It's giving All Tomorrows.
Exodus, an RPG from ex-Bioware developers announced at the Game Awards last year, didn’t exactly grip me on first blush. In fact I remember experiencing a kind of whiplash—the first half of that initial showing aped Interstellar’s emotional core (fitting given Matthew McConaughey’s in it) before immediately taking a hard-right into ‘hell yeah, shooting aliens!’ territory as Muse’s Supermassive Black Hole blared in the background.
Other than that it mostly looked kinda neat, but nothing to write home about. And while I’m not exactly picking up a letter to tell my far afield beloved about how exciting Exodus looks just yet, I will admit that its latest teaser has piqued my interest, because I love a good flesh monster.
The trailer—seen above—goes into the Mara Yama, a race of interstellar assholes whose entire remit seems to be kidnapping people, torturing them psychologically and, best of all, flesh-grafting them onto spaceships.
“Do you know what fear is? The Mara Yama do,” croons Mr. McConaughey, ominously. “They want minds. Memories. Emotions … Captured prey will be subjected to intense psychological torment, before being neurologically drained.” Phew, don’t threaten me with a good time or anything.
While Mass Effect heads may cry copycat and say that this is all pretty reminiscent of the Reaper’s tendency towards body horror, I personally think the clear inspiration here is All Tomorrows—which makes me surprisingly excited for Exodus as a whole. For those uninitiated, All Tomorrows is a science fiction book published in 2006 which provides a sort of messed-up lens into the biological future of the human race. Or, rather, races.
In All Tomorrows, humanity loses a war to a species of genetic engineering sickos called the Qu who are, in summary, kinda terrible to just about everybody. They warp humans into a bunch of different forms as punishment, play around with them for 40 million years, and then leave them to evolve on their lonesome. The book’s mostly concerned with infodumping at you about these various unfortunates and their slow evolution.
The flesh-wall of suffering heads seen in the trailer feels like a clear homage to the Colonials, who did such a good job dying heroically at the hands of Qu that their conquerers turned them into waste-eating flesh bricks, specifically kept intelligent so they could suffer appropriately.
I don’t know—maybe I’m just being super charitable after Starfield mostly just gestured vaguely in the direction of science fiction without really having that much to say about it. To see Exodus clearly vamping some recognisable sci-fi gives me hope that the team at Archetype Entertainment did their homework. Since Exodus doesn’t have an actual release date, though, it’s likely we’ll be waiting a while yet.
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