Ghost Song (part 3)
So. How does it end?
3. It Matters A Lot To Those Ones
Ghost Song's gameplay communicates a sense of highly limited power. In general, metroidvanias are all about gaining power, and you do gain some power in Ghost Song. You gain levels using harvested nanogel, collect new weapons and utility devices, etc. Despite all that though, your deadsuit never feels *that* much more powerful than it did in the early game. Your more powerful offensive abilities are virtually all on cooldowns. The game's equivalent of health expansions don't increase your passive hp, but instead give you more consecutive uses of an active healing ability that you need to actually press a button to activate, and that takes a few seconds to heal you all the way up (your standing hit points do go up a little bit when you level up, but only very, very slightly). More powerful enemies start spawning, but early-game ones never really stop being a threat.
There are ways this could have been done that resulted in a bit less player frustration, but fun value aside, the game makes its point really, really clearly here. You might have a gun arm, but you are no Samus Aran. Or Simon Belmont for that matter. Hell, you're not even that dipshit scientist dude from Axiom Verge.
Once you've gathered all the ship parts and given the Deadsuit its final, most difficult-to-wake-from nap, Saymund tells you to meet him by that ominous red door. He finally comes clean about why ships are crashing on Lorian, and implies that he's only telling you now because he's seen how much of a successful effort you've made at restoring your ship and that, while he normally hates watching his brother kill people who get in his way in person, he can't bear to not give you that smallest potential chance after how far you've managed to get.
Once you finally enter Construct's fortress-lab, you're confronted with a towering "big bot" synth. Throughout the game, you'll have found many damaged big bots strewn around the landscape, imposing and ancient and a clear homage to Metroid's chozo statues. They serve as the game's leveling-up stations and fast transit hubs (presumably by exploiting some surviving space-warping network that still connects the hulks; the fast travel is accompanied by the same sound effect that Construct makes when he vanishes).
In the fortress' antechamber, you find an intact, active big bot.
It turns out that these are Construct's mass-produced security drones.
This one serves as the game's final boss.
After defeating it, you manage to penetrate into Construct's sanctum, where you find him poring over some device or another. The Deadsuit hails him. Repeatedly. Using different words. He ignores her each time.
When she takes a step closer, he shuts her down, and the player needs to buttonmash for a bit to get her to boot back up again. This happens twice. The third time, she tries to get his attention, he causes her deadsuit to explode. Without looking up from his work.
You can grind as much as you want. Bring whatever weapons and defensive items the game world contains. None of it makes even the slightest bit of difference.
Laying on the ground in pieces, unable to move, just barely conscious with her last few minutes' worth of suit energy, the entity that was once a teenaged spacer girl named Charley fights through the ghostly haze and speaks with enough emotion to sound alive and determined, rather than whispery and haunting. She sounds like she's crying.
Construct looks up from his work, and stares at the destroyed deadsuit for a moment. Then, he pushes a button on his touchscreen, and the background noise changes a little bit. She thanks him. He ignores her and goes back to what he was doing before.
The final scene of the game has Charley's deadsuit laying in a pile of garbage outside of the lab, and using her final seconds' worth of unlife to bid a family member who's trying to retrieve her goodbye.
...
Never before have I seen a game so artfully, so beautifully, so poignantly look the player directly in the eye and say "fuck you."
The best you can ever aspire to, you worm, you insect, is getting the attention of someone who actually matters for three entire seconds. After jumping through a literal planet's worth of hoops. At the cost of your life.
This is why I say that Ghost Song actually gets cosmic horror in a way that too much media billing itself as such doesn't.
But, like I said previously, it's also a subversion of cosmic horror. For several reasons.
...
