Just played this game, guess I’ll dump some thoughts here. Might organize them into a review or something later, I dunno.
Adding onto/repeating what other people have mentioned above, it feels like this is a story about the confusion of interpretation. Trying to distill meaning from events that are presented in a purposefully abstract, shattered manner, often because they’re the kind of events that would shatter the psyche–war trauma, mass executions. Something about the uncrossable gap between words and what they represent. None of the other games I’ve played so far are this quotable, and also this opaque. It did make me feel pretty stupid. I saved a lot of passages to a text file so I could look at them later.
I looked through all of the three endings after Analysis 5. Here’s what I make of the story, from what I could glean of it after my one playthrough. Will probably play again at some point.
Spoilers
If you go west from the church, by the mercury pond, there’s a woman who on one particular day will tell you her personal thoughts on what exactly you’re analyzing. In short, she suggests it’s aliens. The beginning of the story, where we see “gleaming rods exiting satellites”, and some of the Analysis 5 text, seems to imply that to me as well. At first I thought the gleaming rods were some kind of orbital bombardment, but the alien relics theory makes more sense to me. These are relics of an extinct alien civilization that have fallen to Earth, and that’s why the local governments have temporarily put a hold on the war that’s happening so they can analyze them and see what they say. From one of the analyses, I think the last one:
The traps we had fallen into, invisible, placed throughout our history and indistinguishable from the air around them, had sprung, and the atomic motion of everything slowed until there was an impermeable darkness.
The same darkness where we had spent the final decades of our civilization mining precious metals.
Edit: Replaying a second time, this is also corroborated by something Cetina says before Analysis 4:
“…The creatures who created these artifacts, these records, often used language that sounds merely descriptive. But they had moved beyond a literal existence.”
“By which I mean their existence was no longer meaningfully physical.”
So yeah, some kind of alien intelligence? And in Analysis 4 itself, if you ask “Am I understanding you correctly?”, you get: “You are becoming a more understanding listener… You are becoming a closer confidant. You are becoming more like what we need and we are becoming more like what you need.” There seems to be some kind of transformation thing going on, where these lifeforms are so strange that you must lose parts of yourself to understand them, and communicating with them has a physical and mental toll, as clearly demonstrated by the ending. The apostate could be another example of this. In his first meeting with you he says he’s a former analyst. Later he effectively lets himself die and you wake up to his fly-covered corpse in the morning. You could see the analyst and Eca as two people who are both destroyed by alien revelations, from entities that have an eldritch, abstract, godlike mien. And Cetina, the supervisor, doesn’t actually do analysis but stands over you and tells you what you should be doing. Of course the employees are the ones who get subjected to dangerous alien psychic energy, not the higher-ups.
But based on these analyses, and the ending, it doesn’t seem like anything useful to the war effort is being revealed here. We’re just getting death and apocalyptic destruction. Then again, in the ending where you return to the church, Cetina and Arcadian are looking at you and taking notes while you start eating body parts alive and experiencing war flashbacks since the bodies belong to dead soldiers, or something. And their reactions boil down to “boy howdy this is sure an interesting scientific discovery, I wonder what our data analyst will reveal to us next”. So maybe they’re learning how to manufacture weapons or where the insurgents are headed or whatever, and you just don’t know it because you aren’t privy to that information, despite producing it? Doing the analyses causes you to shed body parts and also does whatever happens to you in the ending, so it’s possible that it also transmits information you don’t have access to, along with what you do have access to. Maybe while you’re learning about war and apocalypse and losing your mind, they’re learning about spiffy new weapon manufacturing technologies. There’s not much evidence for that, it’s just a thought.
There’s definitely some parallel between the extinct alien civilization and the human civilization that exists on Earth, in this game (or the remnants of human civilization, since it really seems to be on its last legs). Some of the results from the analyses could apply to either an extinct alien civilization that self-destructed or the wartorn civilization the protagonist inhabits, which also has self-destructed. I wonder if the two civilizations are the same civilization, just time-displaced or something, or maybe the alien civilization is a metaphor for humanity or something abstract like that. I don’t think there’s too much evidence for it, so “probably not”, but it is a possibility.
