T w e n t y S i d e d
Alex Yu finally comes out of hiding and we see him for the first time since the start of the game. He still owes us the arming key he promised, but he wants to speechify a bit before he turns it over.
He sums up what we know so far. These two siblings ran Talos-1, but it was Morgan who pushed for taking more chances and dreaming bigger. Alex is somewhat hurt that, after talking him into this, you’re turning on him and threatening to blow up the station. You were always the one pushing for more risk, and now you’re treating him like the bad guy for following your lead.
He also expresses disdain for the TranStar board of directors and calls them “Leeches”. Alex – whatever his many faults might be – is not doing this for personal glory or financial gain. He believes that what he’s been doing up here is right. Or at least, it’s worth the short-term moral compromises the two of you have been making.
Like most people, I emphatically disagree with this point of view. Even if you really do have a miracle to share with mankind and even if it all works out in the end, I don’t think you can solve this with arithmetic. “Oh sure, I murdered a few hundred people, but in the end I made a new technology that saved millions so it all cancels out.” But while I disagree with him on a philosophical level, I love his character and I find his viewpoint understandable. I can also see how maybe this whole thing started with sacrificing a small handful of bad people for “the greater good”, and how the sunk cost fallacy dragged him into making bigger and bigger sacrifices, and he’s so sure it’s all going to pay off any minute now, he just needs to talk you out of blowing the place up.
The Galactic Dinner Bell
Alex also talks about the data you gathered just before we were ganked by Walther Dahl. It turns out that past-Morgan was right. The coral is some sort of (and I’m paraphrasing here) neurological whatzit that does thinky stuff. It seems to be sending out a signal. What has Alex curious is: What is that signal saying, and who is listening to it?
Now, I feel strongly that this ought to be the cue, but it doesn’t happen quite yet. Maybe this moment is too on-the-nose.
Alex then hands over a fabrication plan for the nullwave device that will french-fry the coral. It’s not totally clear what the device will do or what the aftermath will be, but Alex is pretty confident that it will allow us to tame the Typhon.
Alex then brings up the arming key he’s been promising us for the last six hours, but he doesn’t finish because THIS is the cue the Typhon have been waiting for…
From The Darkness
We’re in the domed Arboretum, surrounded by the vastness of space. Suddenly, a shadow appears across the stars. Some sort of opening has appeared in the sky. And through the opening we see…
Earlier in this series I said the game isn’t really aiming for a Cthulhu-style story, but screw it. Purists can haggle over the works of H.P. Lovecraft and what counts and what doesn’t, and which works are too problematic and which ones are okay. I don’t care. This moment is exactly the kind of thing I think of when I hear the phrase “cosmic horror”.
This writhing mass of tentacles slips out of the hole in space and envelops the entire station. The game calls this thing “The Apex”, but that name doesn’t work for me. When I hear “Apex Predator” I think lions and sharks. I think comparing this thing to conventional animals actually makes it seem more pedestrian. If I had to give this thing a name, it would be something more abstract, like “The Horror” or whatever.
The Apex?
This business of calling it the “Apex” is, I think, an attempt at making the “Prey” name fit a little better. I appreciate the effort, but I’d rather they called this game “NeuroShock” or “PsychoShock” and left this predator / prey stuff out. Calling this thing an Apex predator is like saying a nuclear bomb is “a kind of heater”. Ok, I suppose that’s technically correct, but you’re really selling it short, you know?
Also, calling it “apex” implies that we know this thing is on top of the cosmic food chain. Frankly, we’re nowhere near being able to make those sorts of claims. In fact, who’s to say this thing isn’t just the next step up from us, and there are even greater monsters out there that eat critters like this thing as a snack?
The universe is really big!
I find it interesting that this thing is about the same size as Talos-1. Maybe that’s just a coincidence. Maybe that’s just what was convenient for the game designers. Or maybe – and this is the possibility I find interesting – these creatures operate on many different scales. Maybe if Talos-1 was an enormous Death Star sized station, then the Typhon here would have sent a slightly different signal that would have attracted a larger horror.
Allow me to speculate on how this thing works…
The Actual Literal Eater of Worlds
Somewhere out there is some horrendous ball of tentacled flesh that’s grown to something approaching planetary mass. Or perhaps it’s just so big that it’s enveloped an actual planetary mass. It flings out these tiny little mimic-shaped creatures that drift through the universe like spores. We don’t know the exact mechanics of how they get around, but somehow they tend to end up in orbit around planets with a reasonable chance of harboring life.
