E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy was developed by Paris based Streum On Studio, built on Valve’s Source engine. Its cyberpunk style universe is based on a homebrewed private and unreleased table-top role-playing game called “A.V.A” developed by Streum On Studio in 1998. The game is also a spiritual successor to the Half Life mod “Syndicate Black Ops” released on Steam in 2011.
E.Y.E is a peculiar game, as it is a cult classic in the RPG fans circles and yet it is a game that is hard to recommend to people, as I like to explain it as “you either get it or you don’t”. Why is that? Because the game is a janky mess filled with different systems and the most confusing tutorials ever. But that’s gameplay, what about the plot and lore of the game? It is like a strange fever dream that makes no sense, but surprisingly it does make sense. Somewhat.
The game follows the story of an agent of the E.Y.E under command of the Secreta Secretorum, a secret society type organization formed long before humans colonized space. E.Y.E agents are psionic trained, cybernetic enhanced, genetically modified, demon-fighting warrior monks.
The purpose of the Secreta Secretorum and its E.Y.E soldiers is to fight against the “Meta-Streumonic Force”, a mystical alien army of metaphysical origins, supposedly the psychic backlash of the universe over countless environments and life forms destroyed by colonization efforts, who rampages across space.
During this chaos, the Secreta Secretorum is attempting to seize control of the Galactic Federation, the current human government across colonized space, made of various governments and mega corporations, weakened by the Meta-Strumonic forces.
Among all that there is also inner turmoil in the Secreta. E.Y.E is composed of 2 factions: The Jian Shang Di and the Culter Dei (with the player belonging to the Culter Dei). Once allies, they are now in a secret, unofficial civil war.
Fairly straight forward right until now right?
“Where am I? This weird dream again, deja vu!” You start the game in a strange place surrounded by strange black monoliths, with a large portal gate in front of you. As you approach the gate there is a corpse of an armored man with a silver helm depicting a face, “I true thay I killed my mentor.. And yet I am not his murderer” your character proclaims, as he steps into the portal and everything goes white.
You wake up in a cave, in front of you bodies lay dead, as you look around your commander, Rimanah, contacts you to tell you the mission is botched and to get the hell out of there.
You pick up a pistol from one of the corpses and move forward through the cave, dispatching a signal meta-streumonic munduco, and reaching an elevator to the surface.
At the top of the elevator you meet captain Dutch, who tells you the federation are on to whatever it was you were tasked for in that cave and you need to get to an agent who will extract you, while Dutch stays to retrieve some evidence left in the cave.
You stock up on gear from the mobile armory brought with captain Dutch and you make your way down the slope towards the sewers. On the way there you encounter and neutralize a small federation unit, and enter the sewers to find and kill a few more looters hiding there. After going through the sewers you hack through a locked door and meet the agent sent to find you, Shu, who explains he is here to make a distraction for you to escape quietly, and thus ends your first mission.
As you arrive at the headquarters of E.Y.E, you are greeted by your mentor, the man you saw dead in the strange dream, who asks you what happened as he did not know you were out on a mission. You tell about your recent memory loss, and he remarks about the cold war between the Culter Dei and Jian Shang Di, saying some of his actions to ease tensions between the factions begin to bear fruit, but if the Secreta wants to end the feud they might need to replace Commander Rimmanah. He then tells you to talk to a scrab unit, as it looked for you to relay you some messages.
When you speak with the scarb it plays you a recording of yourself, one you recorded before the mission where you lost your memory.
“Hello, if you are reading this message, it means that our last mission was unsuccessful. Something must have happened to us. Our memories must have been altered or destroyed, as we have foreseen. I don’t know what we have discovered during the mission, but we won’t know it anymore. I’m going to refresh your memory so you won’t make any mistakes. We cannot allow it. Several months ago Rimanah chose you to take part in his special unit. As you remember, Culters and Jians, brothers in the past, are in the middle of an unofficial secret struggle. This struggle has calmed down, as our mutual fight against the federation has intensified, the Secreta, and therefore E.Y.E, has decided to take the ultimate step towards stealing ultimate power from our enemy. The special task force was created with a single goal: destabilize and destroy the Jians. Rimanah has high expectations of you for this task. They sent us on a mission into the cave in order to find and eliminate an influential Jian mentor. We are going to continue working towards this goal while maintaining the illusion of subservience. We will continue our original duties to mask our activities against the Jians. Serve our commander the best you can and mistrust your mentor.”
