Divine Cybermancy Is My Kind of Posthumanism

A review and alternative reading of 2011’s strangest video game

Jun 18, 2025

GRAVE NEW WORLD

Mankind wanes. A loose consortium of rapacious megacorporations has wrested control of cyberspace from the Federal authorities and engages in a species-wide campaign of political intimidation and cultural pollution. New and terrifying instruments of mass surveillance cast a shadow of discord and fear over the populace, whose pillaged minds lack any vestige of positive social connection. Artificial intelligence continues to advance in complexity, but is regarded with suspicion and even violence as its emancipatory potential is ensnared by the unfeeling tendrils of profit. Art, love, and faith are forgotten relics of humanity’s ignored past, and nothing is worth man’s devotion unless it can propel a slug through the heart of his traitorous neighbor. The human conscience is the battleground in a perpetual conflict between unstoppable forces borne of hatred and woe. Hope is extinct.

But I’d rather not dwell on current events, so let’s talk about some crazy-ass video game instead.

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy is a mass psychogenic disorder experienced between 2008 and 2011 by approximately twelve game developers working for the Paris-based Streum On Studio. Remarkably, the strange illusion broke free of their flesh and cohered into a video game that you can still buy on Steam for $9.99. As the story goes, a few of the devs had been playing a homebrewed tabletop RPG since the late nineties and, in their neurodivergent obsession, somehow managed to secure the resources necessary to develop and distribute a commercial adaptation. Their opus took the form of a bombastic first-person shooter with roleplaying elements and a unique setting that I can best describe as post-cyberpunk.

Above: The landing dock at E.Y.E’s megalithic Temple Headquarters. It takes several minutes to run from one corner of the HQ to its opposite. This is maybe the third-most grandiose map in the game, and the sixth- or seventh-largest.

I got to thinking about E.Y.E1 for the first time in awhile after reading an excellent review of Streum On’s 2016 shooter Space Hulk: Deathwing by the inimitable

Ashlander

. It was the first broadly positive review of Deathwing that I’ve read in… ever, I think, and it takes pains to consider Streum On’s work for what it is instead of what the gamers of the time expected from it. I reckon that’s the best way to talk about E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy as well — not unlike the last couple of games I’ve reviewed, this thing demands considerably more patience of its player than is typical for its genre.

So this week, we’re doing a good-faith exploration of the strangest FPS I can remember playing, and we’ll pay special attention to the game’s much-maligned story. E.Y.E’s narrative is a sprawling and densely philosophical exploration of man’s metaphysical self-importance, so it’s somewhat problematic that it exhibits the absolute worst presentation of a narrative that I have ever seen in a commercial video game. The story itself is actually relatively intelligent and thought-provoking, but it’s been filtered through a set of distinctly French cultural reference points, and then filtered again through poor-quality machine translation. My contribution to the E.Y.E discourse will be to analyze it as though the story were coherently told, which presents a useful excuse to talk about the game’s nifty take on posthumanism.

There are plenty of good reviews of E.Y.E out there, and I see no need to relitigate the gameplay from scratch. That said, we’ll need at least some background context to make any sense of the story, so without further ado...

...LET’S GET THE REVIEW PART OUT OF THE WAY QUICK

The short version is that I endorse the popular consensus, to wit: E.Y.E is a fucking horrible video game. It’s great! You’ve got to try it.

Alright, allow me to elaborate. The year is 2395 (I’m pretty sure — it’s complicated). You are an agent of the Culter Dei, a faction of psychically sensitive super-soldiers plucked straight from the most overwrought Warhammer: 40K fan-fic you can possibly imagine. You awaken in a dank cave with a nasty case of protagonist’s amnesia and, at the direction of a man dressed like a Nazi superweapon, run through the world’s most grandiose tutorial level in order to extract. The first weapon you find is a brick-shaped pistol that kicks like a mule on PCP, and the first enemy you encounter is a six-armed monstrosity that crashes through a stone wall and charges at you. And every few minutes, the game offers to show you a non-diegetic tutorial video explaining basic first-person shooter controls. It’s an awfully strange first impression that colors the entire experience.