And maybe a few of these creatures find some. Somewhere out there, various sapient species busy themselves building rockets, space elevators, shuttles, super-jetpacks, or what-have-you. Mimics land on their vehicles and platforms, devouring the inhabitants. Once the Typhon get enough biomass together, they start scaling up, forming Weavers and other creatures designed specifically to ambush these particular sapients and exploit their technology. Maybe for humans they make Telepaths and Technopaths, but for another species they’d make a creature that released pheromones, or certain sounds, or chemicals, or confounding radio signals, or whatever would work on the locals.
Once the Typhon feel like they control their environment, they start building coral. The bigger the ship / station, the bigger the resulting coral structure. Then the coral reaches out to that Ur creature – that mother, or queen, or whatever we want to call that huge mass that kicked all this off. It responds by sending something of the appropriate size to seize the structure. If we absolutely must, I suppose we can call this thing the “apex”. Eyeroll. Heavy sigh.
Here is the tricky part for the Typhon: Despite all the crazy stuff they can do, they still can’t survive atmospheric entry un-aided. So the “Apex” shows up to do two different things:
- Goad the sapients into fleeing. Maybe they have small pods. Or other ships. Or maybe they have awesome spacesuits that let them fly around. Or maybe the station itself breaks into smaller ships. Whatever. As long as the little buggers scatter and retreat back to the safety of their homeworld, then they’ll be travelling in things specifically designed to survive reentry for this particular planet, whatever its mass / atmospheric profile might be. The goal is to just get a few mimic-sized creatures down to the surface, which is hopefully densely populated.
- If that fails, then the apex still has plan B, which is to rip the station apart and attempt to de-orbit sections of it. A nice big chunk of ship ought to be strong enough and massive enough to act as an ablative shield for the Typhon critters inside. They don’t need to land comfortably. They just need to survive. Perhaps the hull of the space station can shield them while the atmosphere slows them down, and then they just need to land in some water or other favorable spot where they won’t get pulverized on touchdown. Typhon are more durable than humans, so they have a much more generous definition of “survivable landing”.
Plan B wouldn’t work for Talos-1, since the station is orbiting out beyond the moon. But it would probably work for things like (say) the International Space Station, or Skylab.
If your species has made it far enough to begin building crap in space, then it’s a good guess that you’ve spread out over the face of your homeworld. There are no doubt a lot of you, and you’re probably packed into cities. Once a couple of Typhon reach these population centers, it’s game over.
So then the Typhon eat the whole planet. They devour the entire food chain, from the plankton to the sapients, and in the end the planet is just a big rock covered in Typhon cells. Then it flings a few mimic-sized seeds into the void and the process begins again.
*BURP*
The Reapers? Are you kidding me? Buncha fucking clowns. The Typhon do more damage,The Reapers would kill all humans, but wouldn’t go out of their way to wipe out the rest of the ecosystem. But I get the impression the Typhon would be all-consuming. Which means they would kill all dogs. :( and they don’t feel the need to brag about how awesome they are afterwards. They don’t claim to be beyond anyone’s comprehension, and they don’t feel the need to flex about how many civilizations they’ve wrecked, because they don’t care what their food thinks of them. The Reapers are posers. The Typhon are the real deal.
Anyway, that’s my guess on how these critters work. I’m sure other theories are possible, but this is what I came up with based on what I learned within the game.
Uh, Guys?
Oh right. I got so excited talking about the Typhon that I forgot about our main characters and their current predicament. The Apex envelops the station, which shatters the arboretum and depressurizes the entire area. The gravity generators go offline, so Alex and Morgan find themselves drifting in a vacuum.
Morgan’s suit switches over to spacewalk mode, but for whatever reason, the helmet on Alex’s suit doesn’t deploy. You’re given the option of shoving Alex into his nearby hidey-hole and sealing him in to save his life. Or you can just ditch him. Whatever.
This Apex thing though? This is going to be a problem. Somebody should probably be doing something about that.