It's probably pretty obvious by now how Construct is a foil to the player character. The greater part of a ghost, the part that dominates unless you go through the trouble to separate it, isn't the life of the person, but the death. The final thoughts. The dying wish. The unfinished business. The Deadsuit needs to work hard to remember that she used to be a human named Charley. She needs constant reinforcement and reminding from her living family to even have a chance of holding onto that identity, that humanity. Otherwise, she only has that overwhelming drive toward fulfilling her dying wish. Construct had an externalized copy of Jezicoe's living personality in Saymund to serve this function for him, but it couldn't last. Ghosts just do not deal well with the world of the living. At least, not for long.
The game might make you feel weak and in over your head much of the time, but the Gambler crew are continually awed by the Deadsuit's power and mystified by its origins. Exactly how the player is made to feel about Construct. And, it's easy to infer, how Construct feels about the evil gods against whom he and his "brothers" continue their endless, probably futile, struggle.
You've fought through armies of zombies, hordes of skittering roslock bugs, dozens of maddened failed bounty hunters, but you're still helpless to get the Gambler spaceborne again. Construct has gagged the Lorian system's gornah and defeated wave after wave of horrors sent in retaliation, but all these centuries later he's seemingly still helpless to strike at the true enemy.
Construct is the foil, but he isn't the antagonist. The antagonist of Ghost Song is forgetting who you are. Charley defeats it by saying the same five words, referring to her clan, that Jezicoe had in his mind in reference to the galaxy's entire mortal population. Reminding the ancient techno-lich of why he's fighting, rather than just what he's fighting.
There's a whole other side to this as well, though. The game doesn't put this along the critical path, you have to go out of your way to explore in order to find all this, but the player can actually get a few glimpses at Construct's own antagonist.
...
First, there are two places in the game where the player can potentially speak with a dying member of Jezicoe's opposition. The first is at the hulk of a deadsuited (or possibly just entirely synthetic?) bounty hunter named Rime who got torn apart by roslock. They evidently don't recognize their masters' other emissaries as friendlies (or, if they normally do, then the ones on Lorian have mutated over the centuries and their IFF is busted).
He's been playing dead for over a century since then, hoping that eventually someone else will solve the Jezicoe problem and this planet will be cleaned up to the point where someone can recover him.
Anyway, the important thing about Rime is that he's a total schlub. A bored dudebro who decided to go bounty hunting on a lark, and then decided to take aim at a legendarily difficult target without ever expecting to actually come face to face with it; he just wanted to be able to say he went to Lorian and hunted for Jezicoe/Saymund. He's a goddamned tourist. He doesn't tell the player anything more revealing than that about the society he came from. He just makes it clear that that society contains common everyday frat boy morons, and that some of them can only manage shitty armor (or perhaps shitty deadsuits like yours, if they were ghostly beings to begin with) far weaker than, eg, a devil-stalker.
Speaking of which...
The second is in a secret room accessible by shooting open an unassuming-looking wall in an underground area. In this chamber, laying beside an optional upgrade the player can pick up, is a dying devil-stalker. Saymund describes the devil-stalkers as a nightmare army of genocidal demon-terminators, and in practice that's probably an accurate description. Despite this, neither the game nor the player character treats this dying individual with anything but pathos.
Rather than the raspy insectoid screech you might expect from a creature that looks like this, Slovenmuck's voice acting would fit right in around a campfire in Dark Souls. Tired, morose, husky soldier-man voice.
He sealed himself off in this cave with the intention of dying alone, but the Deadsuit speaking empathetically to him does seem to make him reconsider that desire for a moment.
Why was he given the ability to speak, he wonders, if his intended role would never require him to use that ability? Why give him sentience at all if he wasn't meant to think?
He never speaks ill of his masters. He never speaks of his masters at all, really, except through the implications that someone must have created him if he was, in fact, "created." But still. Just talking to him, treating him like a person, makes him start asking questions. Even if he still asks you to leave him to die alone after exchanging a few more sentences.
Even the name "Slovenmuck" doesn't fit him at all. "Slovenly." "Muck." Disgusting words. Contemptuous words. Disposable words. Someone must have given that name to him, along with the speaking ability he never got a chance to use.
