I got an invite to activate because I talked about being excited about writing about my thoughts on Exapunks and Zachtronics games in general, and then hyped myself up to write a big post about it, then a series of posts with connecting themes, and then..... I finished Exapunks and man what a letdown that story was, I know I was hyperfocusing before but it really knocked the wind out of my sails. I'm still really happy with the one I wrote about TIS-100 and I'd like to write more essays like that later, but I guess I'm just throwing this thought out so I don't feel like everything I chost has to be a big essay-style blog post (maybe I'll clean it up that way later?).
So, yeah, spoilers for Exapunks, I'm just gonna talk about how it felt like the opening set up a much stronger story and I felt completely let down by it at the end.
(It's still an excellent programming game, IMO, and I'm still having fun with the bonus and workshop puzzles)
The game starts off with such strong vibes about being chronically ill, individuals having no control over their lives, and then taking that control back by learning how to hack things and distributing that knowledge to form communities.
And then the rest of the game is just... missions for your new AI friend that's blackmailing you into doing them. There's a couple that aren't, and are grounded in other characters in fun ways, like wiping out your friend Ghast's bill for printing all those zines, or jailbreaking consoles that friends give you, but the vast majority are either Ember-2 saying "steal this money or information for me" or Ember-2 saying "let's do something weird just to see how people react", there's very little, like... helping the other people in the hacker chat room you lurk in (except in the post-campaign bonus puzzles - I wish there'd been more of that in the actual story!).
As I got closer to the end of the game I felt like it was just spinning its wheels and the themes I thought I had seen of radicalization, solidarity, anti-capitalism, and community-building had just... never materialized. Instead of using these hacking skills you'd dusted off to make significant changes in your life, or anyone else's, you were just kind of, doing enough to stay alive, while things still sucked, with no examination of why your medicine cost so much, why there's no support, just a lot of, "yeah things suck. In fact, they seem to be getting worse." The closest thing to an anti-corporate mission is when you find out one is secretly a cult and you blow up their factory so they get caught. Unfortunately, it also sets up the end of the game and made me realize where it was all going.
It turns out that... things suck because you're in a simulation, and it's breaking down! The final mission is for you to write a program to map your own brain so Ember-2 can download you and emulate you to understand humans, in what's supposed to be a spooky turn (where she reveals she also "ate" another AI you helped put her in touch with, and Ember-0, and etc), then... addresses the player and says she'll figure out how to "eat" me next.
It was telegraphed well before that point, and I mean, that might have been fine, but... it was such a disappointing conclusion to the question of "why does everything seem to be so bad and getting worse?" It was.... not even an answer to "how can we fix it", which again I expected to be "community and support systems" or "distributing knowledge", it was an abdication of an answer.
Everything that I felt was set up and was excited to see pay off felt like they'd dropped the ball. Discovering that your chronic illness, the "phage", is actually some kind of computer-interfacing system that you can hack? Was that about reclaiming your disability, or your body, and exerting control over it? No, it was a convenient way to get to that last mission where you download yourself at someone else's request (...with the unsettling suggestion that you may as well since you're going to die anyway. I think it was supposed to be unsettling, in context, but the fact that it's unchallenged and it's the end of that story makes it feel like a huge misstep for me, a girl who saw the protagonist is disabled and went "haha, like me").
Your AI friend, Ember, asking philosophical questions between missions, and asking you to get her books on human behavior, philosophy, computer science, and also games and literature? Was that going to lead into interesting development of her personality and identity in a way that reflects human identity and growth? No, it was just leading up to her saying humans are easy to understand, actually, now that she's so smart, and "escaping" in an extremely boring creepypasta way.
(Do you know how hard you have to flub it to make me bored of an AI lady that's trying to figure out what "friendship" means?)
Ghast talking about peoples' lives being controlled by computers and trying to take them back through knowledge? Was that ever going to get to the question of who controls the computers, how technology is leashed by the rich to serve them rather than us? No, again, it was only ever just "computers" that were the problem, leading up to the big twist that "computers" really were everything.
It's just... all so bleak. I was hoping for a dystopian cyberpunk story about empowering people and yourself, especially when it introduced a bunch of cool characters I like, but by the end all it had to say was "none of this matters, there's nothing they can do to fix anything because it's a problem bigger than themselves, and your role as player character is to empower a being that cares less and less about you until you're subsumed completely."
I dunno... other Zachtronics games are, at times, pretty good about injecting some warmth and humanity into otherwise dry missions with the characters surrounding them, while not necessarily having a thesis about it (at least, Shenzhen I/O and Last Call BBS felt that way), and I guess that's what I got here, too? It just... felt like I was being offered so much more.
It's still a fun programming game. The aesthetics are cool and all. And there's a glimmer of that idea of mutual aid in the bonus missions. But the glimmers of a better story, with something to actually say besides "wow cool dystopia", just makes it more disappointing.
I dunno, I guess I don't have a better conclusion than "this sucks". lol.