Footnotes:
[1] The Reapers would kill all humans, but wouldn’t go out of their way to wipe out the rest of the ecosystem. But I get the impression the Typhon would be all-consuming. Which means they would kill all dogs. :(
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
I actually didn’t know that to save Alex required action on my part, so I just skedaddled out of there – didn’t even get the Arming Key. When looking up the various endings I didn’t get
I was very surprised at how Alex could still be alive in them. OopsReminds me of something about Cave Story, in that
just about everyone’s first ending winds up this way. Sorry, Curly!I don’t think it’s fair to compare the Typhon to the Reapers. Well, not to the ME1 Reapers, in any case. The bumbling doofuses from 2 and 3 are as scary as a Dora the Explorer episode, but the ones from ME1, when they were still teeming with potential, are on a completely different class. The entire cause of fear for them stems from the fact that we didn’t know why they were doing their reaping.
In the case of the Typhon their existence is horrifying but ultimately understandable: they’re a species that grows by propagating like any other, and does so easily by lacking a predator (at least in the area we find them). We’ve seen this happen many times before, so we understand it. Awful as this process is, being able to comprehend it gives us not only a sense of familiarity, but also hope that we might find a way to fight it.
But the Reapers? We knew nothing about them. We didn’t know why they were killing space-faring civilizations (and only space-faring ones). We didn’t know for how long they’ve been doing this. We didn’t know if their purpose was good, evil or something else. We didn’t know the nature of their existence and if stopping them might eventually cause an even larger threat to show up. It didn’t matter that they killed less people than the Typhon. The Typhon’s primal goals are easy to understand, but the Reapers’ motivation, reasoning and objectives were a complete mystery, and that makes it all the more terrifying.
Again, for this thought exercise we all have to pretend that ME2 and 3 never happened, but still.
So basicaly, the Reapers were fearsome for as long as they were basically the Shivans from Freespace.
Come to think of it, that “Eater of Worlds” screenshot is vaguely reminiscent of ME2’s final boss fight…
Now maybe if the Reaper’s excuse for what they do was something like preventing a Typhon-type threat from annihilating all intelligent life in the galaxy… nah, nevermind, too close to the synthetics excuse, plus vibes of the Flood as well. In a way, the Typhon are a much better targeted weapon for taking out exclusively space-faring civilizations than the Reapers are.
The original plan was supposed to be something along the lines of:
Overuse of Mass effect technology accelerates the heat death of the universe
Advanced galactic civilizations inevitably result in massive proliferation and use of mass effect technology, simply by virtue of how that universe works
Ergo, if left unchecked, the universe will die as a direct result of galactic civilizations getting too developed and expansive.
The solution the reapers, or whoever created the reapers, came up with is:
Create Mass effect relays to limit the use of Element zero, while also allowing for space fairing civilizations to develop and flourish
Harvest them every 50k years to prevent them from getting too advanced, while also recording all their accomplishments and incorporating any noteworthy ones into the Reapers
This way galactic civilization gets to develop and flourish without the universe getting destroyed in a few thousand years.
There were hints of it in mass effect 2 like that star that was going supernova ahead of schedule that Tali was investigating when you go on her recruitment mission and that human reaper thing, but, well, we all know here it ended up.
Kind of disagree, though each to their own. To me, the Reapers were a mystery, but not really that scary beyond their sheer power. Even in ME1 they wouldn’t shut up about how great they are, how they were beyond us, how insignificant the player was, how great their plans were…it kind of made them irritating blowhards. Especially when their Grand Plan turned out to be a nonsense solution to a non-problem.
I remember rolling my eyes when Sovereign declared that it was beyond my understanding. Sure, buddy. If that were really true, why would you even bother telling me?
The Typhon, meanwhile, just are alien. They don’t monologue, they don’t explain themselves, they’re always changing – and they just do their thing. Part of what makes them scary is the ways in which they are comprehensible.
And, while the Reapers will tell you don’t matter, the Typhon admit you do – by sending ever-more-dangerous creatures at you. Far better, in my opinion.
I appreciate the effort, but I’d rather they called this game “NeuroShock” or “PsychoShock” and left this predator / prey stuff out.
Considering it wasn’t until you started writing this series that I found out Prey 2017 wasn’t just an HD remaster of Prey 2006? I agree, I wish they had gone with a different name.
Also, “Ur Typhon” would be a better name than Apex. Or maybe Echidna? Orthrus? Hydra? Scylla? Charybdis? Plenty of good, classical references they could have gone with, considering the name “Typhon.” Yes, those are grandiose, but it’s the size of the space station! It can have a grandiose name.
Unfortunately the publisher forced the name “Prey” on the developer and they had to make it work as best they could.
They didn’t have a working title when making the game, Neuroshock and psychoshock were only thought up after the game had shipped, the publisher suggested using Prey because they had the IP and they can’t ship it as “untitled space station game”.
