This review contains spoilers
After 2 years of having the files for PAGAN: Autogeny sit undisturbed on my PC in a folder marked "games I need to try" that had nothing else in it, I finally decided to go back and play the entire Pagan trilogy. After playing through the two games that precede Autogeny, I'm a little unsure how I feel about Autogeny overall; I don't want to give off the wrong impression here, because I really, really enjoyed it. At the same time, though, I finished the game wanting more. Or less. One of those two. I'm still not sure which.
I think what makes me feel so conflicted about Autogeny is how much more ambitious and “big” it feels next to Technopolis and Emporium. Those games were mystifying and disturbing, presenting you with these deeply "wrong" worlds to try and make sense of. Technopolis is quiet and eerie, filled with this looming sense of sadness, and Emporium by contrast feels loud and overwhelming. Still, Emporium is even more isolating, the bizarre floating rock NPCs that populated Technopolis replaced by faceless mannequins surrounded by roaring static and fire; everything's loud, fuzzy, drenched in feedback and reverb. Both games are off-putting and unsettling in a really beautiful way. Collecting everything you need to crack the mystery and escape is engaging, but that primarily serves as a vehicle for you to soak in the setting and the ambiance it conveys. At the risk of sounding like I only care about the 𝕧𝕚𝕓𝕖𝕤 of these first two games, they're incredible mood pieces.
Autogeny feels a lot like this at first, but right off the bat it’s made clear that it’s going to have a way grander scope than the games that came before it. There’s a small central hub, and from there you come across branching path after branching path, falling into these little microworlds that each have their own sub-areas to explore and secrets to uncover. There’s clunky combat, a shitton of rudimentary RPG equipment to collect and wear, and you start to uncover clues to what your ultimate goal is. Soon, it becomes a quest to find all the different items you need to solve its central puzzle, and as I hopped from digital space to digital space, I found the abstraction between typical MMO environments and dreamlike distortions of real places (dead malls, small rural towns) disconcerting and compelling. You get that feeling with some of the items too- the melee weapons are what you’d expect from the ostensible setting of a dead fantasy MMO, a mythical sword and a spear/shield, but there’s a sharp divide with the ranged weapons, which are just guns. Plain, unenchanted modern firearms, a pistol and shotgun.
This split between drab, sinister real-world locales and more vivid, comfortable fantasy themes added a layer of abstraction that struck a chord with me. The game seems to be pretty blatantly about what it feels like to be transgender in a digital space- having the ability to create an identity divorced from the constraints you’re bound to in waking life. You pick up spinning 3D models of prescription pills to level up your estrogen stat. You collect floating limbs and graft them onto a statue in a process the game calls “body forging”, which quickly reveals itself to be your central objective. In a few of the more realistic locales, you can collect little dollars, “labour vouchers,” that do absolutely nothing and only take up precious inventory space. They can’t help you build The Body- that’s something you have to do in a more abstract way. It’s tragic, and I kind of couldn’t help but see myself in it. As a trans person whose own prospects of a full transition are somewhat hampered by social, financial and familial pressures, the idea of this stark split between a mysterious fantasy world where you can be the person you want to be and meatspace hit home. I know it’s embarrassing to talk about, but I think it’s something a lot of people have felt- when you struggle with gender dysphoria (or any manner of body dysmorphia), the creation of a digital avatar can be a powerful, liberating form of escapism, and a tool for self-expression when you otherwise don’t have the luxury of doing that in the real world, at your job, when you’re with your loved ones.
So what ultimately left me feeling kind of bummed by the end of Autogeny is that, unless you’re going for the extremely archaic secret ending, the solutions to those grand mysteries that sucked me in come a little too easily. An hour or two in you’ll have explored most of the world, put together the body, and realized that you need to collect all the secret cards and level up your skills to unlock the main ending and the armory. The problem is that by this point, you’ve already discovered most of the game’s tricks and surprises- all that’s left to do now is figure out how to kill this one boss you’re having trouble with, or find what item you have to interact with now that you have all the cards- each time you come across a new roadblock, the mystery comes just a little too easy. You go back through the same locales again and again, collect all the parts of the statue a few times until you realize what you have to do to Free the Martyr, and then it’s done.
