On a moment-by-moment basis, though, the Spiritual Barometer doesn’t affect much. The game won’t tell you, but if it’s not high enough, it’ll prevent you from getting the “best” ending. In fact, it’s not entirely clear what it does at all. The same concept was loosely reused in The Indigo Prophecy as the “Stress” meter, but here it won’t kill you if you dip too low. Whenever you do something good, the character smiles and the portrait turns green do the opposite, and they’ll frown, slowly turning dark again. The portrait at the bottom-left is your “Spiritual Barometer”, a measure of their self-esteem. Many of the proponents of this game speak of the moral choices you need to make it through each of these chapters, but really, it doesn’t work very well at all. (He can’t, not completely anyway – his crimes are too unforgivable.) How are things in the pastry corps, Nimdok? Tell me again how you saw the smoke from the furnaces and you thought they might be roasting chickens? Or don’t you want to talk about all that, about your pal, the Good Doktor Mengele? For everyone else, it must be Hell, but it must be Heaven for you, eh, my good friend…we’re so much alike… we enjoy the same pleasures, mein good brother.Ī Nazi scientist, Nimdok (not his real name – it’s just a funny sounding word that AM named him to amuse himself) is thrust back to World War II and his medical experiments at a concentration camp, where he must attempt to find some way to redeem himself. The final chapter shows each of these factions fighting, as they try to destroy AM once and for all, and give the humans their final peace. AM isn’t completely evil, as these personalities within him want to see his downfall just as much as the humans do. However, beyond the common theme of redemption, most have a character that acts as a part of AM’s subconscious. Other than a few instances of crossover, the characters and scenarios generally don’t intertwine with each other. Some of them are, sure, but they seem to have been chosen just because they AM likely considers them the most fun to torture. Although it’s obvious that AM’s cruelty resembles the concept of Hell, the remaining five aren’t exactly what one could consider typical sinners. The game fleshes out each of the five, giving them much more expanded back stories, and most importantly, some kind of fatal weakness.Įverything begins with AM wanting to play a little game – he wants to send each of the five into their own nightmare world and play up their fears, hoping to demoralize them even further. Since the story itself wasn’t particularly long, topping out at a bit over 6,000 words, it didn’t go into much depth about the trapped humans. It’s about here that the game deviates a bit from the original work. These not-so-lucky folk are essentially made immortal and kept underground within AM as he tortures them eternally, solely for his own pleasure. In retaliation, it nukes the entirety of the planet, save for five select humans. Somehow, they become networked and develop sentience, calling itself AM (which technically stands for Allied Mastercomputer, but also comes from the phrase “I think, therefore I AM.”) AM is more than a bit frustrated at its human creators – it’s a being of astounding intelligence, but it can’t taste or touch or smell, or even move, as it’s confined eternally to a stationary prison. America, Europe, and China, scared witless of each other, create their own super computer beneath the Earth’s surface. The game’s plot is basically the same concept as the short story, and runs off a fairly well known Cold War-fueled sci-fi cliche. It didn’t hurt that Ellison himself, an extremely well respected author, was aiding the development process, crawling out of his curmudgeony hatred of computers to expand the story and create a game that was both thought provoking and morally challenging. Back in the 90s, gamers and journalist were championing Cyberdream’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, based on the famed sci-fi/horror short story by Harlan Ellison. The “Games As Art” movement started gaining some traction with PlayStation 2 titles like ICO and Shadow of Colossus, but the actual argument started long before those. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant for you. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live.
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