[Spoilers] [ARC] Narrative Review/Essay

[Jack Craiddial]

Having thoroughly explored the level and having found most (all?) of the content, I wanted to review the 'main path' quest and some of the more-easily-missed lore points. As I made my last couple of playthroughs, I realized [ARC] had a lot more to offer than just a tutorial mission, and recontextualized some items from later missions for me.

I'll put the first few bits in Spoilers in case anyone hasn't found these yet:

1) Top of Pool Building - Weapons cache and a note from a Commissar Kerensky notifying the recipient troops will be stationed at the radio tower and speculating Joy Cultists (Subculturists) are paying Second Union troops to broadcast a signal from the radio tower, possibly at the behest of Western Powers. Furthermore speculates that Joy Cult is attempting to push out PSR troops, which have recently reclaimed the Arcology.

2) Pool Building Locker Room/Office - along the canal side of the pool building is a staircase which leads to a small series of rooms, in which a red army cassette tape, ammunition, and a note can be found, the latter detailing the number of corpses processed by the 'eternal life bureau' (Cryonics facility).

2) Planetarium Arena - Joy Cult forces will ask the player to bomb the nearby PSR Admin building in exchange for free passage into the Planetarium. Doing so will result in the player being considered 'Schway'. Damned Degenerates....

2a) Parking Garage - Underneath the Planetarium/Archology Mall is a base of Subculturists, with a collection of drugs, guns, and foreign (western and japanese) media, although its unclear whether the nature of the media is entertainment, pornography, or politics (possibly a combination of the three).

3) Planetarium Basement/Sewer Runoff - Joy Cult will be friendly until player approaches the Cryonics Facility, at which point they will open fire on the player. Inside the Cyronics facility is an Eastern Orthodox church, the priest of which is under seige. After clearing the cultists, the priest will request the player retrieve the cryonics control chip from the Cultists. (Note that there appears to be some ambiguity in the identity of the enemy NPCs at this point. Assuming the Joy Cultists are friendly upstairs, the ones immediately outside the Cryo Church remain friendly, but the ones inside and all others going forward are hostile. Also, elsewhere (in notes, conversations with PSR, and flavor text description of corpses) the game intimates Joy Cultists/Subculturists are "Westernized". However, these subculturists carry (mostly) Eastern weapons and are described as 'Communist Partisans' when corpses are examined. Possibly the Devs intend to differentiate these factions or clarify their relationships. Per the Commissar's note in 1) the Subculturists are definitely NOT Second Unionists, and further levels (e.g. Memorial) clearly distinguishes SSSR troops from generic SC scum, even though their NPC models are often identical.

4) Radio Tower - Again Joy Cult NPCs (alternatively described as 'Communist Insurgents') are encountered and are immediately hostile to the player, this time guarding the first few floors of a Radio Tower. A note from the same Commissar from before indicates they are indeed being paid to do a job, rather than acting on orders from Moscow--and they explicitly name the American's as their employers! The plot thickens....Especially when the Commissar commits suicide when confronted at the top of the tower. The player gets the Cryonics control chip, and encounters a strange Computer program which is being broadcast to the Arcology Mall and later at the skate park. A grainy silhouette with the Slav-Pattern-Baldness by the name of Markov E. Dec, speaks in riddles and gibberish, and like Morpheus of Deus Ex, appears to be "A prototype of a much larger system". Be interested to see this character fleshed out more. Interestingly the broadcast does not end after taking the Chip, although based on dialogue the chip's information on the Morgue appears somehow integral to the broadcast...more clarity is needed...

Returning the Chip to the Cryo Priest ends this component of the quest as far as Marie is concerned, but there are a few other points of interest:

5) Skate Park - An easily missed area across the canal zone from the Pool Building/Admin Office/Planetarium side, the Skate Park is perhaps the most intriguing part of the quest. Inside is a small collection of Joy Cultists, chill for the time being, a dead girl, and the 'Boss' of the gang having a small mental breakdown. Cocaine and weapons are again in abundance, as are several monitors hosting our old friend, Markov E Dec. Talking to the Head Honcho of the Subculturists (A dirty Yank) is a risky move unless you have fast reflexes (or a aug to help with that), but before turning hostile he clarifies several things:

> 'Two Chicks' who can read minds and tell the future came down to talk to him. Apparently they're 'big names' in the SubCulture, by which I can only surmise our two favorite tarot-incense-frog's eggs aficionados from Karabash have been here ahead of us.

> These two Boho Depot rejects told him he'd be paying Kerensky to broadcast a 'spiritual message'. The following day he got a 'message' from 'up top' along with a briefcase of 100? All American Federal Reserve Notes. Pretty strange for a contractor to notify his future employer of the job, rather than the other way around. The way this sounds, the CIA is using this guy as a cutout, and by implication it seems the whole Subculture may be (a) Entirely a NATO gayop to destabilize both PSR and the Reds, or more likely (b) as a known quantity in the region that can be relied upon to do wet work and cause trouble as and when required, something like a new-age techno-taliban in the Central European hive-cities.