I’ve talked about other classical allusions elsewhere on the page, but I’ll use you as a springboard to talk about the name of the station, Talos I.
I couldn’t actually remember what Talos was, so I looked it up and discovered it was an automaton that protected Crete (or specifically the princess, Europa). Rather appropriate for a space station trying to learn the strengths and weaknesses of alien beings.
Then by coincidence I was watching Jim Henson’s The Storyteller (which is a fantastic show that I think you should all go watch and if my recommendation isn’t enough then know that Neil Gaiman is such a huge fan that he’s helping to write a new series) and I was reminded that Talos was also the name of Daedalus’ nephew, whom he murdered in a fit of jealousy when Talos proved to be smarter than him. Certainly puts a new spin on William Yu’s callous order to kill the entire station, doesn’t it?
William Yu, Dad-Of-All-Us.
Thank you for the rec. I will check that out.
“I’m Typhon? I’m Typhon what?”
[rimshot]
Well, we do call a nuclear bomb a nuclear bomb, which if were weren’t used to it, would sound like a bit of an understatement.
In Halo, they used a lot of biblical terminology/references. The cosmic horror was The Flood, the weapon that was designed to wipe out all life in the galaxy in order to stop them was called Halo, and the forerunners built The Ark as a place to hide in when they activated it.
Of course, the Flood make even the Typhon look like chumps, especially when you get into the extended media/hidden consoles. The general consensus among people who hang out on forums where they debate this kind of thing is that the flood could eat the vast majority of heavily-armed galactic space empires rather easily. The enter GE from Starwars would last about a week at most.
The Flood and the Ark appear in the Bible. Do haloes?
No, but it commonly appears in religious iconography across the ancient world, although not specifically in Judaism as far as I can tell. Christians sometimes used it in the Ancient and Medieval eras, but it appears quite often in Renaissance art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(religious_iconography)
Thread hijack: Scifi fans comparing universes.
Star Wars tends to get beaten up in scifi comparisons because it’s so common that, unless writers specifically avoid it, there’s a tendency to treat that setting as a baseline and amp up the powerscale. I attribute this to the near-universality of Star Wars familiarity among scifi fans and general public alike.
You can also see this dynamic inside Star Wars, with various authors coming up with yet more absurd superwaepons and Force powers with each passing book or show.
The best stories and universes (my opinion, but also I think reflects objective reality), naturally, ditch that element and focus on storytelling. Babylon 5, Star Trek: TOS/TNG/DS9, and Battlestar Galactica (old and new) weren’t considered great or interesting because the villains were even more powerful than the villain in another show, but because the villains and heroes and challenges were interesting.
I’ve personally never understood the point of comparing sci fi universes, or superheroes from different franchises. Each of those stories was created with something very specific in mind, and the universe and powers of those characters was created accordingly.
None of those authors set out to make the “Strongest Fictional Universe in Existence”, and I’ve always found it weird when fans compare different franchises that way. I’ve always been more interested in comparing which stories each of us liked better and why – e.g. what made it work for you, and not for me. In my opinion, that’s the only thing that matters.
Well, I’m pretty sure One Punch Man was doing that.
It was doing that for the express purpose of highlighting the main character’s inner conflict – his struggle to find purpose in a life made meaningless by his infinite power over everyone else in a universe full of extremely powerful beings.*
* Or so I’m told. I’ve never been one for manga/anime.
Maybe in the later seasons. I stopped in one, where it’s clearly a parody of shonen action stories where people keep ramping up their power levels in the middle of fights. And then One Punch Man punches them once and they explode.
That is also my main gripe with superhero stories, when they escalate the power of the villains and thereby the stakes until yet another one threatens the entire universe.
Dr Who had a similar problem with the first five seasons of the relaunch. The end of season four had the villains attempting to blow up the entirety of every alternate universe and then they raised the stakes to destroying every universe at every point in history.
Worth noting is that this particular aspect of the SW EU drove fans bonkers, which is one reason why Timothy Zahn was so well-regarded by most of the fandom–he didn’t feel the need to come up with things like the Galaxy Gun or the Sun Crusher, but instead relied on making the antagonists smart.
How did I not get “the Flood”? Especially considering the other obvious religious allusions?
Spacebattles, got it.
The Flood and the Covenant both.
The Covenant was pretty obvious. But I looked at a story called Halo where The Ark saves people from The Flood and I didn’t make the connection for the last one.
