A tale of media illiteracy.
You see signs of the game not trusting the player to understand information very early on - it encourages you to ask the same thing multiple times to really make sure that you know what you need to do (on top of the existing hint system), but the answers only change slightly each time, creating a lot of repetition. Especially early on, your character is bewildered by pretty much everything and has to ask the most obvious things - and this is not related to the trope of an outlander coming to a high-tech area. You initially think nothing of it, assuming they were just quirks of the devs trying to help you.
But it just gets worse. As the tension builds up, you come to an incredibly disappointing Marvel-esque cutscene that makes absolutely no sense, is completely avoidable and foreseeable and ends with, of course, a sacrifice and a tearful goodbye. It does literally nothing for the story, no character arc has been changed, nothing in the world is different.
The actual ending is what broke me. The idea of man vs machine, empathy vs logic, and the interpretation of happiness is not new - in fact it's a mainstay of the sci-fi genre (though at least we avoided the ubiquitous utilitarianism topic for today). And this game presents an absolutely naive interpretation of it. Firstly, it concludes at 'this one specific obviously bad way of making everyone happy is not good', without challenging the innate notion of happiness being the end goal. Secondly, and most importantly, the end sequence is literally you using the power of logic against a machine that for some reason didn't see the issues with its own bad logic. You, the player, don't even get to think - you just solve the kid's version of a rubik's cube and the protagonist automatically does the arguing for you - no thinking necessary! In an even more child-like manner, the different opponents you defeat using the power of logic cower and disappear (forever), and the antagonist then... dies for some reason.
Why is this so childish? This the dream sequence, the l'esprit de l'escalier of rational™ people - that your opponents will listen to you, you have all the answers, and your opponent will then back down because your power of logic is just too strong. In a way, you can interpret it as a hopeful appeal to democracy, to activists who can change the minds of the people in charge. But while that's true to some extent, in reality it's more than a single person happening to just... go to the people in charge (which nobody else did) with a perspective from outside (because everyone inside is brainwashed) and the people just listen and accept whatever you say (because they were solely in charge because they think they're doing what's best for everyone, even if they're wrong).
Overall, the Obvious Bad Thing (kidnapping children) that happened at the beginning and is the motivation for the entire journey turns out to be... not really connected to the overarching theme. It's not actually pivotal to anything that's happening in the city, it's explained away in a single line. Even worse, it provides the protagonist a counterargument for the previous battle using the power of logic - so it can't even challenge its own assumptions labelled as 'bad' on a fundamental level, it has to resort to things that the writers themselves made up. This also applies to the apparent resource exploitation of another city which, if you haven't played the previous game, gets mentioned one or two times tops - the theme doesn't imply such an exploitation must happen, but it provides an argument because otherwise you couldn't have easily defeated an opponent using the power of logic.
At least it covers the theme of a social credit system, but to a very limited extent. What happens as the citizens get infinite Qdos (their social credit system) and are basically freed? We don't know, it doesn't get explored. Neither do we get even a hint of discussion that human governance (after defeating the evil robots) isn't great either - at most by looking back at 'the old city' (bad) but it doesn't get explained, maybe it was in the prequel game.
I feel like I keep writing about games that do boring interpretations of their themes, but I never see a base version of them done well. I do wonder if I have to give some older game or media credit for that, but I don't think I've played/read/watched them then. At the same time, it feels cheap to recognize a genre mostly because of themes that I often identify as lazy. Maybe we're just beyond that, and this game is from 2020 anyway.
I still do appreciate its creative hacking games, the voice acting and actually the more interesting faces of the people you meet - literally. Its tone is also fun, which kind of excuses its random quirks.
Just like Ghostrunner, it has some okay gameplay which might be worth its while but the pure disrespect shown towards the player during the thematic conclusion makes it unworthy of recommendation. Play State of Mind or maybe even Whispers of a Machine instead.
You see signs of the game not trusting the player to understand information very early on - it encourages you to ask the same thing multiple times to really make sure that you know what you need to do (on top of the existing hint system), but the answers only change slightly each time, creating a lot of repetition. Especially early on, your character is bewildered by pretty much everything and has to ask the most obvious things - and this is not related to the trope of an outlander coming to a high-tech area. You initially think nothing of it, assuming they were just quirks of the devs trying to help you.
But it just gets worse. As the tension builds up, you come to an incredibly disappointing Marvel-esque cutscene that makes absolutely no sense, is completely avoidable and foreseeable and ends with, of course, a sacrifice and a tearful goodbye. It does literally nothing for the story, no character arc has been changed, nothing in the world is different.
The actual ending is what broke me. The idea of man vs machine, empathy vs logic, and the interpretation of happiness is not new - in fact it's a mainstay of the sci-fi genre (though at least we avoided the ubiquitous utilitarianism topic for today). And this game presents an absolutely naive interpretation of it. Firstly, it concludes at 'this one specific obviously bad way of making everyone happy is not good', without challenging the innate notion of happiness being the end goal. Secondly, and most importantly, the end sequence is literally you using the power of logic against a machine that for some reason didn't see the issues with its own bad logic. You, the player, don't even get to think - you just solve the kid's version of a rubik's cube and the protagonist automatically does the arguing for you - no thinking necessary! In an even more child-like manner, the different opponents you defeat using the power of logic cower and disappear (forever), and the antagonist then... dies for some reason.
Why is this so childish? This the dream sequence, the l'esprit de l'escalier of rational™ people - that your opponents will listen to you, you have all the answers, and your opponent will then back down because your power of logic is just too strong. In a way, you can interpret it as a hopeful appeal to democracy, to activists who can change the minds of the people in charge. But while that's true to some extent, in reality it's more than a single person happening to just... go to the people in charge (which nobody else did) with a perspective from outside (because everyone inside is brainwashed) and the people just listen and accept whatever you say (because they were solely in charge because they think they're doing what's best for everyone, even if they're wrong).
Overall, the Obvious Bad Thing (kidnapping children) that happened at the beginning and is the motivation for the entire journey turns out to be... not really connected to the overarching theme. It's not actually pivotal to anything that's happening in the city, it's explained away in a single line. Even worse, it provides the protagonist a counterargument for the previous battle using the power of logic - so it can't even challenge its own assumptions labelled as 'bad' on a fundamental level, it has to resort to things that the writers themselves made up. This also applies to the apparent resource exploitation of another city which, if you haven't played the previous game, gets mentioned one or two times tops - the theme doesn't imply such an exploitation must happen, but it provides an argument because otherwise you couldn't have easily defeated an opponent using the power of logic.
At least it covers the theme of a social credit system, but to a very limited extent. What happens as the citizens get infinite Qdos (their social credit system) and are basically freed? We don't know, it doesn't get explored. Neither do we get even a hint of discussion that human governance (after defeating the evil robots) isn't great either - at most by looking back at 'the old city' (bad) but it doesn't get explained, maybe it was in the prequel game.
I feel like I keep writing about games that do boring interpretations of their themes, but I never see a base version of them done well. I do wonder if I have to give some older game or media credit for that, but I don't think I've played/read/watched them then. At the same time, it feels cheap to recognize a genre mostly because of themes that I often identify as lazy. Maybe we're just beyond that, and this game is from 2020 anyway.
I still do appreciate its creative hacking games, the voice acting and actually the more interesting faces of the people you meet - literally. Its tone is also fun, which kind of excuses its random quirks.
Just like Ghostrunner, it has some okay gameplay which might be worth its while but the pure disrespect shown towards the player during the thematic conclusion makes it unworthy of recommendation. Play State of Mind or maybe even Whispers of a Machine instead.