THE RUIN OF 0CEANUS PR1ME

We’re doing this again, I say to myself – you can read that in an excited tone of voice, representing my combined eagerness and dread to revisit the horrifying yet oddly beautiful world of A1RL0CK, or with a world-weary sigh as I contemplate having to type out a bunch of number-for-letter substitutions once again (how ‘bout we just call it TROOP from here on out?) My emotions on this second encounter with the alien terrors and man-made atrocities found under the waters of Titan aren’t far afield from those of our protagonist this time out:

"Colonel J.T. Thomas. Father of twins that he hasn’t seen yet, husband of a semiotics teacher, head of a recovery team who doesn’t have a clear idea of what the fuck he’s doing three thousand meters deep in the black ass of the universe… Fuck Biofarm and fuck the fucking rescue team."

Yes, after the mess you contributed to creating in the first game, in the grand tradition of sequels everywhere now you’re sent to clean things up. The efficiency with which the above response to X ME conveys backstory and engenders sympathy – I definitely did not want to screw up and get this guy killed – is of a piece with the environmental descriptions, which grounded me in the awe and awfulness of going so deep below the seas:

"As you descend, the darkness becomes less penetrating. Black becomes blue, the same shade as any night at the north pole, under a sky with few stars…The water seems thinner here and the pressure less impressive. All directions are good, if you want to go to a worse place than this.”

There’s great imagery and evocative prose throughout the piece, which combines the laconic lilt of hard sci-fi with grand guignol sights and body-horror flashes that wouldn’t be out of place in a dark, edgy anime. It’s a combination that ratchets up the intensity beyond what I experienced in the first game; here, it’s clear that you’re to some degree complicit in the crimes committed in this place, even if you’re not aware of their full scope, and with the station now almost fully swamped, and fallen hundreds of fathoms deeper, I always felt exquisitely vulnerable in my explorations. And while J.T. is in some respects a more conventional main character that Chloe was in A1RL0CK, TROOP similarly manages to throw his sense of self into turmoil with a few well-judged and well-delivered twists.

Once again, though, I struggled with the puzzles. There are a few early ones that are simple but satisfying to solve, relying on your suit’s different scanning instruments to suss out the way forward. I was disappointed that this mechanic fell by the wayside as the game opened up into its middle act, though – as I explored a relatively large map with confusingly-described exits (sometimes passages towards a staircases are given as both a vertical and compass direction, sometimes only one) and no real sense of where I should be headed, I felt as though I was in a maze, and many of the challenges hinged on vaguely-described gadgets that I had a hard time picturing, much less knowing what they could do. There’s a valves-and-tubes puzzle that I think just requires a lot of trial and error, unless I missed some more direct clues, and one that involves combining a few devices that are described just by their shape rather than their function, which meant I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. Fortunately, David Wellbourn has pulled together a walkthrough of this game too, since I confess I was following it quite closely for the second half of the game.

I’m glad I did, though, since the final confrontation is appropriately nasty (even if I’m still not completely sure how I won it), and the hint of redemption in the epilogue is a lovely grace note. The story and environment here are really compelling, selling the fantasy of being unimaginably deep underwater and coming face to face with the worst fruits of man’s inhumanity. So it’s definitely worth a dip, I just wish the water was a little more welcoming – and for my nerves’ sake, I’m not sure I could handle a third visit to 0CEANUS PR1ME!