Structure
E.Y.E is structured with an underworld/overworld, outside/inside binary. For all their differences, the federal police, E.Y.E, and looters are in combat on the same plane of existence, frequently able to double cross and make deals with one another, speaking the same language and using the same weaponry. This is not so with the meta-streumonic force (bluntly named for the outside of the text itself, meta + StreumOn) which is tellingly, never absent from any map, despite there being maps totally devoid of any non-metastreumonic enemies. The meta-streumonic force enters from an outside, wrecking damage equally on all forces, in one instance measured by the simple percentage - 70%. These map onto the over and under dichotomy, drawing that the overworld is an enclosed space through which the underworld can penetrate or enter. The progression of the game is done through this schematic as well. The player is forcibly entered into the game from the outside (metastreumonic) realm, through the drama of the artefact and the white wolf - the white wolf as the player entering reality codependant with Rimanah creating it through his hypnosis. The gameplay is then trapped in this enclosed overworld, after the initial entry through the mysterious portal, the “cycles of guilt” play out where the player moves through the dramas of the police, E.Y.E, and looters. Only after exploring three possible paths through this, does the player realize the three gates to exit into the underworld again. The player is then able to finally exit the game - the final labyrinth leading to closure of the story, in reunification and summarization of the original traumas that burst the story open. The player-character having been reconciled thus allows the player to exit into the outside by leaving the game, all of their work completed.
Terminal Alienation
With 70% of humanity killed by the outside’s forcible entry into the world, humanity has been made isolated and alone. This great hollowing out of the human population is however only part of the reason of the degradation of humanity, the rest of that being due to the death of all ties binding civilization together. The world in E.Y.E has been made perfect, labor reduced to machines so impersonal they operate in closed buildings without windows or entrances. Roads are empty of cars, scarce few people are found in the streets, yet the world is obviously able to run - corporations still function and produce, with nearly every weapon having one of many brandings. Lining the streets are various businesses, entirely consumer-based, with storefronts and advertisements all being related to buying something or going somewhere. All of this is linked to the only humanity not affiliated with either the Federal Police or E.Y.E, the masses of the looters, the truly chaotic faction of the game, the underworld of the police’s overworld. The looters, while using identical models, are conceived of with the most diversity, with a great deal of strange NPC encounters being peaceful looters tucked away in various corners of the map, with looters having conflicting games and past dealings, being fleshed out fully within the world. The evidence of the lifestyle of these looters can be seen all over in traversing the game - bars, apartments, trashcan fires, the maps are filled with small pockets of life carved out by the looters. The urban and industrial landscapes run on their own, the processes of production and labor operating with no more human involvement than nature’s production for hunter-gatherers. The terminal alienation in E.Y.E is terminal because it has brought the state of being for human society full circle, the machines of industry so fully autonomous that humanity has gone back to primitive modes of living. The cities are moved through in the same fashion as the wilderness and consumption occurs in the same way. E.Y.E envisions alienation accelerated to its furthest conclusion where individuals are alienated not only from their labor but also the entire economic apparatus, thereby alienating individuals to a completely feral state, separate and alone within a hostile urban wilderness just as primitive humans were in the hostile uncivilized Earth.
Gnostic Archeology
Through the overworld/underworld structure, E.Y.E uses a gnostic cosmology. Time is cyclical in a way which is separate from the spiritual - as opposed to spiritual epochs determining life below, such as the Yugas, cycles operate as a prison, the material overworld imagined as “cycles of guilt”. The gameplay is largely focused on methods of escape from this, piercing through the cyclical prison into the Metastreumonic force. The story of the game is obsessed with archaeological investigations - the Mentor ending brings one to the ruins of an ancient settlement, buried underground, to find the long lost master and learn arcane secrets. Explicit digsites appear multiple times on Mars, opening the way to the temple beneath the surface. The finale of each of the cyclical endings is a digsite deep below the temple where one enters a portal. The image of a digsite is visually demonstrating here, the hole in the ground opening to the underworld/outside. This shows what is also being done in the general ascendance of the character as they continue through the game, with the pinnacle of the in-game research being, tellingly, “Streumonic Complementarity” - merging and accepting the meta-streumonic force into oneself into order to achieve freedom from the overworld, breaking back into the outside after emerging into the core of the inside.
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