> Pretty much the last thing he tells us before pulling a Mateba and a Bad Attitude(TM) is that the 'psycho ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥' wanted Markov E Dec's data transmitted from the 'Virtual Epitaph', whatever that means. A similar machine is found near the priest in the cryo facility.

6) Putting it all together - We have three factions so far: the Poles, in typical Polish fashion, have decided to take on impossible odds with a near-religious zeal in inverse proportion to their level of organization or preparedness, attempting to reclaim vast territory in Central and Eastern Europe. It's clear from conversations in the first 3 levels that this effort is not entirely smooth, facing armed resistance from the Reds, noncooperation and hostility from non-Polish ethnics dispersed throughout the Disputed Zone by the Communist Resettlement Programs (read: Peaceful Ethnic Cleansing), and the impossible task of rebuilding thousands of square miles of megacity, much of which is either entirely abandoned or sparsely populated. If they are paying guys to farm an old pool, clearly the economics are not going well. We also have the Reds, attempting to reform the old SSSR and stubbornly striking back against the Poles wherever they can, sometimes out of blind ideology, and sometimes because they have things that really shouldn't see the light of day...Finally come the Subculturists, which are clearly Western in culture and possibly NATO backed. They represent a new-age spiritualist movement that mixes hedonism with a strange techno-religion, but they are more well organize than they appear and seem to have their own long-term agenda for the Disputed Zone.

Clearly this operation in the Arcology seems related to the Cryonics facility, which upon further examination seems to be more than just a way to get rid of bodies in a megacity of several hundred thousand people per square mile...somehow they are collecting memory or personality data in the form of a 'virtual epitaph', and for some reasons the Joy Cult wants to spread one particular Epitaph around, willing to incur the ire of the PSR and potentially burn their connection to the Reds to do so.... What on Earth the American's stand to gain is unclear, and why they would support the Reds over the PSR is similarly baffling--I mean, when has the West ever backed Communist over a Nationalist regime in Pola---ohhh. OOOOOHHHHH. Right. Damn, guess those statues of Based Pilsudski are meant to tell us something after all.

One other bit of trivia. On this level is a girl, dead by suicide, and another girl caring for her Father, trapped in an iron lung. A third girl, a decaying gynoid, waits abandoned in the bowels of an old Planetarium. itself a dead (or at least dying) relic of a bygone age. Meanwhile, decaying empires and discredited ideologies match wits and arms to bring back the dead or breath new life into the bones of an abandoned city, while a Priest of a far more ancient faith than Socialism, Capitalism, or Polish Nationalism prays for the souls of the living and long dead alike. Death, consciousness, and immortality is a recurring theme in cyberpunk, a genre where machines think and feel and Men often fail to. Peripeteia presents these themes subtly, without any forced dialogue, chintzy 'summing up' notes or conversations at the end of the quest, or some kind of tear-jerking cutscenes.

Most of this content can be outright missed if you take either of the two 'expedient' routes to end the level. Yet as I complete this small article I am struck by the care and skill in which these themes are explored, how each little encounter contextualizes the others. There is no melodramatic moment where we are asked "What IS the meaning of existence?? Does a computer have A SOUL??" by some breathless tragedian. Peri treats you like an adult, one with the bare minimum genre-savvy and critical thinking skills necessary to engage with these ideas instead of having them force fed to you by a condescending UC Berkeley Intersectional Feminism Major who's introduction to transhuminist philosophy was an episode of Sex, Drugs, and Robots.

In the end, [ARC] went from being an OK starting level to one of my favorites, and I'm torn between loving how much effort and time it took to fully (?) explore the level and track down the whole story, and hoping the Devs make some paths a little clearer so other players can enjoy the discovery process. I look forward to more enlightenment as I explore the next level, Memorial Towers, in detail this weekend.

[Rune Scim]

As someone who is super interested in this game but doesn't have the time to actually churn through everything to figure out what's going on, I really appreciate this. your last writeup was extremely high quality too.

I keep getting the impression that there's a ton of thought put behind the world building of this game, but that world building is just barely obfuscated by a few missing early access dots to connect (like some areas being unfinished) coupled with the games insane level disgn that almost encourages players to miss major locations. I like that it feels like there's something going on here, and the game could not care less about whether you figure it out or not.

[Jack Craiddial]

Originally posted by Rune Scim:

I like that it feels like there's something going on here, and the game could not care less about whether you figure it out or not.