We’ll address the game’s wild story in a bit. Suffice it to say for now that the narrative is completely incoherent until you’ve sat with it for awhile, so one is strongly encouraged to lock in with the gameplay. At its core, E.Y.E is a linear, mission-based first-person shooter with a very strong mechanical focus. Those mechanics are some of the most unusual in the entire genre, so we’ll start in familiar territory and work our way up. The RPG system is the simplest: gain XP for killing enemies and completing objectives, then spend points on increasing your stats. Develop evenly if you want to be a jack-of-all-trades, or focus on just two or three for a happy-go-lucky power fantasy centered around one or two mechanics. Newcomers are advised to invest heavily in Accuracy, which affects gun damage and unlocks the game’s best weapons at higher levels. Let’s talk about some of them.

In a good first-person shooter, every weapon is itself a character, and E.Y.E is particularly well cast. The HS 010 submachine gun is a triple-barreled beast whose firing modes include “Full Auto” and “Fuller Auto,” the latter of which empties the hundred-round magazine in about a second. The .444 Bear Killer revolver shoots thumb-sized rounds that can bring down an aircraft or make a refreshing mist of soft targets. The LF Damocles, a longsword the size of a man, generates a distortion field that can deflect incoming bullets. These are just some of my favorites — there’s a full complement of rifles, shotguns, and even man-portable assault cannons with which to delight the senses. E.Y.E is built on Valve Software’s venerable Source Engine, so movement and gunplay feel as satisfying and buttery-smooth as one could reasonably hope of a Eurojank release from the era.

That’s all well and good, but Doom 2 had a bunch of great weapons thirty years ago. I promised you Divine Cybermancy, and I’m pleased to report that E.Y.E really sticks the landing with this invented concept. Agents of the Secreta Secretorum are almost fully cybernetic, retaining only incidental bits of their original human anatomies. Your Cyber Arms are strong enough to lift and throw cars. Your Cyber Legs can propel you fifty feet into the air and negate most falling damage. You’ve even got a damn Cyber Thyroid — if you fall in battle, it’ll flood your body with combat stimulants until you stand back up. You begin the game as a cybernetic superhuman and can upgrade almost every part of your body until you effectively become a demigod, hence “Divine Cyber.” But whence this “mancy” of which I speak?

*Above: The CyberTech interface, through which the players can upgrade all their cybernetic parts. A member of the Jian Shang Di stands behind the counter to sell us additional Cyberware as we need it.*

Well, for one thing, there are the PSI powers. Agents of E.Y.E master powerful psychic techniques that can essentially reshape spacetime in accordance with their whims. These powers are basically magic spells by any other name, but have some unusually creative effects: Polyclone summons a handful of AI-controlled clones who inherit your equipment and will follow you into hell; Madness poisons a target’s mind and makes allies appear as hostiles; my favorite, Dragon’s Breath, just straight-up teleports you into any enemy you can see. That is, you literally teleport into the physical space they currently occupy, and their body explodes around you in wet, visceral accommodation of your own hulking mass. Teleporting into a looter and then vaporizing his pals with an automatic shotgun is satisfying to a borderline sexual extent — the high points of E.Y.E’s combat are among the highest in all of first-person shooting.

And of course, no discussion of E.Y.E would be complete without mentioning the infamous hacking system. Virtually every computerized object in the game world can be hacked, as can anyone with a Cyber Brain, i.e., every single human opponent. Hacking doors, ATMs, and automated defense systems produces predictable effects. Hacking people allows you to digitally possess them — you see through their eyes and may command them to move around and attack their allies. Your victim shrieks impotent protest all the while, unable to resist as they cut down their friends by your will. The infamous part is the hacking mechanic itself, which takes the form of a bizarre minigame that plays like Pokémon by way of Egyptian Ratscrew. E.Y.E really is a veritable soup of weird game mechanics that exist practically nowhere else. Some — like the Fatal Wounds system that can randomly cause semi-permanent stat debuffs — are outright bad ideas, but I don’t mind that so much in an experimental FPS designed by a few passionate freaks. And if nothing else, at least the rough edges make for a more characterful experience than we’ve come to expect from so codified a genre.