I think what makes me feel so conflicted about Autogeny is how much more ambitious and “big” it feels next to Technopolis and Emporium. Those games were mystifying and disturbing, presenting you with these deeply "wrong" worlds to try and make sense of. Technopolis is quiet and eerie, filled with this looming sense of sadness, and Emporium by contrast feels loud and overwhelming. Still, Emporium is even more isolating, the bizarre floating rock NPCs that populated Technopolis replaced by faceless mannequins surrounded by roaring static and fire; everything's loud, fuzzy, drenched in feedback and reverb. Both games are off-putting and unsettling in a really beautiful way. Collecting everything you need to crack the mystery and escape is engaging, but that primarily serves as a vehicle for you to soak in the setting and the ambiance it conveys. At the risk of sounding like I only care about the 𝕧𝕚𝕓𝕖𝕤 of these first two games, they're incredible mood pieces.
Autogeny feels a lot like this at first, but right off the bat it’s made clear that it’s going to have a way grander scope than the games that came before it. There’s a small central hub, and from there you come across branching path after branching path, falling into these little microworlds that each have their own sub-areas to explore and secrets to uncover. There’s clunky combat, a shitton of rudimentary RPG equipment to collect and wear, and you start to uncover clues to what your ultimate goal is. Soon, it becomes a quest to find all the different items you need to solve its central puzzle, and as I hopped from digital space to digital space, I found the abstraction between typical MMO environments and dreamlike distortions of real places (dead malls, small rural towns) disconcerting and compelling. You get that feeling with some of the items too- the melee weapons are what you’d expect from the ostensible setting of a dead fantasy MMO, a mythical sword and a spear/shield, but there’s a sharp divide with the ranged weapons, which are just guns. Plain, unenchanted modern firearms, a pistol and shotgun.
This split between drab, sinister real-world locales and more vivid, comfortable fantasy themes added a layer of abstraction that struck a chord with me. The game seems to be pretty blatantly about what it feels like to be transgender in a digital space- having the ability to create an identity divorced from the constraints you’re bound to in waking life. You pick up spinning 3D models of prescription pills to level up your estrogen stat. You collect floating limbs and graft them onto a statue in a process the game calls “body forging”, which quickly reveals itself to be your central objective. In a few of the more realistic locales, you can collect little dollars, “labour vouchers,” that do absolutely nothing and only take up precious inventory space. They can’t help you build The Body- that’s something you have to do in a more abstract way. It’s tragic, and I kind of couldn’t help but see myself in it. As a trans person whose own prospects of a full transition are somewhat hampered by social, financial and familial pressures, the idea of this stark split between a mysterious fantasy world where you can be the person you want to be and meatspace hit home. I know it’s embarrassing to talk about, but I think it’s something a lot of people have felt- when you struggle with gender dysphoria (or any manner of body dysmorphia), the creation of a digital avatar can be a powerful, liberating form of escapism, and a tool for self-expression when you otherwise don’t have the luxury of doing that in the real world, at your job, when you’re with your loved ones.
So what ultimately left me feeling kind of bummed by the end of Autogeny is that, unless you’re going for the extremely archaic secret ending, the solutions to those grand mysteries that sucked me in come a little too easily. An hour or two in you’ll have explored most of the world, put together the body, and realized that you need to collect all the secret cards and level up your skills to unlock the main ending and the armory. The problem is that by this point, you’ve already discovered most of the game’s tricks and surprises- all that’s left to do now is figure out how to kill this one boss you’re having trouble with, or find what item you have to interact with now that you have all the cards- each time you come across a new roadblock, the mystery comes just a little too easy. You go back through the same locales again and again, collect all the parts of the statue a few times until you realize what you have to do to Free the Martyr, and then it’s done.