Apex is fine as a name. It’s at least fairly original, which can’t be said of Phantom, a title which it’s apparently the law one variety of enemy must be given in every single video game.
I agree and I didn’t really associate it with Apex Predator, but rather a sort of evolutionary apex. The Weaver’s created the coral and Apex is the resulting being. It is the highest form of Typhon, the apex of the species if you will.
Apex predator is also location specific, so you can change it by introducing more dangerous stuff.
It’s a lot better than Omega, that’s for sure.
They could have called it the “Brother Moon,” because this is the plot of Dead Space.
On one hand I kind of hate the whole “Giant thing appears because this is a video game” and it just doesn’t seem appropriate for the tone of this one. At the same time, the cosmic horror of an invasive species whose soul purpose is to consume sounds rad, is great sci-fi, and while it’s been done a lot, this is probably one of the better conceived ones if your blog entry is accurate.
If only Dead Space and Mass Effect could have been this cool instead of so… what they were.
I mean, at least it’s not a giant anthropomorphic thing with glowy weak spots. Me, I just love how most alien species in video games go out of their way to develop bioluminescence for the benefit of human combatants. Now that’s just being a considerate interstellar neighbor. The Typhon, in comparison, are awfully rude and uncivilized, I’d say.
Yeah, despite my earlier joke about the ME2 boss battle upthread, you don’t ever face the Apex in combat, and you can’t (successfully) scan it with the Psychoscope. The idea that you could beat it with standard game mechanics isn’t even considered.
One detail I like about the Apex is January advises you not to scan it. And if you do…you’re taken to 1HP and inflicted with the Fear status effect. I like that they made even -attempting- to comprehend such a creature is highly dangerous.
With all the classical references around, I couldn’t help but compare it to the story of Semele asking to look upon Zeus in his natural form. It didn’t end well for her either.
Thinking a little about the predator/prey thing. It surprises me (assuming Shamus’ description is largely accurate) how unsophisticated the Typhon are. They’re a somewhat mindless animalistic predator.
Because they don’t farm.
It’s incredibly wasteful to hunt your food source to extinction. But that’s what they do. They find a source of consciousness, and eat it down to lifeless rock. Then they have to go find a brand new planet full of a different food.
It would be way, way more productive for them to keep up a breeding population of sentient beings that are chock full of that juicy juicy consciousness. Compared to centuries that it takes for their plan here to work (even when things go well), we breed relatively quickly.
Eat half of us, wait for us to replace the lost population, repeat. Or maybe eat the older ones and leave the breeding age ones alone.
I guess it’s kind of cool that the typhoon are utterly animalistic predators who do what they do without any understanding of it. Just strange is all this that they’re extraordinarily sophisticated on some ways and completely primitive in others.
Life – uh – finds a way.
Maybe they’re just well aware of the ecological impact of farming. The Typhon might eat every living thing on a given planet, but by Cthulhu are they keeping their carbon footprint – sorry, tentacleprint, – low.
That’s exactly why I liked the Typhon, they were truly alien. We see their sophistication and grasp at least the edges of their motives, but they remain animal and esoteric in ways which render them incomprehensible and disturbing. In fact what we eventually conclude is that it’s impossible for us to understand them, we have to force the opposite.
Oh jesus, I only just made the connection. Typhon. Typhoon.
I are slow.
I assume it’s a direct reference to Typhon, the many-headed Greek Titan, associated wih volcanic eruptions, who gave birth to lots of monstrous offspring.
But Typhoon is one of Typhon’s offspring, so the etymology is linked.
Typhon was not a Titan, he came long after they had all been banished. Though they did have the same mother, Typhon was unique.
There was another classical reference during the game that compares in an interesting way. Apparently while talking to January, Morgan compared Alex to Jupiter (the Roman syncretism of Zeus). January extends the analogy to make Morgan Juno (Roman syncretism of Hera, presumably as the sister of Jupiter) before changing her mind and declaring that too weird (presumably as Juno was also Jupiter’s wife).
That got me thinking. When Typhon attacked Mount Olympus, all the gods fled, as only Zeus was powerful enough to fight Typhon. Except in some tellings where Athena realised that if Typhon won nowhere would be safe and so stayed to help. Comparisons to Morgan are obvious at this point; Goddess of Wisdom and Director of Science.