After listening to the message you left for your self, you head out to report to commander Rimanah. He explains how your failure at the mission has made so there is a bit of change in plans while showing some vague concern on your current condition, and instructs you to head to archives of the temple to catch up on recent news. After you finish at the archives Rimanah summons you again for a new mission in the megalopolis of New Eden. A mole in the organization has stolen a cyberbrain a high ranking Secreta official and plans on selling it to the federation. He wants you to head to New Eden and eliminate the mole and take back the cyberbrain before he sells it. He also wants you to keep an eye on your mentor, as he knows he will be interested in that brain, and might be able to use this opportunity to remove him. And with that you set off to New Eden.
Arriving you land on a helipad in a docks area below the city. An agent named Cassius meets you and tells you the city is under lockdown because of looters attacking, and the only way to get there is through an elevator. You have a choice of actions to take to get access to the elevator, and upon gaining access you go up to the city proper.
Reaching the city you start in a wet room with your mentor, he explains the exchange of the cyberbrain between the mole and the federation is already taking place and urges you to move quick and silently to not make waves.
You make way through the city block fighting the occasional federation troops along the way to the warehouse. Sneaking past the security, you take out the mole and his federation partners and retrieve the cyberbrain. On the way back to your mentor you find a side alley with a makeshift bloodied altar and a strange door with a lever. When pulled, the door opens to reveal a small room with a peaceful manduco inside. Speaking to the manduco, he speaks of strange cycles of guilt and artifacts:
“I am stuck in the cycles of my guilt… If I had gathered the three artifacts, I wouldn't be here. I would have returned to where it all began, where you began, to finally end…”
Not making much sense you can dispose of the manduco or just leave and return to your mentor.
When returning with the brain, he asks you to place it on the analyzer, and connects to it to see its contents, despite your wishes not to. The information in the brain reveals there is an informant nearby related to the looters, and you are tasked by your mentor to meet them, while he stays to buy you time from your superiors who await you to return to base. In a seedy looter bar you speak with Fonzi the bartender, and after greasing his wallet with 500 brouzof he gives you a location of an apartment complex where he hid a briefcase that would intrigue us. Inside the complex you dispatch some loitering looters and find in one of the rooms the briefcase, sending information of its contents to your mentor. After he evaluates the information he tells you it contains some coordinates of a strange alpha prototype terminal, but with the Secreta breathing down his neck on his activities on New Eden he says it is time to head back so he could explain his actions and calm them down.
Returning to the temple HQ, you report to Rimanah that your mentor scanned the brain which led to a briefcase, with its contents unknown to you. He then sends you on another mission to a looter’s hideout. Officially you are there to get info on them, unofficially you are there to retrieve secret documents they stole from a Jian ship during a raid they did.
You arrive at the looter’s hideout, ruins of a giant abandoned shopping mall, with a Jian agent explaining you are there as a E.Y.E defector with a double agent vouching for you to join them.
You do some menial tasks, some sabotage and can even get a looter with a guilty conscience to kill himself if you want. After that you gain access to the leader’s chamber, where you dispose of him and his looters and gain the intel you came for.
After returning to the temple Rimanah tells you the documents you retrieved reveal that the Jians are actually working with some important bandit chief, and that bandit knows your mentor and acts as a sort of middleman between them, although for what purpose he cannot tell. He sent a task force there to gather intel, and your job is to sneak in there disguised as a Jian to eliminate the bandit chief and find out any information he has on the Jians. You are also tasked with destroying a part of megalopolis with extremely powerful explosives to frame the Jians for a terror attack. You go there, deal with the target, dispose of a few other high profile targets to cover your tracks, and plant the explosive to destroy the city block to frame the Jians.
After the mission in the megalopolis you report to Rimanah who seems agitated. He tells you data shows the jians are keeping an eye on the Vindico mega corporation, a part of the consortium of mega corporations, who are secretly allies of the Secreta for a long time. He tells you that the corporation must have found something during their terra-forming maintenance project on mars, and sent it to a factory of theirs on Sulaco for research. We don’t know anything about this and that’s a problem, so Rimanah sends you to the factory to gather whatever secrets they hide there.
You arrive with the team after a 7 day travel time, with Dutch, the guy from the cave mission, briefing you on the mission: You are on the planet Suleco, we’ve lost contact with the Vindico factory 5 days ago and a task force sent by Rimanah arrived to 2 days before us but all contact was lost with them, believing the federation is involved. He also says the jians are also on alert and figured out Rimanah is involved with Vindico behind the Secreta’s back.
