[ATROPOS_SCOUT_LOG_#01]://“DualSense"
The drizzle of rain rippling through my fingers. Stone hearts pulsating, shocks to my system. A fog unending. This ain’t home but the place where I must be. The ghost of Sisyphus lost in a dark forest where the rivers run red with neon-blood at her feet.
This is not an ordinary planet. Everything wants [to kill] me. The worm-fed wolves and the speckled colossi uncoiling their endless garments of tentacles. Selene gets bashed into her suit by a biological blade slicing through the bullet rainbow. Azure echoes, a scan. Soft waves washing over my palms, producing new images, forming a sense of space built on the past-pulled directions of her previous deaths - rubber-banded triggers and reflexes snatching at the pressure of our fingers, dashes across a yard of grass, concealing its cosmic horrors, gestating new ones, each loot chamber a tomb filled with little dilemmas like a gun or another gun or a malignancy that’s worth the bite it will inflict on your virtual corpse once the creeper’s been fed if only I could survive that long - come through the other side of the mirror not unscathed but changed, finally, freed from the kind of anxious death-drive repetition forces upon you with its binaries of risk and reward. The sepulchral horror of Returnal’s feedback loop isn’t so much the impossibility of our escape as it is the unveiling of desire’s deepest seat; Selene - and by extension the player - are exactly where they’re meant to be, embedded within this unbelievably tight system of dashes and haptics, movement mechanics that thankfully prioritize responsiveness over groundedness complimented by an array of weapons each embodying distinct ways of approaching and eradicating our outer demons in this inner hell - and god does it feel good to burst this Hollowseeker open, watch Ixion fold into a cloud of golden dust; to see polygons devolve by my hand and understand this information in the skin directly then commits the player to kinesthesia as a form of immersion in which Returnal refuses subjugation and offers a direct line of conversation with the text instead - the best rumblescape since Rez’s Trance Vibrator. I’d go one step further even : Atropos as a sexual device. Of parasites latching onto my arm and skin saturated in power-ups. Digital matter that burrows in my brain's DualSense, carries me over this teleporter and away. Pop the bubble bath. Selene crumbles like the feeble being of particles that she is before reappearing somewhere else. Another room, another reverberation, this time I fail miserably at dispatching the heretic Phrike but I’ll soon be here again no doubt, and if not here then perhaps up in this spire that festers into infinity, grinding the score, collecting poppy flowers, attempting to make sense of the frenzy of it all. Bared tendrils at the mere sight of me, so I respond in kind - they tear me to pieces, they send me under.
Hihi, Atropos.
-
[ATROPOS SCOUT LOG_#02] :// “DreamSequence”
“Her name was Echo and she made the mistake of helping Zeus succeed in one of his sexual conquests. Hera found out and punished Echo, making it impossible for her to say anything except the last words spoken to her. Soon after, Echo fell in love with Narcissus whose obsession with himself caused her to pine away until only her voice remained. Another lesser known version of this myth has Pan falling in love with Echo. Echo, however, rejects his amorous offers and Pan, being the god of civility and restraint, tears her to pieces, burying all of her except her voice. Adonta ta mete. [—Adonta ta… = “Her still singing limbs.”]”
- Chapter V, House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
Between every crash, a vision. Dreams in cathode ray-tubes and ocean-memories leaking through [her] with each failed attempt, a corrosive force of time itself, a marriage happening in reverse. Days falling into darkness; back to the beginning. In that particular fold of forest green a house stands - stood - still. Upon entrance, on the left wall just before a flight of stairs resonates with unknown footsteps, there hangs, I remark, the wooden-carved face of a sun left alone long ago. My son. Her daughter. Someone else’s Pandora's box - the soft voyeurism of play as metaphor. If DualSense’s intent was to obfuscate, to render tenuous and tactile the delineation between player and character then the house serves an opposite function - it sings with echoes, granting my poor astronaut the corporeal presence she so desperately craves in order to grasp the dream sequence and tear this body away from me. In her first-person perspective, at last, a new symbolic layer of reality touched in artifacts. Each passage through the house's pristine innards bores new holes in the narrative whilst grounding Selene in a larger picture of Returnal as an object both about her and itself - incapable of escaping its own maze of contradictions. But it's never enough. For me, for her. Even in death the proverbial rug is pulled from under us; to end her life on Earth means the same for Selene as it does on Atropos. We never escaped. And in this realization something shifts in our perception. Biomes of meaning begin to coalesce as crimson wastes become fractured and composed again, a ruin overgrown no longer and instead echoing our knowledge of design, confronting it to that of a decaying specter - except there's no one to race against but ourselves, frolicking in lasered flesh, taking a certain pleasure in charting that tract of scorched earth turned calcified snowmetal, in knowing that the planet glances back at us with every variation of its arcade terminologies. Sometimes on the ground you find a music box. Couple of omens, couple of tunes. Suddenly Returnal shrinks - and then expands. This planet is real, I’m convinced of it and the more Selene remembers, the more she seems to forget. I was lost in a forest once but now, it seems, I am trapped at the bottom.
Smile, Atropos.
