of Hell, Moses only perceives it through the rosy glass-eyed programming of a teddy bear who does not like to be wet - the lens of tales and arborescences. This world taken as a whole may well be humanity's future purgatory but Moses doesn't see it that way. How could he? Charlie and Mac may still survive. The memory of the little girl he played with remains. Reality as he perceives it is still magical, still to be thought of as something more than an oil spill even as he himself is nothing more than a facsimile. A faith brittler than bones is still worth carrying by souls untainted. And so as Moses leaves the room for the last time, swearing hope to his computer brethren, the once-human Faran asks :
"I...can never leave here. Can I?"
To which the plastic bear responds with one of the most heartbreaking lines of dialogue I’ve ever heard in a videogame :
"Yes, but it is still a story."
Moses will see the sun again. But even if he doesn’t, the only way out is through. There’s still life to be found under the water.
A genuinely moving articulation of faith through virtual mediums. Hope dies in the vacuum of space and is found again through deep water, with horror stemming from the blood fuselage of sullen muscles stretched across the clockwork machinery of corporate empire; on the oceanic floor where my suns were drowned I emerge - a nü-man. I am a very smart bear now. I will see the sky.
The world of Stasis left a gash-wide imprint on me because like the dead genre that it is point’n’click needs a jolt, to be dragged across waves engines and into a space where flesh and interface meld into one - behold, my precious Bone Totem. The convergence point of adventure-play with a place vivid enough to make the trajectory of our clicks worth more than a mere curious inquiry of hidden nooks and crannies. My sea is no corporation, my sea will crush you. There can be no logical order of exploitation to the whims of the depth's currents therefore locating your story inside an environment whose hostility far surpasses any capital contempt, that will only deal in blood and iron as its sacred currencies; to make it through the day deeper truths need to be held - a belief in something other than broken ribs, powered by said-broken ribs. DEEPSEA15’s all rust and grime, a place for the true masochists, lovers of algaes and wire-grids alike, actively pressing down where it hurts and yet prodding at our insides with a great deal care - binding itself instead of shredding our characters, a slow-burn of cog-wheeled violence amidst stormy seas. Oil rig's always the play, because here it's the only play. Nobody wants to be down there yet we’re all exactly where we're meant to be - wound up in this great skeleton unfit for any sort of humane life, unable to function for long without our continued presence within itself. And in this mother of all contraptions “the only way out is through.”
The big question posed by Bone Totem's vast array of characters and computer terminals is as follows : Is survival even worth it in this world? Capital has become its own religion & theology, a literal promise of digital afterlife for the devout worker while their exploitation fuels the expansion of CAYNE Corporation and its Churches into further enslaving mankind. Liberation only exists in the glimpses of shadow organizations off-world whose motives may not even be all that benevolent and by the time the credits roll on the last act's torture porn, barely anyone is left alive to answer my questions. This is a story about what happens when you take the pay that's too good to pass and sink in the process anyway. In the derelict's underbelly Charlie, Mac and Moses make sickly sweet bed, a grieving couple and their teddy bear, each one pushed to go on by their faith in something larger than themselves - that could save them as much as it could swallow their body and soul whole. Mac is a true believer in Cayne's gospel, implanted with the technology that's supposed to transport his mind into the Nexus at the final hour; Charlie's the practical cynic, a clever and desperate engineer, while Moses sits in-between those two as Bone Totem's touch of uncanny valley genius : It's their dead daughter's animatronics bear, one infused with the artificial intelligence to match; a pure soul in the most profane body. The second stroke of ingenuity of the narrative lies in the use of each character's abilities throughout the game and the way they communicate with one another : Mac possesses the brute-strength to bend contraptions to his will while Charlie's the crafting expert who will make sparks out of the inert. Moses, due to its size and circuitry, finds wiggle room in ventilation shafts and back-panel motherboards to get its "humans" out of tight spots. But what binds this whole system together is the ability to AirDrop objects between the three of 'em in order to take advantage of their respective skills at any moment, swapping perspectives and squeezing the abstract bits out of gameplay, the actual pointing and clicking pushed to serve a constant state of fiddling and putting things together, connecting skin to metal and arteries towards their new orifices, making due of the broken state of it all just to get through the day in one piece. Shit’s a breeze for my monkey brain, as much as a slow, catastrophic systemic failure of corporate machinery can in any way be qualified as swift - spaces compressing and then stretching themselves, water-filled elevators in contrast to their air pockets, finding finality - always - in death puzzles whose fail-states splatter in grizzly 3D. Here violence is not so much a shock factor as it is the character-building exercise in which we partake with all its sloshing steel atrocity. Only the most broken and dysfunctional of families could get through this. But even then survival is not the point in Bone Totem. What sits at the heart of the game's troubled conscience is artifice and hesitation - how we may progressively find ourselves bound by the clauses of the new flesh. Everyone on DEEPSEA15 is kept on a loose leash, wanting out of the hurt that comes from being born in this putrid place called reality. And it's not happening. And it keeps happening. No one's got the answer - but we can't leave.
[This is a MULE Emergency Broadcast]
WATER PRESSURE REACHING CRITICAL LEVELS_
SEEK THE SUN OR DROWN IN THE DEEP_
BE A GOOD BEAR NOW_
Towards the end of third chapter, Moses discovers that one of the trapped scientists who's been helping him through radio in exchange for his own freedom was nothing more than a brain in the proverbial jar, condemned to sink with the rest of the station. We enter a room and find the cable-crucified approximation of a circulatory system atop which sits what little remains of Faran, a consciousness unaware of their own predicament. Eyes in the dark. It's impossible for me not to think of my first steps back in PATHOS-II, finding the robot body of Carl Semken and him looking at me, believing, truly believing, that he was still human - and then unplugging the cord because the only way out is through. Bone Totem walks a lot like SOMA - threading a bleak and complex existential line - but what separates it from Frictional's work mirrors the gap in emotional fortitude between the original Blade Runner and 2049. The question that gets its hooks into me isn't whether Deckard is a replicant or not and, henceforth, if androids do indeed dream of electric sheeps but rather the turnstiles of such an existence, or in other words, what meaning do you ascribe to the wooden horse that K finds in the furnace? Knowing you are a byproduct possessing the ability - however life-like in its fakery - to feel things and coming back to DEEPSEA15 with that same line of questioning, from Moses to Faran, presents a difficulty...the horse could, in essence, mean nothing - in fact it does. So why the struggle? Moses is remarkable in his artificiality because it grants him the most human quality a robot could have : Delusion. Contrary to Faran who scorns his watery prison as a physical manifestation of Hell, Moses only perceives it through the rosy glass-eyed programming of a teddy bear who does not like to be wet - the lens of tales and arborescences. This world taken as a whole may well be humanity's future purgatory but Moses doesn't see it that way. How could he? Charlie and Mac may still survive. The memory of the little girl he played with remains. Reality as he perceives it is still magical, still to be thought of as something more than an oil spill even as he himself is nothing more than a facsimile. A faith brittler than bones is still worth carrying by souls untainted. And so as Moses leaves the room for the last time, swearing hope to his computer brethren, the once-human Faran asks :
"I...can never leave here. Can I?"
To which the plastic bear responds with one of the most heartbreaking lines of dialogue I’ve ever heard in a videogame :
"Yes, but it is still a story."
Moses will see the sun again. But even if he doesn’t, the only way out is through. There’s still life to be found under the water.