As far as Dutch is concerned, if there are any federation forces in the factory we must eliminate them and destroy any evidence they have against Vindico. Our main objectives are to retrieve info on what they found on mars, discover the fate of the team that was lost two days ago and detonate the factory with an explosive charge.
As we enter the factory sneaking through the automated turret system we read reports from the workers of the factory on a terminal learning a few things:
Because of fierce storms on the surface the Sulaco factory has dug deep underground to expend on the facility including building a nuclear reactor to power the factory. Recently strange quakes coming from underground began to be detected with them intensifying in strength every time. After an incident in the underground chambers they were sealed off with no explanation and despite being told everything is under control some of the engineers who worked down there have shown signs of strange psychological syndromes and federal soldiers arriving to investigate the underground construction, leading to gun fire and unknown creatures bursting from underground killing everyone.
As you continue exploring the suspiciously quiet factory to deal with the security system, you find a scarb bot left by the team that went missing, but it provides no information on their fate. After hacking the defense system to not be hostile to you, Dutch calls you back to the entrance to discuss how to move forward.
With the reports you found only raise more questions than answers, Dutch decides that you and him are going to the central computer to gather more info. As transmissions are jammed, he sends you to align the signal parabola to connect the temple hackers into the factory. As you make way through the silent dining hall to the other side of the sector you find the signal terminal, which requires you to go down the maintenance tunnels beneath to reconnect the power supply. Down there you find the power supply terminal and divert power to the signal systems.
As you choose to explore the tunnels farther you come across a room that drains your stamina with three synicles in it.
Synicles are metastreumonic-force creatures who resemble human women wearing white robes and hoods covering their eyes who confuse their victims.
The first tells a story of a wolf spirit sent into the universe with an unknown mission, he would plunge creatures into his spirit trapping them in a never ending dream to combat its loneliness. Along the way it came upon a man who must not be named, who sought something he did not know why, and the spirit and man battled with the man using great powers of hypnosis until one remained, not knowing if one consumed the other. Whatever it is that was left though, finally understood what it is seeking.
The second one tells you a tale of a man who must not be named searched for an artifact, and after finding it they could not figure out how to use it until one day they vanished and now knew how it worked. The cynicle then gives several interpretations:
She then says our predecessor was only concerned with the existence of the artifact, to which she did not know what to answer. She then theorizes about if all these points are subjective or none of them, and finishes by saying the one who seeks control always fails.
The third tells a tale of a man from a very long time ago, who dedicated his life to the destruction of his own being. Early on he sought to find the meaning behind all things, although he didn’t really know what he was searching for. Among the many talents he developed he developed a mass hypnosis technique to pacify his homeworld, that however created more than just hallucinations. His victims were damaged, as if trapped inside their own minds. Then an unknown event forced him to continue his journey to amass more power. He then met a strange creature called the spirit wolf. The battle between them resulted in a being far more powerful than either of them, but it did not understand the fusion between them. Did one consume the other in combat, or did they fuse into something else?
Not understanding any of this, you head back to set the signal parabola and return to Dutch.
With the signal fixed, Dutch tries to contact Rimanah and Vindico but they are jamming the comms between us and Rimanah, so Dutch says it’s time to get out of there when suddenly you are attacked by waves of meta-streumonic forces. After you and Dutch fight through drones of the creatures, he tells you that during the fight he was communicating with Rimanah who told him that what Vindico found on mars revealed something about this place, which led to them digging beneath the factory. Rimanah knew about the artifact, but the info you retrieved in the last mission led him to the chamber Vindico were looking for. With communications jammed, you go back in the factory to install jammers to disrupt the Vindico systems, all the while the meta-streumonic forces keep growing larger. After that you get your last order to install a bomb to turn the whole place to ash.
As you head down the elevator to the lowest chambers in the factory you feel quakes coming from below, and upon reaching the bottom you meet an agent named Uriel from the missing team. Uriel is raving on about the destruction of nature and wildlife for centuries ever since the industrial revolution. Forward on you encounter the rest of the missing team, who seem to also gone mad and work with the meta-streumonic forces and attack you on site. After exterminating them and setting the explosive you make your way up again and regroup with Dutch, who immediately sends you to mars.