-
Further journal entries will be added, in due time.
The drizzle of rain rippling through my fingers. Stone hearts pulsating, shocks to my system. A fog unending. This ain’t home but the place where I must be. The ghost of Sisyphus lost in a dark forest where the rivers run red with neon-blood at her feet.
This is not an ordinary planet. Everything wants [to kill] me. The worm-fed wolves and the speckled colossi uncoiling their endless garments of tentacles. Selene gets bashed into her suit by a biological blade slicing through the bullet rainbow. Azure echoes, a scan. Soft waves washing over my palms, producing new images, forming a sense of space built on the past-pulled directions of her previous deaths - rubber-banded triggers and reflexes snatching at the pressure of our fingers, dashes across a yard of grass, concealing its cosmic horrors, gestating new ones, each loot chamber a tomb filled with little dilemmas like a gun or another gun or a malignancy that’s worth the bite it will inflict on your virtual corpse once the creeper’s been fed if only I could survive that long - come through the other side of the mirror not unscathed but changed, finally, freed from the kind of anxious death-drive repetition forces upon you with its binaries of risk and reward. The sepulchral horror of Returnal’s feedback loop isn’t so much the impossibility of our escape as it is the unveiling of desire’s deepest seat; Selene - and by extension the player - are exactly where they’re meant to be, embedded within this unbelievably tight system of dashes and haptics, movement mechanics that thankfully prioritize responsiveness over groundedness complimented by an array of weapons each embodying distinct ways of approaching and eradicating our outer demons in this inner hell - and god does it feel good to burst this Hollowseeker open, watch Ixion fold into a cloud of golden dust; to see polygons devolve by my hand and understand this information in the skin directly then commits the player to kinesthesia as a form of immersion in which Returnal refuses subjugation and offers a direct line of conversation with the text instead - the best rumblescape since Rez’s Trance Vibrator. I’d go one step further even : Atropos as a sexual device. Of parasites latching onto my arm and skin saturated in power-ups. Digital matter that burrows in my brain's DualSense, carries me over this teleporter and away. Pop the bubble bath. Selene crumbles like the feeble being of particles that she is before reappearing somewhere else. Another room, another reverberation, this time I fail miserably at dispatching the heretic Phrike but I’ll soon be here again no doubt, and if not here then perhaps up in this spire that festers into infinity, grinding the score, collecting poppy flowers, attempting to make sense of the frenzy of it all. Bared tendrils at the mere sight of me, so I respond in kind - they tear me to pieces, they send me under.
Hihi, Atropos.
-
[ATROPOS SCOUT LOG_#02] :// “DreamSequence”
“Her name was Echo and she made the mistake of helping Zeus succeed in one of his sexual conquests. Hera found out and punished Echo, making it impossible for her to say anything except the last words spoken to her. Soon after, Echo fell in love with Narcissus whose obsession with himself caused her to pine away until only her voice remained. Another lesser known version of this myth has Pan falling in love with Echo. Echo, however, rejects his amorous offers and Pan, being the god of civility and restraint, tears her to pieces, burying all of her except her voice. Adonta ta mete. [—Adonta ta… = “Her still singing limbs.”]”
- Chapter V, House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
Between every crash, a vision. Dreams in cathode ray-tubes and ocean-memories leaking through [her] with each failed attempt, a corrosive force of time itself, a marriage happening in reverse. Days falling into darkness; back to the beginning. In that particular fold of forest green a house stands - stood - still. Upon entrance, on the left wall just before a flight of stairs resonates with unknown footsteps, there hangs, I remark, the wooden-carved face of a sun left alone long ago. My son. Her daughter. Someone else’s Pandora's box - the soft voyeurism of play as metaphor. If DualSense’s intent was to obfuscate, to render tenuous and tactile the delineation between player and character then the house serves an opposite function - it sings with echoes, granting my poor astronaut the corporeal presence she so desperately craves in order to grasp the dream sequence and tear this body away from me. In her first-person perspective, at last, a new symbolic layer of reality touched in artifacts. Each passage through the house's pristine innards bores new holes in the narrative whilst grounding Selene in a larger picture of Returnal as an object both about her and itself - incapable of escaping its own maze of contradictions. But it's never enough. For me, for her. Even in death the proverbial rug is pulled from under us; to end her life on Earth means the same for Selene as it does on Atropos. We never escaped. And in this realization something shifts in our perception. Biomes of meaning begin to coalesce as crimson wastes become fractured and composed again, a ruin overgrown no longer and instead echoing our knowledge of design, confronting it to that of a decaying specter - except there's no one to race against but ourselves, frolicking in lasered flesh, taking a certain pleasure in charting that tract of scorched earth turned calcified snowmetal, in knowing that the planet glances back at us with every variation of its arcade terminologies. Sometimes on the ground you find a music box. Couple of omens, couple of tunes. Suddenly Returnal shrinks - and then expands. This planet is real, I’m convinced of it and the more Selene remembers, the more she seems to forget. I was lost in a forest once but now, it seems, I am trapped at the bottom.
Smile, Atropos.
-
Further journal entries will be added, in due time.
HunterMask
29 days ago