It all takes some getting used to, but E.Y.E eventually comes together into a delirious exposition of cyber-violence. Almost every map is a gargantuan sprawl of ostentatious architecture, which is ideal given the player character’s extraordinary speed and jump height. Fights become frenetic and vertical — everybody in this universe owns an arsenal of ludicrously powerful firearms, so you’re generally better off abandoning careful strategy in favor of moving fast and hitting hard. The only significant problem is that the combat’s enjoyability scales with your character level and upgrades, and a lot of folks understandably bounce off of E.Y.E before ever experiencing combat at its best. The first playthrough will feel relatively dull unless you approach it with a lot of foreknowledge and/or confidence. Luckily, for reasons we’ll discuss in the next section, your progress carries over to all subsequent playthroughs. If you’re prepared to give it a few hours of patience, then the core gameplay will become more and more fun until it competes with the genre’s greatest.

Shame about that story, though, which is notoriously absurd and incomprehensible. But is it really as bad as they say?

LET’S TRY MAKING SENSE OF E.Y.E’s STORY

Actually, it turns out to be pretty compelling! The problem is that, in almost three decades of gaming, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a video game’s narrative so woefully presented. E.Y.E’s first minutes show promise as the tutorial level teases you with cultic intrigue, but then it all collapses when you make it back to HQ and your commander tells you to go read up on the game’s backstory in the library. And that’s literally what happens — you follow an objective marker to the library, and the game doesn’t proceed until you’ve at least pretended to dignify its colossal story dump. There are over 3,000 words of confusing, disconnected exposition with which to bore yourself into a coma. It isn’t helped by the dreadful French-to-English translation,2 although there’s at least some unintentional comedy to be had in that direction. My impression is that all of it comes from the devs’ personal TTRPG universe and that the player is not actually expected to internalize a word of it, much less analyze the entire thing in minute detail.

But that’s exactly what I did. My first idea for this newsletter was to summarize it all in grammatical English, but that was the most boring thing I’ve ever committed to writing.3 Fortunately, I played for long enough to discover that Streum On did, in fact, reach for some ideas worth sharing. I’ll tell you as much about the story as we need to get us there. Mild-moderate spoilers ahead, but I strongly discourage you from trying to play E.Y.E for the story. Consider this more of a beginner-friendly primer.

I suggested earlier that the game begins in a dank cave after a failed mission, but that isn’t strictly true. Starting a new game actually loads you into an ethereal dream realm where you’re asked to roll character stats and are then ushered toward a strange, glowing portal. Stepping through it begins the game proper. At its threshold lies a dead Space Marine, introduced by your character’s internal monologue as your mentor whom you’ve killed, sort of. Here, just have a look:

Above: The Dream Realm. You appear here upon beginning a new game, and then return every time you load a save. That’s your mentor slumped against the wall. The character design and environmental art owe much to Warhammer: 40K, but the game ultimately achieves a strong visual identity all its own.

After you complete the tutorial mission, you return to E.Y.E’s palatial temple headquarters. The narrative immediately perjures itself by directing you into a conversation with your mentor, now alive and berating you for failing your mission. He tells you to regard your commander with suspicion, but then you find a video recording in which you yourself insist that the commander’s orders should be followed to the letter, even at your mentor’s expense. Then you’re permitted to go find the commander and receive your next orders. It’s very confusing, and you immediately get the sense that something isn’t right. The dialogue trees will even let you bring attention to this, but your interlocutors will only ever react with bemusement or defensive hostility as though you were asking too many questions at a Silicon Valley happy hour.

Commander Rimanah finds himself in a tight spot within E.Y.E’s hierarchy. Some years before the events of the game, the organization was split into two competing factions in order to limit its influence. These are the Culter Dei, which Rimanah commands, and the Jian Shang Di, which is full of annoying bastards who dress like cybernetic rice-farmers (no, seriously). In the wake of a coup attempt, both factions are notionally at war with the authoritarian Federation. In practice, however, Rimanah is interested only in consolidating power within the Secretorum and will spend the entire campaign working to subvert the Jian. All the while, Culter, Jian, and Federal alike fight against the invading horde of undead demons brought back to life by a strange, alien will called the Metastreumonic Force. Man, and I thought the auteur wargame I reviewed a month ago had a lot of impenetrable jargon.