Arriving on mars you meet with Secreta forces led by Dutch, who informs you the Federation also found out about the artifact and sent massive forces to mars and moved it underground. As you move with the forces to the base up ahead in the canyons you get attacked by a federation helicopter killing Dutch and the rest of the agents, leaving you the only one to reach the makeshift base and take command of the operations.
With intel from the temple, you are told the artifact was taken to an ancient crypt built by some extinct race underground here on mars, and the federation took over and made base in the Vindico infrastructure.
As you make your way through the red desert canyons of mars you fight through many units of federation shocktroops, deadly helicopters and even encounter a deus ex machina, the biggest and most dangerous creature the meta-streumonic can throw at you.
As you fight through them all you find a dig site of some ancient ruins leading deep underground.
Inside you find a giant structure filled with bones and meta-streumonic carnophages, and in the main chamber sits a giant skeleton on a giant throne. The giant corpse speaks to you telepathically, identifying himself as the eternal king, and you are in the tomb of his folk.
Asking him about the place he tells you people dressed the same as you arrive not long ago with a great purpose to take “the unique”, the artifact you are looking for. Then other humans came later with the same goal, saying he doesn’t care as long as they don’t touch his tombs.
He then cuts the conversation short, saying you can find more answers on the other side of the Portal of Truth, and says the gate will open if you offer him human sacrifices.
After killing how many humans the eternal king demands, you return to him and he says the gate is now open. As you enter the portal you appear in some deep chamber where your mentor stands with some jians.
Questioning him over the artifact he says it is not there, and have been there for a while now, wondering if it ever even was there. He claims he doesn’t know much and even wonders if the whole veil of secrecy over the artifact means it ever existed. With nothing more to offer, you tell him you were ordered to eliminate him, and so you fight him and the jians. Exterminating them as ordered, your mission on mars is over and you return to the temple HQ.
Returning to Rimanah he congratulates you on killing your mentor, saying you should not feel bad over his death. He then updates you that the artifact vanished, and your old friend and jian, Huan, escaped from the temple HQ. He sends you to the main Jian temple where Huan and the artifact presumably are, to eliminate the Jians once and for all.
Arriving with a strike team at the Jian temple, you blast through the gate and storm through the giant temple, killing every jian soldier you come across. Deep in the temple after a storm of steel and bullets you reach Huan in the main chamber of the Jian temple, where you kill him and the last of the jians in the temple.
As you head back Rimanah contacts you saying:
“You served me well, but you are a part of me I can't let be anymore!”
As you are ambushed by two helicopters hunting you. After destroying them three E.Y.E soldiers sent by the Secreta to kill Rimanah and his traitors, laughing as you were used as a puppet by him for eliminating your mentor and Huan. They claim your mind was altered by Rimanah after the mission in the cave to turn you against both your mentor and Huan. Now that the truth is revealed, you are ordered by the High Council of the Secreta to infiltrate the temple and eliminate Rimanah, putting his plans with the artifact to a stop.
Upon entering the temple HQ, you meet a lone carnophage. The carnophage is surprised you can see it, as it claims to be invisible. He claims to be a spirit and waited for you, and he bestows upon you the Hypnotic Gate, one of the three foundations of the sacred artifact, by hypnotizing you and joking about the absurdity of it. Questioning why it is giving you such powers, he muses that maybe it’s because you started noticing the absurdness of it all, saying it is time to introspect on recent events in your life. He calls you to go kill Rimanah together, and beware the four divine pillars of the temple.
Storming the temple you must defeat Rimanah’s four divine pillars, powerful generals guarding the temple. After eliminating the four pillars, you make way into a hidden chamber deep in the temple to finally face Rimanah and finish this once and far all.
Going through a cave, under the water there is a hidden passage leading to a hidden chamber with an altar with Rimanah waiting for you inside. After killing Rimanah, you can leave the temple (or read the scroll with the games credits in it) and now it is finally over.
After the fight you are in the temple again, now everything back to normal. You head to Rimanah’s office, which is now empty. You speak with the man standing outside the office, asking him where the commander is. To your surprise he doesn’t understand what you are talking about, saying the office was empty for years now and the only one who goes there is you to talk with yourself. Asking about your mentor he says he died before you went into the cave, killed by the rebels he was fighting.