It made me think even further though. Athena was born of Zeus and only Zeus: she sprung fully formed from his mind. Depending on how the story is told, the concept of Athena was either wholly Zeus’ idea, or an idea that formed itself within his mind. Knowing the big twist at the end, and that it was originally Morgan’s idea but executed by Alex, I feel the similarities between Morgan and Athena to be even stronger.
So to those that have played this game more than once, who does January compare Morgan to if you’re playing as a dude?
I think the best model for the Typhon is that of an invasive species. There’s an abundance of food and a lack of the things that usually kill them. (Whatever those may be.) The Typhon population consequently explodes and their prey species in the new environment are driven to near or actual extinction. In this model the Typhon may or may not lack the ability to reason, but they definitely lack the ability to regulate their reproduction effectively.
Either that, or they were designed by someone to annihilate all those pesky sapient beings on a planet (and leave it’s valuable resources untouched).
That makes me think, the Typhon could be a first strike bio-weapon in a Dark Forest scenario.
Invasive species makes sense. It could be that some planets have the ability to fight them off, perhaps using the same psychic powers that make the Typhon such a threat, but any time the Typhon hit a planet without those defenses they devour it down to the bedrock. (I suppose even humans count as such a species, although it’s a close-run thing.)
It could also be that the galaxy is a big place, so even if a species evolves the ability to eat everything it’ll take millions or billions of years to actually reach everything.
As I recall, we aren’t actually showed what the planet looks like after. There’s no “evidence” of farming, but there’s also no reason to assume that they don’t or can’t. Specifically we see
a quick shot or shots of cityscapes apparently lifeless and covered in coral, but that doesn’t tell us anything really.It could also be that they don’t just cover a planet/oid, but each covered rock is itself an individual that needs no further people to eat (consider that if coral is neurons,
a planet covered in coral is a brain). But in order to create a new individual a new rock is needed, which needs enough of the right sort of life for the process to start.Ooh, I like this interpretation. (Have never played this game, but the discussions are fun!)
Seems logical to me. They basically act on a kind of animalistic/hivemind instinct. They can hunt and reproduce, but many real life species have eaten themselves out of existance.
I mean, there are very few animal species that can be said to farm* so I don’t think it’s weird that the Typhon don’t either. Generally apex predators don’t overrun ecosystems due to having few offspring and longer reproductive cycles than all the species lower on the chain, not because they consciously “leave some alive”. Like, sharks don’t render the oceans devoid of other fish because other fish out-reproduce them by huge factors, not because sharks care about sustainability.
The Typhon, in contrast, appear to be predators with the reproductive rates of prey animals, which raises some interesting questions; like, are Typhon actually in the middle of the galactic food chain and need to reproduce this quickly once they find sustenance to out-reproduce something that preys on them?
*I know some ants farm fungus and aphids, but that’s all I can think of off the top of my head.
Oh, very well said. This is what I wanted but mostly failed to say myself.
No worries, it was your comment above about invasive species that got me thinking along those lines in the first place. :)
I think this could be the case of us not comprehending what scale “the ecosystem” is, or on what timescales do the Typhon operate. Like, clearly Typhon’s approach to Talos 1 is unsustainable, possibly same deal for Earth, but what about the galactic scale? It is possible that the reason for no aliens is that the galaxy is literally seeded with mimics. Or who is to say that the Typhon operate only in one galaxy? Or how often do they “feed”? Do they even need to in the traditional sense? For that matter one of the speculations about mimics was that they transform by shifting items from alternate dimensions, this could very well be working on a larger scale and maybe Apex doesn’t show up from across the galaxy but from gobbling up an alternate Earth?
To be clear I think it’s fine that the game doesn’t answer these questions.
This assumes that the Typhon value stable, long-term subsistence. If their primary drive is simply to expand, and they fundamentally don’t care about the long term, then no amount of sophistication is going to make them want to farm.
And this is what made the pre-ME3 reapers so terrifying… or could have been. Because the Reapers were farmers. Before they were retconned into being nonsensical machines. The Reapers of Mass Effect seeded the galaxy with sapient life and terraformed planets to support it, left relics like the Mass Relays and The Citadel to help that sapient life grow, develop, and form complex interstellar societies… and once their societies reached a critical ‘ripeness’ of enlightenment and interstellar saturation, then… Time to Harvest! All those juicy, ripe civilizations get harvested, then turned into new Reapers, and then they re-seed the galaxy to let the cycle begin.