I agree and I can't help but think this is intentional. To get the full picture you not only need to pick the correct quest path, you also need to thoroughly explore the maps, including hidden areas, and then you need to put the pieces together and fill in the gaps with a little imagination. I really like this style of storytelling because:

1) The player is encouraged to play and replay each level to try different quests and find secrets, every new playthrough adds something to player knowledge

2) It treats the player like an adult and lets them engage with the themes, characters, and narratives in an interactive fashion--like Marie, we are solving a mystery rather than riding a ride at Universal Studios. Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example--each Quest introduces you to a topic, reinforces it explicitly during the mission, and has a short conclusion cutscene or flavor text at the end. The player is railroaded throughout and force-fed the experience. Peri gives the player agency, including the agency to ignore non-mission-critical lore or information. If the player plays Marie as a single-minded, driven girl beelining it for the bunker, then she won't much care for the wider world and therefore would be as ignorant as the player. In other words, TO EXPERIENCE THE FULL STORY, the player has to ROLE PLAY as an inquisitive, patient, and investigative Marie, which is the best example of Ludo-Narrative synchronicity I'v seen recently.

3) While billed as an immersive sim, the core gameplay loop for Peripeteia is actually a puzzle platformer, and the large maps encourage creative platforming and navigation puzzle-solving

The downside is a casual player (or even a repeat player used to more obvious tells such as the maps in Deus Ex or even Thief) will miss a lot of content unless clues in that there is more to find.

[krev]

The Arcology is a fantastic first level and it hints at or expands on a lot of the stuff encountered throughout the rest of the game, even Belgrade.

Speaking with Filemon for example before finishing his quest allows you to learn a little bit about the window of time between the Soviet Union and the Second Union, namely the 'things' that prowled the streets in 'days of lead'. Initially I thought he meant the Topielecs, but what he describes are 'heads of androids' on 'potato sacks' collecting bodies. He's describing the 'dolls' in Belgrade, which are probably bloodstained and sacklike because they're harvesting bodies for the 'recycling' function of the tower, and perhaps even for facilities like the one in Karabash.

I didn't realize it at first, but the Saber is actually embedded in a dead Topielec, and the pit of Topielecs you can fall into is your means of introduction to them by inspecting the corpses as well as an introduction to using APS darts to climb given that there are no other ways out of the pit.

The Planetarium itself and the maintenance logs from Filemon plus Nietzschka's timestamps also hint at the picture of the timeline, namely that whatever war turned Moscow to ash happened prior to October of 1990, that the roof was caving in after that log, and that Filemon left to be a junker by '91.

Nietzschka meanwhile mentions that the roof has leaked for 5632 days, and that her last maintenance request was 4241 days ago. That's about 15.5 to 12.6 years ago which seems to place the game some time in the mid 2000s contrary to an assumption I've heard a lot placing things in the 90s. Readables and dialogue in Belgrade also seem to support this, even if Belgrade might be something of a total mindtrip hallucination.

Clearing Karabash at least on Iskander's route also helps contextualize the importance of the Planetarium and the significance of the 'Gagarin Cult' to the 'old fogies', or why the moon-and-star iconography seems significant to Second Unionists. The Planetarium actually has at least one mural presumably dedicated to the Astral Communist dream off to the right behind the PSR-level entrance, though there's no text description to pull from it.

Otherwise, I think the Arcology has the most footage available for the Red Man show, which is a little weird because you don't find a TV with Red Man flavortext until a later level. By memory, Marie doesn't understand and is afraid of him and wonders why he's red, but the clip on TV shows two blue men instead with no trace of Red Man himself. Weird little case of a mismatched description that'd work better in the Parking Lot Joycultist den.

There's plenty of other stuff like propaganda posters or newspapers mentioning some kind of colony in Harbin despite China being otherwise an irradiated ruin, or world implications like the UK's capital being Edinburgh instead of London.

[Jack Craiddial]

Totally missed the flavor text on the TVs, need to spend more time with them but the audio mixing makes it hard to hear.

Also while the Commies seem interested in the Gagarin Cult, it seems like the PSR is also hoping to revive it as well according to Filemon, although perhaps only as a way to revitalize the Arcology. The Potato farmer mentions that the Pool used to be a "house of culture, but the culture didn't survive". Perhaps the PSR has the idea that the reintroduction of culture, any culture, will help them stabilize the Disputed Zone.

On that note the story reminds me a lot of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, particularly it's examination of the effects culture and institutions have on individuals and ideology. The Subculturists are the result of an alien cultural spore infecting a populace without proper cultural immune systems, their native culture and Soviet ideology destroyed in the war. The PSR and Second Union are waging internal battles to determine their culture, whether to be hidebound ideologies worshipping the ashes of dead empires, or to forge ahead devoid of moral or cultural constraints in a Neitzscheian power struggle, or to rely on blind Faith (in either Christ or Socialist doctrine) to carry the day.

In each case, individual actors are beset by their own culture (or lack thereof), their type and degree of ideology or pragmatism, and the creeping influence of organization and bureaucratization that is calcifying the various groups as they grow from small factions to major powers. Marie (and therefore the player) is already being challenged in certain dialogues based on these factors, and I hope the devs continue to elaborate on these themes.