...

so, bit of context for this one: a few years ago I bought itch.io's Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, all of the games from which proceeded to sit tragically unexplored in my library until very recently. more recently, I decided to scroll through each and every single one of the hundreds of games included, find the ones that seemed interesting, and give them a shot! it seemed like a great way to get introduced to games on the fringe, and I've been very happy with the results.

THE ENIGMA MACHINE (which, yes, I will be capitalizing exclusively like that throughout this post, because I'm not about to enforce sensible typography on a game that so consistently refers to itself in all-caps) was one of these games, and holds the distinction of being the very, very first horror game I've ever played. not for lack of interest—I've always loved horror to bits, but for someone easily panicked and incredibly noise-sensitive like me, engaging with the genre is like russian roulette with about as much risk for damage to my brain.

however, the premise of this was an incredibly alluring one, with THE ENIGMA MACHINE (I warned you!) promising a trip into the murky, ambiguous, low-poly worlds within the mind of an artificial intelligence. mindscapes and synthetic life have always been some of my favorite narrative concepts, and it's clear that this game was made with its own love for these ideas. it's a bold and passionate opening statement from this developer, and the game that truly solidified how much I wanted to keep playing these kinds of abstract, heartfelt experiments.

in its opening minutes, the game did a nice job of setting up everything it needed to with its narrative: the player is taking part in a training exercise for the ENIGMA corporation's DREAMSCAPE software, which allows users to enter the minds of artificial intelligences—which ENIGMA is also the leading producers of, alongside the lifelike android bodies that house them.

and speaking of AIs, the chipper companion called demOS responsible for delivering most of this information is an incredibly well-written character! their constraints as an artificial being and lack of understanding of humans is consistent and sometimes charmingly awkward, but the dialogue still felt alive in a gripping way.

of course, this is a horror game, and once you actually enter the simulation, that fact becomes immediately apparent!

to be clear, another first that this game gave me was my first experience with the whole psx low-poly Thing that's been sweeping the indie horror scene these past few years. and y'know what? I get it now. the environments had me more unnerved than I've been in a while. with how slow your walking speed is and how frequently your surroundings plunge into inscrutable darkness, you spend a lot of time in this game staring into empty, silent space. each ring of dimming light is starkly visible along the walls, and there's a subtle flickering to both the framerate and the way the polygons catch the light at a distance that not only draws unavoidable attention to the artificiality of these settings, but gives an impression that they're only barely held together. it's wonderful. I fucking loved it and it made every single corner I turned into a surreal nightmare.

ultimately, though, the gameplay and relatively simplistic puzzle solving are vehicles for the impactful little plotline the game has going on, wherein you're given all sorts of cryptic talk about "decontamination" and AI sapience. but to talk more about that, we need to...

⚠ ENTER THE SPOILERZONE ⚠

"decontamination" is a word the game likes to throw around without explaining what it means. it's apparently what you're meant to be doing to AI by accessing their minds, but the game leaves the identity of what exactly is contaminating them enticingly vague.

and perhaps counterintuitively enough, things start getting MORE fucked up the less contaminated the testing AI is. the menu interface starts glitching out, demOS starts diverting from its programming, and the worlds you explore start changing. in one particular sequence that still sticks with me, the sky is replaced by a distorted view of the menu screen. it's haunting.

not only that, though, but the levels start merging. through various passageways and corridors, you start finding old levels, and thus the lie of these being individually simulated environments is revealed.

the game's final scenes (wherein you get a gun, only for there to be a stress-inducing lack of any enemies) contains many of these kinds of revelations: not only is the "contamination" you're tasked with cleaning out the essence of an AI's sapience, but you're also poking around in the brain of your friend demOS--or Red, as they're otherwise called. you and all the other agents like you are constantly lobotomizing this AI right as they realize what's happening to them.

and this is all paired with visuals that are haunting on a physical level as well as a glitchy metaphysical one. you find yourself in a courtyard with a beautiful starry sky with rain falling down, but everything's wrong. the vertices of the level geometry are mutilated in a way that constantly leaps out at you and obscures your vision. the rain is frozen in place. and, all the while, Red is recounting to you the experience of being torn from one's body and made to die over and over again, forever.

then a horrible humanoid figure walks towards you from behind one of the many bits of misplaced level geometry, you shoot it, and the game crashes.

honestly, part of me almost wishes the game ended there. sure, the following sequence where the courtyard becomes a swirling hellstorm and you have to go through all the past environments while avoiding shrieking manifestations of an AI that wants to live is kickass, and far from unearned!

but THE ENIGMA MACHINE was so affecting for me because of how slow of a burn it was, and how gradually the tension and dread escalated. the crazy explosion of action at the end was almost a release of tension more than anything else, and while that wasn't unwelcome, it makes me wanna see the version of this game that stuck to that slow-paced dread all the way through to the end.

isn't that the best part about small little games like this, though? they set the mind ablaze and propose neat little ideas that, even if they aren't seen all the way through or have some quirks about them, are presented in an exciting enough way to get you thinking. the lived experience of an AI and how their senses operate so differently from ours despite having the same level of sapience is such a fascinating thing to dig into, and the way this game does that is so visceral that I found it utterly inspiring. can't wait to play the other games from the studio!!