Okay, so the Metastreumonic Force is… you know what, forget it. It’s some kind of poorly understood pseudo-intelligence that permeates the physical universe and turns the dead into hellish perversions of man’s excess, i.e., it’s a gossamer-thin pretense to give the player some non-human monsters to shoot. The story occasionally tries to give itself metaphorical weight by gesturing at analytical psychology — “that monster is a reflection of our hidden selves!” — but never commits to anything quite so lofty until near the very end. This is the sort of thing I’m talking about when I call the story “woefully presented.” It’s packed to the gills with concepts and ideas, but few are given any room to breathe even within the vast exposition dumps in the library. They drape and slouch over one another in such a manner that you can’t easily tell which are story threads worth pulling and which are just the cracked-out musings of some Eurojank developer. It’s no wonder that so many people write off the story as totally incoherent.

It’s not totally incoherent, though. The important and interesting parts of the story are mostly to be found in your interactions with Commander Rimanah. He is the only member of E.Y.E who seems to take you at all seriously — the others speak to you like you’re a child, or else wonder aloud why you act so strangely. You never see it in-game, but several characters make reference to you stumbling around in confused trances, muttering nonsense to yourself. It’s made abundantly clear that your character’s mind is severely disordered, and it’s played eerily straight in the otherwise sardonic dialogue. Only Rimanah seems to take you in his stride. But as the game proceeds, you quickly realize that something isn’t right with him, either.

The penultimate mission takes place on Mars, and it’s where the game abandons any semblance of traditional narrative structure. If you’re still paying attention to the story, you’ll find yourself coming to revelation after revelation about Rimanah and his various conflicts. That Rimanah is more than he lets on may go without saying, but I’ll resist the urge to give away the big twist in this newsletter. Worth mentioning at this juncture is that your decisions on Mars determine which of three possible endings you’ll get, as well as the final mission that effectuates it. This next paragraph is going to look and sound a lot like a major plot spoiler, but I promise it’s really not.

After you make it to the end and defeat the final boss, you step into a glowing portal and… awaken in a dank cave with a nasty case of protagonist’s amnesia. Then Commander Rimanah tells you to run through the world’s most grandiose tutorial level in order to extract. That’s right, folks! E.Y.E had a cyclical narrative the entire time! But instead of picking up the brick-shaped pistol, you simply delete the six-armed monstrosity with whatever weapon you were just using to kill the final boss. To achieve the True Ending, you’re expected to complete the game at least three times and to achieve all three normal endings at least once each.

I thought at first that I’d end this section by talking about the True Ending, but upon closer reflection, I realized that it’s really not what I’m most interested in discussing. We’re gonna close out this week by dissecting a thematic throughline that I’ve never seen anyone else touch, and we’ll learn a thing or two about contemporary French philosophy along the way.

A POSTHUMANIST READING OF A GOOFY FRENCH FPS

It’s easy to dismiss a story this extravagantly baroque as the delirious ravings of a dozen Chablis-guzzling Frenchmen, but let us not forget that the introduction of psychoactive intoxicants to France was responsible for some of Europe’s most legendary philosophy. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that E.Y.E itself is marinated in continental thought, but it would also be incorrect to write it off as entirely unexamined. Consider, for example, this passage that I read in the temple library (lightly edited for clarity):

[The world] has lost all sense of moral reference… the number of tramps is constantly increasing while mutual aid and compassion lessen… Federation social security and welfare have become a myth…
It comes as no surprise that individualism and self-consciousness have become the leading qualities in the modern human being. At best, the human takes refuge in clannishness, family, and work or, as the [authorities] like to call it, “company spirit.” In the worst case, [the] human is infantile, narcissistic, aggressive, superficial, uncultivated, distressed and wondering why.

Oh, God damn it. Was this game about capitalism the whole time?! Well, you could certainly make a case to that effect, but it’s not what I take away. Instead, I interpret E.Y.E as a vision of technological posthumanism. I’ve got some explaining to do, so bear with me.

Up top, I referred to E.Y.E’s setting as “post-cyberpunk,” and this is what I mean. One sees glimpses of a distinctly cyberpunk-ish past in certain environments, but all of them look to be in decline. We’ve still got the tasteless neon, the satirical billboard advertisements, and several heavy-handed references to Blade Runner, but it’s all being colonized by new construction so brutalist and utilitarian that Nikita Khrushchev would tell the architects to lighten up. In a genre context, I think of the term “cyberpunk” as referring to a speculative image of late capitalism — you know, a supposed hyperconsumerist future in which ordinary folks augment their bodies as an expression of individualism and then labor in the slop mines for eighty hours a week. But the world of E.Y.E seems beyond even that. Everyone you meet is motivated strictly by power, bloodlust, both, or by nothing at all. Even the dastardly consortium of megacorporations has effectively given up on the relentless pursuit of profit, because they’ve already pushed it as far as it can possibly go. The corpos continue to exist as vestigial bureaucrats whose function is to supply weaponry to various actors. The human spirit has evolved beyond any need to recognize itself as agentic or exceptional. The philosophical distinction between machine and man has effectively ceased to exist. What now, Fukuyama?

