The Quest for a New Man
The supposedly central quest of the game is completely illusory. Adam’s obsession with Megan is so poorly conveyed and motivated as to border on farcical, the strange justifications of a madman as he rampages across the world at the whims of his employer, telling himself it’s all for the sake of the object of fascination, Megan Reed. The conclusion of this quest, culminating in a stark white room where he encounters her, shows the truth of this quest. Throughout the quest, what really takes place is Adam being guided along an episodic journey to become who was destined to be, an esoteric quest towards his destiny guided by the hand of this desire. That Megan is out of his grasp matters little, Megan ultimately being a trick played on Adam to make him undergo his transformation.
Two Cities
The sidequests in Detroit make the player return again and again to the same locations, the DRB-occupied ruined block, the mass of apartments, the police station. In these locations, hostile humans are compacted into dense complexes, forming a tightly compacted maze of flesh and heat with which to do violence. Flesh and violence makes up the theme of Detroit, with the pure humans turning to rioting and flailing against the semi-robotic riot police, the main gang antagonist being the larger and unaugmented crew, the comments from purity-seeking hobos, and etc. The populace of Detroit is a populace left behind, wallowing in the decay of a city forgotten by history, in the null death of a human body untouched by advances in the human organism’s evolution.
The human in Hengsha is situated not as a part of it, another piece of grime on the bottom of the street, but against it, navigating it as an outsider. Hengsha is a city of capital and technology. Every part of its construction is built for higher, machinic purposes, with the player visiting centers of consumption and production, nightclubs, market streets, construction sites, dockyards, etc. The dramas taking place are dramas of interaction against these inhuman machines of economics and technology, being stricken down with augment malfunctions, resisting forced augmentation, struggling against the power of capital and technology. The motif recurring in showing this binary is that of vertical transition. Multiple missions deal with humans thrown down great descents in the Youzhao district, the design itself is vertical, Jensen navigates in story progression in ways that cross-cut the layers of the city, emerging from the construction site of the ambush, climbing the TYM tower through both layers of Hengsha. Vertical transition shows the free movement through an inhuman structure such as the city of Hengsha, an image of humanity after technology.
Bull, Mantis, Snake
Barrett and his forces appear occupying the facility of another, a large complex of purchased factories and a FEMA facility. His personal title and style is the first and most brutish form of martial power, that of mere presence, of power manifesting as the baton or beating, the logistical and guardian work of the war machine.
Federova’s presence comes from nothing, the deferred presence of Eliza, first leading Adam from room 404 (not found), then to the unknown part of the Picus building, only to discover that Eliza herself is not. Federova’s original appearance in the opening is her emerging and then quickly making herself vanish again, a way of fighting she uses against Jensen, making generous use of cloaking abilities. Her attempt to kill Adam from behind shows her role, the tip of the spear, the surgical piercing end of the war-machine, manifesting in the single instant the bullet impacts.
In a room of muscle-bodies, Namir comes out as one of them, a deconstructed specimen of a person, naked in a sense more extreme that simple unclothedness, his appearance laying bare the foundational operations of a human. If the player bought into the narrative of the game enough to get themselves upgraded, Zhao strips them of their augmentations for the fight. Adam winning against him is a stripped-down contest of war machines against each other, an image of two nude warriors wrestling to prove their rawest individual prowess. Incorporating the tactics of the other two, Adam and Namir engage as an apex of Adam’s entire conflict against Belltower, against the enemy soldiers throughout the entire game.
Selection for Fitness
In the second “first” mission, the more advanced tutorial after Jensen’s been augmented, the player is tasked with surgically solving a hostage situation in the Milwaukee Junction factory. The Purity First members have attempted to throw their flesh upon the assembly lines, forcibly stopping technological production. Jensen’s removal of them occurs by reminding them of the situation they’ve found themselves in. Far over their heads, Jensen solves the final dialogue challenge by convincing Zeke of his impotence in the face of the superior power of war, competing ultimately, with technological and economic capabilities far beyond their comprehension, retreating in timid fear of a lower creature back to the unaugmented sewers.
Jensen’s conjecture against them, the superiority over pure humans, is tested in The Missing Link, when Jensen finds himself on the other end, the captive and subject of another antagonizing him. In both of these fights, what occurs is evolutionary competition between organisms. Stripped and forced to rebuild himself, Jensen passes through the various gateways as he triumphs against Belltower, his competitor in the struggle for dominance. By killing Burke in stealth, the achievement is “Apex Predator” as Jensen proves himself the superior being above and beyond Belltower.
Viruses & CPUs
The first encounter with Zhao Yun Ru occurs at the apex of the Tai Yong Medical building, a tower ascending like a flower from the productive substratum of Hengsha. The building is decorated in tune with this metaphor, green and orange with various botanical shapes drawn along its interiors and the only unclouded sunlight of the game being visible from its upper corridors. The new form of life that Adam represents in his namesake, the first of a new type of human, grows from this fertile garden of biotechnology. Upstaging all his predecessors, he proves himself worthy by nature’s test, selecting to the peak of augmented-human perfection.
Zhao is met again at the bottom of Panchea, where she fails, being overwhelmed by the machine she attempts to unify herself with by performing the same integration as the captive human calculators the computer uses. All of these captive humans and Zhao are killed, purged from the system. When Adam achieves the ending, his final meeting is with Eliza Cassan, recognizing her as his only true equal. Both Adam and Eliza have the same fundamental nature in that they remain a whole organism at the peak of their chosen machine. Zhao was purged as a foreign entity, as were the captives, for being only pieces, as expendable as it would be for Adam to replace his arm with a new one. Eliza in the same way, could lose infinitely many devices spreading Picus, computers below her, as long as her central intelligence remains intact. When the Hyron Project purged the flesh invading its body, it did so just as the crazed people in Panchaea desperately tried to purge the invading biochip from their own body, desperately attempting to retain the stability of the unified organism. The next evolutionary step of technology is not, as Zhao sees it, a singularity of all things, but a new type of entity, a biotech animal, evolved and formed by the template that Adam evolved and was formed in the progress of the game.
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