Confused by all this, you head to the archives to speak with the scribe in charge, he asks if you came from the office, to which he replies that he was sure it was locked. Not sure what to make of everything, you speak with another agent named Hyphialtes who asks for your advice. Lately he has dreams of being in a strange place, with a strange man telling him things he doesn’t understand. Telling him you had similar dreams, he is about tell you what the strange man said to him only to be cut off by a transmission he has to answer. Not knowing what is real and what not, you head to where the hidden chamber that you fought Rimanah in to check on the artifact.
Surprisingly the cave to the chamber is open, and inside stands a tall bright portal and as you step through it you awake in the strange dream again, only now it is different.
The dreamscape is the same as every time you start the game, but this time your mentor is not dead, and Rimanah is also there, with a mysterious strange between them.
Speaking to the mentor he says:
“Distrust what you believe… ask yourself who you are!”
Speaking to Rimanah he says:
“Are you lost? Or have you already been lost since the very beginning?”
And speaking to the mysterious stranger he says:
“Don’t you think that right here right now could be the exact place and exact time of the supreme perception? Perhaps it is time to accept truth itself? Talk silently, and listen to the void.
Your old friends tell very different tales… No one can tell who is right or wrong, who is mistaken, or if any of them really know the truth.
Were you dreaming? Are you imagining this? Do you think there is some reality, some truth to this place? Have you followed the path well? Were you attentive during your journey?
Sometimes, a rebirth, a new beginning can allow you the insights necessary to approach the ultimate goal! But, sometimes, the snake bites its own tail, coming full circle, creating a sort of spiral…”
And with nothing left to say, you go on through the portal, and wake up in a cave.
Beginning the cycle anew.
Whew. That was long I know, and trust me I tried to skim through it and leave only the important bits. Now, that is one of three different endings, and luckily every play through is mostly the same up until the Noctis Labyrinth (mars) stage so we got most of the game’s story out of the way.
So what was all of that confusing mess? Everything you went through from waking up in the cave to facing Rimanah was a fever dream your character was having from whatever happened in that cave. What really happened is that you went on a mission in that cave, and suffered some type of psychological damage that caused you memory loss and hallucinations. It seems as though you went through some traumatic events prior to the mission in the cave, leading you to feel guilt over the deaths of your mentor and friend Dutch, making you project them in these delirious fever dreams, but what about Rimanah? As the other said, there was no commander, then who is he? That is answered after unlocking all three endings.
Beginning a second playthrough, we start again in the cave just the same, and go through all the same levels in the exact order while keeping all character progression (levels, weapons, etc.) and the hypnotic gate the carnophage bestowed on us, providing a powerful spell which traps any foe in an endless dream rendering them harmless.
We play through the stages again until we reach the Noctis labyrinth stage.
Just like in the Rimanah ending, we enter the underground temple with the eternal king and perform the sacrifice he asks for to open the portal to the chamber to where your mentor waits.
Instead of telling him you are there to kill him, speak to him instead and he asks you to think for yourself, reject the poison Rimanah used on your mind and join him against Rimanah.
We agree to join him, and the mission ends with no bloodshed.
We arrive at a destroyed colony with our mentor, in search of a retired Secreta mentor who deserted nearly 50 years ago, a man named Akmal, who knows the temple like no other and can help you sneak in to take on Rimanah. As Akmal hates our mentor, he sends you alone as he heads to the temple to try to find a way in.
The ruined colony is now filled with looters, vagrants, trash and toxic sludge. Speaking to a crazy man high on flammable gas, he needs help cutting the gas supply blocking our way to Akmal so we give him a hand and find the old Secreta agent.
Greeting Akmal, he asks if your mentor came as well. When told no, he is a little disappointed but remarks he is still angry at his former disciple. Asking him on how to infiltrate the temple HQ, he professes he doesn’t feel if you are even aware of what you want to do, but after some convincing he gives you the information, and you head out to the temple to meet your mentor.