Now, the word “posthumanism” gets applied to all sorts of mutually incompatible systems, so it’s tricky to settle on a definition. I prefer to think of it as simply and as literally as possible: posthumanism means “after humanism” — as a category of thought, it encompasses those philosophies that reject the classically humanist notions of man’s exceptionalism relative to nature for one reason or another. The past few decades have motivated a lot of new thought concerning the relationship between technology and humanity’s evolving nature, and recent advances in actually existing cybernetics have stoked the flames even further. Let’s talk about the parallels between the study of technological posthumanism and the themes explored in E.Y.E.

Consider your own self-conception as (I presume) an intellectually curious being motivated by reason and discovery. Now try to imagine yourself as a tradesperson in antiquity or as a hunter-gatherer in pre-history. All of these categories are populated by anatomically modern humans with a shared evolutionary past, but their self-conceptions and perceived roles in their universes could hardly be more different. As a species, we’ve progressed over the millennia from struggling against our environment to understanding it to dominating it, which is undeniably correlated with technological advancement. Technological posthumanism posits that our inventions therefore play a foundational role in defining human nature as we experience it, and the logical extreme of this idea is that humanity will one day come to be defined exclusively by its relationship with technology.

And that’s essentially what we see in E.Y.E. In the world of 2395, humanity has progressed to the point of totally destroying and entirely replacing its environment to better suit its present imperatives. The setting represents the end of “the human” as a distinct category of being, and I must say it hits quite a bit harder in 2025 than it did in 2011. For centuries, Western institutions have considered human beings not only exceptional relative to nature but altogether transcendent of it. In E.Y.E, people are just one lifeform among many, and they exhibit barely any more capacity for self-determination than a mold spore. The will to power remains, but only in a very rote, biological sense of wanting to dominate the local environment in order to guarantee future propagation. That will turns out not to be a uniquely human feature after all. What is unique about E.Y.E’s humans? Well, they seem to be the only ones replacing their organs and limbs with loose machinery…

Enter Bernard Stiegler, the French philosopher and student of Jacques Derrida whose work on technological posthumanism provides the context we need. He published the following in 1994, shortly before some of his countrymen wrote the setting that would eventually become E.Y.E:

In this global Western culmination—which has allowed for the total mobilization of all [natural resources], and soon will allow for the literal mobilization of [extraplanetary resources]... a strange problem is posed: the greater humanity's power, the more "dehumanized" the world becomes. The increasing intervention of humanity in the course of nature, and by the same token in its own nature, makes it incontestable that humanity's power can reaffirm itself eminently as the power of destruction (of the world) of humanity and the denaturalization of humanity itself...4

So, perhaps against our intuitions, technological progress diminishes our humanity even as it empowers us to modify the world around us. By that logic:

If the individual is organic organized matter, then its relation to its environment (to matter in general, organic or inorganic), when it is a question of a who, is mediated by the organized but inorganic matter of [the] tool with its instructive role (its role qua instrument), the what. It is in this sense that the what invents the who just as much as it is invented by it.5

Good Lord, that all could’ve been taken straight from a conversation in E.Y.E. See, Stiegler reckoned that “human nature” as we tend to understand the term is characterized at any given point in history by our invention and deployment of tools, the power and efficacy of which constrain our influence over our environment. We’re now at a point in real life where influential tech-industry figures speak earnestly about cybernetic augmentation and computerized intelligence as the near-term future of the species, and we were already rushing headlong into a dehumanized future of data-harvesting and automated surveillance. E.Y.E tries to imagine a world in which all of this is taken completely for granted. Let’s go back to the library:

The Federation hardened the laws prohibiting access to high-end war equipment... The whole market is in shortage. Secreta Secretorum launches its own research programs to counter it.
E.Y.E is in its worst possible position… [and] must also be partly financed by itself. It employs beginners wishing to [gain E.Y.E’s power]6 and sends them on badly equipped missions to intercept important valuable cargoes. These warriors parade as galactic plunderers. E.Y.E, like many, knows a serious shortage in high-end military and cybernetic equipment.