(Also found a branch that seemed to let you access the last ending (return home) early on in Analysis 4. Really not sure what to make of that, except the implication that whatever you’re analyzing in that church might have precognitive capabilities, or literally contain a piece of yourself from the future? Or maybe by analyzing it, or analyzing anything there, you’re unanchoring yourself from linear time by jumping to various moments across past and future, though most of the other analyses seem to cover the past?)
In the end, your process for “analyzing” becomes literally just eating corpses and through that you see the memories of dead soldiers and people buried in mass graves. Something about the violence of interpretation in there, boiling things down to one meaning? The violence of taking real horrific things that happened and turning them into statistics, getting it all swallowed by the systems of corporations and warmongering governments and whatnot? The story has a corporate horror bent to it, if you think about it. You’re working for the government/some unknown institution on a secretive process where you know nothing and can’t even see the end results. From one of the corpses in the ending where you return to the church:
In the past I was conceived, and lived happily. Now I am scraped from the past even as I try to crawl my way back into it. In that past, a house that made no sense. The residual calcium phosphate - crushed and disposed of according to protocol. In the house where I lived, there was always something to eat.
The source of the artifacts also gets compared to the divine, by the apostate, and the process of “analyzing” is compared to divine revelation. Trying to interpret the word of God.
I haven’t heard of the Oracle Project, but I was really reminded of some blog posts by Spencer Yan. He’s this priest who is also making a video game about revelation and grappling with faith (My Work Is Not Yet Done, currently unreleased), and has written a lot about his gamedev process. This game reminded me of the one that he describes making, in this devlog particularly:
The spiritual core of this game for me lies in a certain state of frustration, and more acutely at times exhaustion, that emerges from the process of discernment. The most concrete way I’ve been able to articulate this is as that phantom flicker of a feeling you get after you’ve been thinking about some idea, or staring at a set of data for too long hoping to find some kind of recognisable pattern, and all of a sudden the shadow of something emerges out of the corner of your eye but just as quickly as it passes across your vision, it’s gone.
…For me, this is fairly directly tied to my own religious discernment (both theologically, in my personal spiritual and theological orientation, and vocationally, in the call to the priesthood); but the game is just as much interested in non-spiritual manifestations of this too: whether that’s the glacial inconclusiveness of scientific and technological pursuits, or the challenges of trying to piece together contradictory historical narratives describing the same event, or the maddeningly confounding ways in which people tell themselves stories about themselves in order to make sense of the parts of themselves they’re not yet ready to confront. At direct risk of repeating myself in a slightly different register, a big part of this game is especially concerned with the role of boredom in that process, both in the ways in which, given enough time and space for speculation, it can coagulate into uncertainty and paranoia, and in recognition of the probable necessity of boredom as a strange vehicle to greater eventual reconciliation and clarity somewhere later on down the line. I’ve always privately described the core of the game in summary as a game about what we are to do with, and in the midst of the silence of God; or in a more general sense, what happens to us and what do we do in the aftermath of an encounter with the divine which fundamentally alters us, but which may and probably will not ever come back to us again?
A lot of the things the apostate said were reminiscent of this, for me. Interpretation = a search for revelation.
The second thing I thought of was Almost Nowhere, a web serial that has “figure out what’s going on” as a challenge for the reader (at least from the first few chapters and the author’s note, haven’t finished it yet).
If this was from someone I hadn’t played so many other games from, I probably would’ve spent less time puzzling over everything, but I did since I figured the dev knew what they were doing. It is kind of a puzzle game, if you think about it. The puzzle isn’t within the game itself as something you need to beat to get a victory screen, but it exists outside the game as the metatextual challenge of “figure out what’s going on here”.