Arriving to the temple HQ, your mentor is already inside and when speaking to him he suddenly acts aggressive and attacks you. After killing him you speak to your mentor’s scrabsynth, who relays a post mortem message left to you:
“I guess if you have this message it is because I'm dead, and by your hands in a certain way. You would have probably found me changed, and you are probably wondering why I attacked you. I simply did it because neither of us alone have the power to defeat Rimanah. By slaying me, you must have felt something change in you. Know that when I died, a part of my power have been transferred into you, my friend. It is what we can call my heritage. Don’t blame me, disciple! I didn’t really have a choice, because I couldn’t come to fight Rimanah with you. When I managed to break on the temple, Rimanah sensed it and met me. We talked for a time, we then battled each other. I couldn’t stand, and I had to flee, badly wounded. I waited here, hidden, for your arrival. I wanted you to eliminate me, so that you could absorb my power, but also wash away my sins and that I could finally pay for my mistakes! You must now erase my biggest, most shameful error! Rimanah! You have now gained almost all of the power you had before your accident in the cave; you are now nearly the equal of Rimanah! I know you will be victorious, but there will be no real winner from this battle. What you think you won in reality, will be a bitter defeat. However, there is no longer any other choice.”
And with that you unlocked the Triangular Gate, the strongest spell in the game, and just as before you move on to kill the four divine pillars and again defeat Rimanah (much easier now as the Triangular Gate one shots him).
After that it all plays out the same: nothing was real, you enter the portal in the artifact chamber and have the same conversation again.
Like a snake eating its own tail the cycle begins again.
For a third time we play throughout the same, up until we reach mars. This time around we will do a different thing than before.
Instead of heading to the ruins, we will head to the other end of the canyons, to the now federation occupied Vindico compound. While fighting federation forces there, we will hack a door to one of the buildings, and inside meet a federation soldier not hostile.
He greets you and says he was expecting you, asking what he means he implies that you are known as somewhat of a renegade and still confused by his intentions he tells you his superiors took notice of him and are interested in acquiring his services. He offers riches beyond your wildest dreams, an immediate promotion to a special squad leader and a pardon for past transgressions against the Federation, in exchange of you wiping out the Secreta. With a mild tone we agree to his offer, and depart toward the federation base orbiting the third moon.
You meet with the team in charge of taking on the Secreta, and they explain the plan to you: As you know the Culter Dei temple, you are to infiltrate it and take out the Culter Dei commander, while Federation forces will engage in a large fight against the Secreta as a diversion to pull forces away from the temple. To enter the temple you will need to gain codes of access from the Secreta higher ups, to do so you and another turn coat from the Secreta, Cyrus, will convince the higher ups of an imminent Federation attack to confuse and ambush them.
Cyrus explains he set up a meeting with Secreta Council representatives, where you need to convince them of a Federation attack, while he hacks their systems for the temple codes and implant false info on the Federation attack.
At the meeting place, while Cyrus hacks the systems, as you lie to them (or kill them all) and return to Cyrus, he gives you the codes and the extraction point to head to the temple, as he joins the forces that attack the Secreta Council.
At the exit to the extraction point, you meet a strange looter named Balthzar. Balthazar tells you he very much enjoyed the journey you went through, saying you progressed a lot since the cave. Amusing this conversation, you listen on as he tells you he’s been watching for a while and quite pleased with your success on mars, saying you let yourself go with how you never noticed him once. He tells you because you are so nice, he will give you something he found for you, one of the artifact's three fundamentals, the Substitution Gate.
After feeling a surge of power inside you, you speak to him again, but he is confused as to where he is and who you are, so you leave him there and head to the temple.
Again you enter the temple, fight through to Rimanah and kill him. After that you yet again awake to find out it was all a fever dream, enter the portal, speak to the mysterious stranger and begin the cycle anew.
After achieving the three different endings, you begin the cycle again, but this time you hold the three fundamental gates of the artifact: Hypnotic, Triangular and Substitution. Although the cycle begins again, this time there is a difference.
After unlocking the third ending and beginning a new cycle, you again wake up in the cave, but this time there is something different here. The stage starts the same, but to the right you see a portal open in the wall. You can continue to play the stage as normal, but to reach the true ending we enter the portal. You appear in a strange realm surrounded by walls of rusted metal and grated floors with an endless abyss below you. You can feel the ground shake from the stomping of patrolling kraaks, hulking humanoid monsters carrying a giant hammer in each hand.
Navigating through this rusting maze you will eventually find a large area with strange obelisks growing out of trees and a lone cynicle named Circe.
“You have finally decided to come back to see me.”
You as if we knew each other. Who are you?
“I see that your guilt still prevents you from opening your eyes. Somewhere deep inside you, you know who I am and who you are. You are a prisoner of your own cycles; lost between two universes, on the limit, and this labyrinth is the ultimate frontier.”
Prisoner of my cycles? What do you mean by that? What cycles?
“The answers are deep inside your being.”