And, finally...
Throughout the game, the player will occasionally spot a tall, ghostly figure gliding through the desolation, always vanishing before you can get close enough to interact.
After Saymund tells Deadsuit about the ghosts wandering Lorian, the player will most likely assume that this lady is just an unusually coherent ghost who's able to appear more visibly than just lights in the water etc. It's only if the player spots her and tries to follow after her enough times, in enough different places in the game world, that she finally approaches you just before the endgame.
Her name is Relic, and she is here on a periodic survey to see if anyone's gotten any closer to eliminating the target yet.
Relic's people, the "beings of wilful ascension" as they call themselves, are the ones who placed a gornah inside of every star. They created the roslock and the devil-stalkers to protect their interests, and unleashed them on Lorian when its inhabitants provoked them. Relic doesn't specify if the bounty hunters are themselves beings of wilful ascension, or if they come from other societies a tier or two below them on the cosmic totem pole, but either way the wilfully ascendent are the ones who put a price on the heads of Jezicoe's twin deadsuits.
When asked why, she gives you an appropriately incomprehensible technomagic bauble and tells you that you will understand everything once you use it. It is this device that gives the player that look into the past where they can see Jezicoe's assistant manning the soul-cutting device. This does not, in fact, help you understand absolutely anything about why her people committed all these atrocities. Relic seems to be under the impression that if Deadsuit just knew that Jezicoe gagged one of their gornahs, she would agree that genociding his entire homeworld was the correct and indeed only choice.
She's also really, really condescending. Probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway.
The most important thing about Relic though, is that - aside from being all ghostly (she even refers to her own people as "the first and forever masters of the ghostly realm") - she is very clearly a technology-using humanoid. She wears clothes. She has what appears to be a metal harness fitted over her shoulders. She even has a distinctive accent not shared by other characters, suggesting a specific linguistic tradition invented by and for people who communicate with sound.
Given all of the above, one might infer that Relic's people are a civilization of the ancient dead, but no. She says that though her people inhabit the "ghostly realm," she has never died; she was born there.
...
In the first part of this article, I mentioned that the humanoid species of this setting seem like they might just be long-lost human colonies in the wake of one or more dark ages. It FEELS like that type of scifi setting. There's mention of thousands of years worth of "human" history, but no mention of Earth. Members of ostensibly nonhuman species you meet have a very weird mixture of alien and human cultural frames of reference (including Saymund, whose civilization rose and fell something like a millennium before the game's present). All of them look very humanlike.
On a similar note - and I'll admit that this is much more conjecture on my part, the creators may or may not have intended this at all, but it's the impression that I got - something about the ghosts themselves feels distinctly technological.
Could the beings of wilful ascension be the creators of the ghostly realm? Is the entire existence of ghosts just a consequence of someone's apotheosis project?
Are the Gambler crew just a bunch of poor Star Trek extras who stumbled into some Vernor Vinge/Liu Cixin reality reconstruction shit?
On one hand, you'd think that if Relic's people were that powerful, a planetbound entity like Construct wouldn't be so hard for them to deal with. But then, maybe Construct isn't actually that hard for "them" to deal with. Maybe Relic's organization is the equivalent of a backwater police department, and nothing Jezicoe ever did could have gotten the attention of their national military.
...
Bringing all this back around to the game's ending, I feel like it would make the most sense if the purpose of the gornahs actually had nothing to do with the ghosts of corporeal humanoids. If the ghosts getting sucked into their mouths was just an unintended side effect of their actual function, like birds getting killed by wind turbines. That would explain why Relic thinks the player character would care about keeping the gornah healthy and functional; to Relic, a gornah isn't something that hurts and consumes. It's something that serves the important function of...well, she didn't even realize it required explaining. She's just that out of touch with people like Charley, or Jezicoe.