In 2395, access to high-end weaponry has migrated all the way to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. Guns and cyberware are so standard and familiar to humanity at this point that even the pathetic, immiserated looters have built-in nightvision and wield advanced military hardware. Despite the talk of financial instability and market shortages, framing this reality in terms of labor relations and/or capital exchange hardly makes any sense. The Secreta Secretorum conceives of heavy weapons manufacturing the same way we conceive of agriculture: it’s the foundation of modern civilization, because its output allows us to continue existing and proliferating. Guns, bombs, and terraforming equipment are to them what scythes, plows, and tills were to our ancestors. These tools are all manifestly unconscious and non-human, and yet their deployment comes to define the conscious experience of our own humanity. That’s the paradox of Stiegler’s technological posthumanism and, by my estimation, the most fascinating aspect of the famously obtuse E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy.

AN E.Y.E FOR THE CLASSICS

My Steam library’s Favorites list has continuously hosted E.Y.E ever since I first played it over a decade ago. I like to replay it when I feel deflated by the games industry, because it reminds me of the experimental spirit that defined its era and which still resists the enshittified homogenization of moneyed game development. I also like to play it whenever I need a tonic against technological pessimism, because it prods us to remember that we still have a semblance of shared culture and mass politics by which we can exercise a semblance of control over our collective identity and our futures. 2025 has thus far been a year for pessimism on both fronts, so diving back into E.Y.E has been a borderline therapeutic exercise.

I also found the process of deeply considering the game’s schizoid narrative to be personally worthwhile, if not particularly fun. My verdict on E.Y.E’s story is this: it’s absolutely not worth playing the game just to experience it but, if you’re going to try the game anyway, then I encourage you not to ignore it completely. Think of it less like a traditional narrative with a beginning, middle, and end — this is more of a bubbling Jacuzzi of themes and ideas. Immerse yourself in it for a little while and let it stimulate your nerves and soothe your mind. Alternatively, approach it as though it were a traditional narrative and enjoy some good, hearty laughs at its hilariously incompetent presentation. Don’t let the likes of me tell you how to enjoy your post-cyberpunk hallucinations.

Finally, it seems worthwhile to mention Streum On’s other work in the context of E.Y.E. The game was inspired by the Warhammer: 40K universe quite nearly to the point of ripping it off, even borrowing proper nouns from the franchise from time to time. Games Workshop usually litigates the asses off of people who do that kind of thing, but they were apparently impressed enough to greenlight Space Hulk: Deathwing instead. After I was through with my E.Y.E campaign, I booted up Deathwing with Ashlander’s review in mind. And I gotta say, this thing really is better than I remembered! It’s more numbing than stimulating, but the combat is still viscerally enjoyable and the environment design is practically unmatched in terms of atmospheric grandiosity. It’s too janky and frustrating to recommend at its $29.99 MSRP, but it regularly goes on sale for less than five bucks and is at least worth trying at that price.

Streum On also released Necromunda: Hired Gun in 2021, which is another officially licensed Warhammer: 40K FPS. It plays a lot closer to Doom (2016) than to E.Y.E, although it’s not as mechanically polished as Doom was. It feels more like Deathwing with the addition of a grappling hook and a wall-running ability. If that sounds like a good time, then you’ll probably get at least a few hours of fun out of it. It never really grabbed me, but it’s another one I can recommend on sale.

Streum On has never released a game that I would describe as “great” without qualification, but I think E.Y.E comes the closest. More than any other FPS I can think of, playing it makes you feel like you’re pushing the frontiers of game design. As with any frontier adventure, there will be no shortage of pain, hardship, or dysentery. The destination may or may not be worth the trouble, but at least the journey will be memorable and worth a few good anecdotes. I’d love to hear from any of you who’ve also played this unstable artifact of early-2010’s gaming, or about any games you’ve played that make you feel similarly. This is a rough time for the big-money games industry, but times like these tend to draw out the best of the medium, and often from the most unexpected sources.