The only cycles similar to this that I know are those of the syndrome of wandering, induced by necrocybermancy.
“You are tiresome. It’s the same every time.”
[silence]
“You now have two choices; the first to continue the cycles, with the hope you’ll eventually wake up. The other is to pass through the ultimate frontier, in order to maybe find some rest or horror.”
I choose to pass through the frontier.
“Good. Do not destroy the seal when you’ll get there. I now hope I’ll never see you again, oh my lost… love…”
You are then teleported to a strange island floating in the void, with nothing else in sight. Walking around there is nothing of interest there, other than the seal Circe spoke of, the Ouroboros, the serpent eating its tail in a perfect cycle.
You have now truly finished the game, escaping your cycles of guilt finding eternal rest in this isolating void left to contemplate your sins for ever. Or break the seal of the ouroboros and plunge back into the cycles, repeating those guilty memories again and again.
Congrats! Now you are allowed to quit the game and never return. After all of that wild ride what happened and what does any of that mean? Good question, it isn’t explained properly so I’ll try my best.
As I explained before, your character was sent to a mission in a cave where you suffered some sort of psychological damage and memory loss, making you hallucinate the game’s events in your delirious mind replaying past trauma of people related to you. But, there is more under this than it first leads you to believe. After running through the cycles and acquiring the three gates something changed in the cave, but what was in the cave in the first place?
You are told by Rimanah at the beginning the purpose of the mission in the cave was related to a Jian master but nothing more. What happened there was that you were sent to retrieve the artifact from the cave, which was in possession of the jians, but trying to control it without the three fundamentals (the gate spells) you experienced a psychic backlash, leading to being trapped in a dream repeating itself over and over again. Throughout the game there are hints thrown at you: The maduco at New Eden who straight up tells you about being trapped in the cycles, and trio cynicles in the factory sharing some esoteric stories about self reflection and some other more subtle clues.
What I haven’t remarked earlier is when in the factory fighting with Dutch against the meta-streumonic forces, if you don’t protect him he can die there. Now if he dies the mission continues all the same, but that’s one of the first “cracks in the simulation” so to speak. If Dutch dies in the factory, when you arrive on mars he meets you there all the same, despite you saw him dying in front of you.
Another thing I haven’t mentioned is what happens if you die in game. When you die in combat, or overdosing on a medkit, or casting a spell with low psyche or whatever other reason, you are revived on the spot using a resurrector. You have 10 of those but when you run out and completely die, you don’t get a game over. What happens when you die for real is that you return to the strange dream, where the mysterious stranger you talk to at after reaching an ending is there, saying what just happened was just a glimpse to a parallel universe where you did not complete your mission, and if you go through the portal you respawn at the same stage you died in, to continue your cycles.
Knowing all of this, there is still one thing not explained, who is Rimanah and why after killing him no one knows who he is? Who is Circe and what did she want the character to remember?
Allegory of the cave (also referred as “Plato’s cave”) is an allegory presented by Greek philosopher Plato.
In the allegory, Plato describes people who have spent their entire lives chained by their necks and ankles in front of an inner wall with a view of the empty outer wall of the cave. They observe the shadows projected onto the outer wall by objects carried behind the inner wall by people who are invisible to the chained "prisoners" and who walk along the inner wall with a fire behind them, creating the shadows on the inner wall in front of the prisoners. The "sign bearers" pronounce the names of the objects, the sounds of which are reflected near the shadows and are understood by the prisoners as if they were coming from the shadows themselves.
Only the shadows and sounds are the prisoners' reality, which are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent distorted and blurred copies of reality we can perceive through our senses, while the objects under the Sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason
Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not the direct source of the images seen. A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality. However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.
The story of E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy is of a man trapped in cycles of his own guilt. The characters you meet along the journey are like dancing shadows on the wall, and you the player go through the cave, noticing the signs one by one, until you find the exit. Once you find the exit of the cave you understand the game you played was not real (in the eyes of the character), and the true way to finish the game is to close it and move on, or jump back into the cave and return to the dancing shadows on the wall knowing from now on that what you see was never real, and never will be.
The whole story of your character getting psychological damage and hallucinating is true, but that is also, in a sense, shadows on the wall.