Mass Effect 1 was probably terrifying for the Reapers – They sent Little Johnny Sovereign to warm up the tractor and hitch up the combine, only for The Happening to Happen against him ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES-style. So they sent Harbinger to investigate what the hell happened, and what the fuck was going on with these murderous Human weeds that were causing such a ruckus when the Citadel council races had been so carefully grown complacent and harvestable. Fundamentally, Mass Effect was a Heroic Fantasy story, not Cosmic Horror.
But did you even try?
…I kind of want to see a Katamari horror game now. You have to avoid getting rolled up, and also knock the giant deathball into big pointy things so it gets stuck on them and slows down. And of course the ball is accompanied by Katamari music that gets louder as the threat approaches.
I always thought those games sounded completely horrifying, so, I approve of this entirely!
Katamari x The Eternal Cylinder?
Honestly, Katamari is basically a horror game for everyone but you. It’s just hard to see it like that because it’s so fucking wierd and….I don’t know how else to describe it.
I’m sorry, did you just imply Katamari isn’t horrifying? This is a thing where people, still alive, get glued into a big ball and then set to burn for the next best thing to eternity.
Maybe they’re not alive for that last bit. Maybe. But horrifying nonetheless.
Just popping in to make the inevitable comparison of the Typhon to the Tyranids from Warhammer 40k. Traveling around consuming everything on a planet, leaving a barren rock behind before moving on. They even land their initial troops on the ground and if the environment is not favourable they evolve into different strains that perform better. Finally when they’re done all the smaller forms throw themselves into bio pools to get melted down so the big spaceship sized creatures can suck them up and reuse their mass for later planets. No waste here, no sir!
I don’t actually think the Typhon would eat the whole planet. Humans absolutely, and probably some animals, but it’s established that the Typhon feed on consciousness, hence using human prisoners to get the Typhon to reproduce instead of the vastly more convenient (ethically and otherwise) farm animals or plants or whatever. There are a bunch of Typhon hanging out in the Arboretum and the plants are untouched.
It’s taking the standard story theme where humans are presented as incredibly delicious (“To Serve Man”, c’mon, have a nice steak) and justifying it.
Maybe they would expand their diet once the humans were extinct, but I doubt it. I’m very sure people would have tried that out because, no matter how much of a sociopath you are, feeding them non-humans would be cheaper and easier.
Just once I’d like to see the unknowable cosmic horror be some sort of freaky bird or mammal, and not fall back on the same tired trope of “mollusc (or crustacean) = creepy”.
You know what that sounds like? An excuse to plug Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is what that sounds like.
Behold, Grimclaw!
So what’s the freakiest mammal you can think of?
Besides humans, obviously.
Most things that live in the deep sea freak me out, they look incredibly weird. Any animal that’s smart enough to get out of it’s cage and has the coordination/dexterity/manual ability to do so makes me nervous too, especially squid and octopi. The tentacles don’t help, but I seriously think that while the cockroaches will rule the land if we wipe ourselves out, the cephalopods will rule the sea and likely become the next tool-using dominant life form. With corvids as their henchmen, those birds are also scary smart (and remember our faces and never forgive).
Fun fact, cephalopods are scary smart. But it’s been theorized that the reason they didn’t evolve consciousness like humanity… was because they lack the ability to cooperate and communicate with each other. Mirror neurons, just like the Typhon.
There’s also this problem where it’s hard to do fire underwater, and burning stuff (well, applying a lot of heat) is a key ingredient for most technology.
The crowd looks up at the sky in slack-jawed horror and awe. Lightning flashes. And then, with an Inception-esque WOOAAAMP, the head of a gigantic duck-billed platypus parts the clouds.
I can see why most sci-fi media stick with cephalopods.
Well, the solution is the old Greek solution of combining different animals into a strange new animal with a lot of weapony bits. Chimaera, Manticores, Griffins. All mammals, and also sometimes birds.
So instead of leading with the head, we lead with, like, the claws of a mole, and then the beak of a raven, and the head of a horse, and the neck of an ostrich, and the body of a hedgehog. And the tail of a Stegosaurus.
Coincidentally, the platypus’ nearest relative is named for the wife of Typhon and the mother of monsters.
Also they’re super-duper cute and visit my house occasionally.