Perhaps her people have forgotten what it's like to be small, to need things.
As soon as the people being inadvertently hurt by their activities did something to inconvenience them, they reacted with knee-jerk lethal force.
"What I mean is, if you call me Captain, that makes me afraid we're failing. The crash, maybe? We can't let tragedy push us into roles that shouldn't even exist."
This, rather than just Charley's dying wish being so similar to Jezicoe's own, may have been what made Construct stop and think. The realization that by not stopping to think anymore, by turning his back on the part of him that remembered his human origins when it got inconvenient, he had allowed himself to become the exact same thing he was fighting. He had to lash out at you, just like they lashed out at Lorian, before the parallel could occur to him. For however long he was able to remember it, after the fact.
There's one more detail that I feel is important. The Deadsuit is threatened by monsters that the game shows normal, Gambler clan-tier people to be able to (with effort) just barely fend off. In turn, the Deadsuit is - with great difficulty - able to go toe-to-toe with some of the weaker bounty hunters. Who themselves, one might assume, might have a chance against a devil-stalker. When you see Construct wandering around during the midgame, you can try shooting at him for a second before he shuts you down. If you do, you see this:
The game could have just had a bunch of zeros show up over those hits. Other indestructible objects in Ghost Song do exactly that. But no, it makes a point of showing you that you ARE dealing damage to him. Very little damage. Against his presumable ocean's worth of hit points, and probably outpaced by his passive health regen. But still. You are hurting him. And he, in his own small way, is hurting the beings of wilful ascension.
Not on the same playing field. Perhaps not even within multiple playing fields of each other. But still on the same continuum.
...
There's a proverb I was told growing up. A man went to the beach at low tide, and saw a bed of hundreds of starfish that had been caught in the open and exposed to the air. They were slowly drying up and dying in the hot sun. A young child was standing among the starfish, picking them up one by one and tossing them into the water. The man approached the child and asked him why he was even bothering; there were so many starfish, and he could only save so few in time, that his efforts didn't even matter. In response, the child pointed at the patch of sea he'd been returning the starfish to and said "Well mister...it matters a lot to those ones."
Everyone matters, to someone. If Ghost Song didn't have the warring space gods in it, if it was just a game about a girl coming back from the dead for a few days to save her family from a planet of monsters, then that would change the tone completely. Now it's a triumphant, empowering story where the day gets saved and everyone except for our tragic heroine lives happily ever after.
What causes that change? What difference should that make? There's always someone else. There's never NOT a different struggle for different people going on offscreen.
...
We live in a world where there really are vast, impersonal forces that could destroy everything we know without recourse. Nature is nature. But those aren't the only forces that surround us. There are people whose fingers rest on the buttons that dictate the lives and deaths of millions of others. Individuals with fanatical worshippers who make their every ill-advised whim a destructive reality. Countries who treat the rest of the world like a resource, and react with spite and swagger at the first sign of pushback, complete with chucklefuck violence tourists with no idea what the real world is like and much-vaunted soldiers who get treated like shit and discarded the instant they're no longer useful.
It's easy to slip into the worldview of that being what makes the measure of a man. Power. How many others are at one's mercy, and consequently how little those lives can possibly still mean to the one in question.
But those people? They're not gods, no matter how much they look like they are, act like they are, or think that they are. Each and every single one of them was a screaming, drooling, diaper-shitting little baby once. And, babies? I'm a parent now. I love my baby. Wouldn't dream of trading them for anyone or anything else. But intellectually, I still know that - when they're first born - babies are all the fucking same. No matter where they end up in life, they're still on the same continuum.
Ultimately, no one matters. And, ultimately, everyone does.
For that reason, despite being about as far out a science fantasy story as a person could possibly write, I maintain that in terms of tone, themes, and general attitude, Ghost Song is actually in the same literary genre as real life. That's not a description I hand out lightly. Or disparagingly.