In the game you hear the story of a man who had his wife tortured by cutting her eyes out and killed, changing him forever. The truth is that Rimanah is the man who must not be named, he sought power and killed many (including innocents) to rise through the ranks of E.Y.E. and even killed his own mentor, who became aware of his actions, to take his powers for himself and hide his crimes. Rimanah, who was married to a woman named Circe, sent his wife to explore a blocked off area of the temple (the hidden chamber you fight Rimanah in) to retrieve some forbidden knowledge hidden away, but she was caught. To make sure no one finds out he is the one who sent her, he has her executed so she will not talk (maybe using the hypnotic gate so no one questions him).
After Rimanah finds the artifact on mars, he brings it back to the temple. The artifact is an item that connects both the real world and the meta-streumonic force, which by its nature cannot be controlled by anyone. Rimanah not knowing this, or maybe just ignoring any warnings, tries to use it and is hit with severe psychic backlash and the artifact acts as a time loop and since the artifact was the last thing he saw, it is the catalyst that resets the loop every time he reaches it. The backlash traps him in a never ending dream of guilt and what if’s playing out of past events that weigh on his mind.
In a nutshell? You play as Rimanah, going through past memories mixed and polluted with meta-streumonic energies creating scenarios that may or may not be real, with every character being a reflection of Rimanah’s mind: seeing himself as this all-powerful commander, his mentor as traitours adversary, and the cynicles as a psychic reflection of his wife trying to kill him, as he feels guilt for what he did to her. After going through 3 or more cycles gaining the 3 gates, and starting to open his eyes he reaches minos, where he meets the ghost of Circe who confirms that you the player are Rimanah, and agreeing for a chance of sort of repentance, you are trapped forever in a purgatory shaped as an island drifting a meta-streumonic void forever, with only the seal infront of you, tempting you to return to the hell that is your cycles of guilt.
Now the final question is, what is the artifact? I have 2 theories on what it is. The first is that the artifact is the portal you go through in your dreams, its blinding light resetting the loop every time you pass through it. It’s the more likely option as you obviously see it doing just that, both in the dream and the ending, and also when finally accepting to repent, if you choose to go back to the cycles you have to jump into the same light in what looks like a tunnel leading back to a cave.
The other theory I have is that the artifact is some sort of technology that is implemented inside one’s body. The reason I think its a possibility is because when speaking Circe on minos, your character mentions the only syndrome of cycles they are aware of are effects of necroCybermancy.
NecroCybermancy is a research you can perform in game to raise your cybernetics to the highest level, but its description is the interesting part:
We attained to cybertechnology limit, the fringe beyond death. We can create the perfect cybernetic piece thanks to complex rituals. This operation brings death, and then the resurrection of the subject into a perfect being.
It is described as a perfect cybernatic piece achieved by complex rituals, implying its creation involves the use of the meta-streumonic force, and by installing it in one’s body it causes death and then resurrection into a perfect being.
Personally I believe Rimanah, after killing his wife and obtaining the artifact, tried to use it to create the perfect cybernetic piece and implanted it in himself using a necrocybermancy ritual to achieve some type of ascension, but due to the nature of the artifact the ritual failed, and he was trapped in a dream state coma, replaying past memories while also damaging his brain, thus the events of the game not making sense.
And with the psychic nature of the ritual and artifact he is able to find some way to ascend beyond the dream trapping him by accepting the fact that his wrong doings brought him this fate, and his rest from it all is a lonely existence in purgatory.
I also see some connections between this theory and the ascension of Jesus Christ to heaven: Rimanah allowed himself to go through necrocybermancy and trapping him self in his mind (the cave), parallel to how Jesus allowed the romans to crucify him and bury him in a cave. As Jesus resurrected after 3 days, left the dark cave to see the sun and ascended, so does Rimanah resurrect after 3 cycles (the 3 endings unlocking the gates) and escaping the cave that was his own hell to a higher plane of existence. But, while Jesus was pure and left the earth to heaven, Rimanah was a wicked soul sent to his own made hell, and only after accepting repentance can he find some rest in purgatory with the temptation to go back and try again forever in front of him.
Damn this took way longer to write than I thought, but why not. After all of this, what can I say about the game? I think it’s amazing with its unique story, very deep and confusing depth and world design. Gosh dang it I love this game, even though it was made by fr*nch “people”.
Do I recommend you play it? No, I can’t. It’s a very janky and weird game that is hard to get into, but I will describe this game with a Dracula flow quote: “call this pussy video game the matrix, cus i’m in this bitch and I can’t get out!”
Aight, peace out.