Hmm…good question*, but perhaps not the right one—I’m not suggesting it should be any specific mammal species, just as the unknown cosmic horrors are not actually any specific cephalopod species (they just take cues from them). Imagine something vaguely mammalian-looking: it’s got some fur (but also naked skin patches), eight legs with giant serrated claws on the fingers/toes (and one too many bends), sparse spines interspersed with armored scales on its back, three long prehensile tails, a freakishly long tongue with extra teeth on it/more than one tongue, three tusks, six eyes/no eyes, no visible ears/more than two ears, etc., etc.. So it’s not, “Oh look, a cute space fox the size of a space station”, it’s, “It looks like a mammal, but all my instincts are screaming at me that this is wrong somehow”.
*The answer is naked mole rats.
I’ll be honest, I saw the title and was wondering how you were going to link PREY to Heart of Darkness as I read.
I really enjoyed how laid back the game was about the ‘save Alex’ choice. It didn’t succumb to the urge to dramatically go into slow-mo with camera cuts between a panicking Alex and the crumbling escape path. It just had him start floating away, and you can grab him if you’re quick-thinking and want to, or you can deliberately let him go because of his bastardry, or you can get distracted by the situation and not even realize he’s savable. I instinctively sprang in to action to save him and it felt really good that I used only the game mechanics to do so without a helping hand from the writer and cinematographer.
I tried shutting him in the escape pod instead of the bunker. Wasn’t airtight enough apparently.
Why would the Typhin be so deadly when one non combat trained scientist can clear an entire space station of them?
Why would one getting to Earth spell the end of humanity when Morgan can kill them with a shotgun and not having been through even 8 weeks of basic training
I’m afraid that to answer this question, we have to resort to the unsatisfying explanation of “Because Morgan is the player character.”
While it’s true that a lone human is able to defeat them in large numbers, it’s also true that the Typhon completely tore through the rest of the station, including many security personnel who DO have combat training.
Also, the degree to which Morgan has “basic training” is a bit up in the air. The game intendeds for you to take multiple neuromods to improve your prowess in combat. These neuromods are supposedly giving you a lot more than just “8 weeks” of training. They probably impart months, years, or possibly even decades of accumulated experience. It’s true that you can still beat the game without ever taking any neuromods, but it’s also true that doing so is brutal and unforgiving. Without the benefit of save & load, Morgan’s chances of survival are very small, bordering on astronomical.
Mimics are devious little bastards. They’ll pose as common items, wait for you to get near, and then pounce. For Morgan this just does ~25HP of damage, but for everyone else this seems to be an insta-kill that consumes your mind and spits out four or five fresh mimics in under 15 seconds. With those numbers, a lone mimic in a big city could turn into ~400k mimics in the space of a few minutes. The result would look less like predators turned loose in a city, and more like a viral infection run amok.
If they multiplied more slowly, then humans might have time to learn and adapt. But at the apparent rate of expansion, the few that survived long enough to learn how to beat the typhon would be hopelessly outnumbered.
There’s also the Psychoscope and how new/secret it still is. It’s apparently the only thing keeping Morgan from “instant permanent possession by a Telepath” and so unless someone sent both the recipe and a warning to Earth fast that would end all hope of humans winning in close confrontations with the Typhon.
(it occurs that this is another reason why I don’t quite think of Mooncrash as canon)
The Psychoscope also seems to provide some kind of protection against mimic cranal orifice invasion, although how it does this is not obvious. Morgan otherwise has a Gordon Freeman-esque invulnerability to head humpers.
Except that you encounter mimics well before getting the scope. I don’t recall them becoming any less deadly afterwards.
I think that’s not quite so unsatisfying as it would usually be because [MASSIVE ENDGAME SPOILER]
you’re not playing as Morgan, you’re playing as a phantom that’s playing as Morgan. Real Morgan made it through by injecting a ridiculous number of NMs and sneaking around until deploying the super nullwave, but phantom Morgan can proceed how it wants because Alex needs to judge it. So he makes the sim easier to allow more freedom of choice.Sorry for the wall of spoiler.I thought the appearance of the Apex was impressive. You’ve spent the entire game running all over and flying around Talos-1, so by the end you have an appreciation for just how big the place is. So when an enemy shows up that’s big enough to single-handedly engulf the station you have a pretty good idea just how far above your weight class this thing is. Having it knock out the artificial gravity on impact only helps sell it.
I’m gonna be honest; I don’t think I would’ve been able to resist making some sort of “Trapped in the Closet” reference for Alex, dated as it may be.
And I would’ve titled the post “the Horror, the Horror”, even though the Apocalypse Now reference possibly makes even less sense than the R. Kelly one. Even if they both involve a big guy hiding in a room at the end of the story.
:(