quakefultales

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indie game dev, AI and narrative design researcher, playwright


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Freespace 2 is Zone Fiction, the more I sit around after watching Stalker and reading a bunch of Otherside Picnic, I can't escape it. That is what it is down to Admiral fucking Bosch thinking the nebula through the Knossos device is the route to salvation. The nebula itself is weird, full of horrifying unknowable things, and bends the rules of the game itself.

Your sensor range is limited, you can't see well, and for one mission (the best mission btw), you can't target things properly. There are monsters potentially every direction you could go, your allies can just disappear, later coming back ranting about everyone needing to leave immediately. Beyond the Knossos portal is a Zone, full of Shivans and it's never clear how many they are or how they even got there, they are just a fact of the place.

The Zone is less unknowable to Bosch, who spends the entire game spurring genocide so he can try to talk with the monsters inhabiting it.

Freespace 2 is Zone Fiction from the perspective of someone who does not feel the temptations of the Zone nor finds its call compelling.


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