#the enigma machine

[blueiskewl]

A Four-Rotor Enigma Cipher Machine Heimsoeth & Rinke; November, 1941

Serial number M4117, with complete electrical wiring, three aluminum rotors (IV, V & VII), Gamma rotor and B reflector all with matching serial numbers, raised 'QWERTZ' keyboard with crackle black painted metal case, plugboard in the front with eight patch leads, four spare patch leads to lid which is fitted with spare bulbs and a previously unknown, probably unique, metal security screen, housed in wooden carrying case -- with a German Navy telegraph key.

13½ x 11 x 6in. (34.5 x 28 x 16cm.).

[red-akara]

The games of Enigma Studio are a wild time.

Echostasis. Mothered. The Enigma Machine.

Top level, these all look like individual, stand alone games but if you go deeper, you’ll start noticing the tiny threads of connection between them. And it is a startling, creepy revelation.

Can’t wait to talk about this more at my friends’ next PowerPoint party ;)

[orchiddevourer]

Rambling about a character from an obscure indie game trilogy *SPOILERS INCLUDED* (long post) part 1

This post will include content from Mothered, The Enigma Machine and Echostasis: Prologue, so there are going to be lots of spoilers. The full Echostasis game hasn't dropped yet so there might changes to this post later. I'll discuss Mothered: Home in a seperate post as that dlc is confusing, but it will be mentioned later.

Explanation vids have already been made about some of these games so i wont explain that much in my own post. This post may serve as a sort of recap before Echostasis drops.

So with that out of the way, this post will basically be about Red, her story and her character arc throughout the trilogy. Lots of rambling and maybe some info-dumping included.

Part 1: Mothered - life as a replacement of someone

Basically Red starts out as a robot possesing Liana's CORE/soul. The real Liana died of terminal illness and her father took on the task to somehow bring her back via an android with her CORE, with the plan being that her soul will be nurtured out via the mother and fully overtake the robot's interface. So far this hasnt worked without the entites inside the robot (The interface and Liana's soul) corrupting eachother, resulting in it being disposed of (standard game ending). I'll get to the true game ending, but first i want to talk abt Liana's mother/Evelyn.

Liana's mom and her treatment towards "Liana"

She probably has the worst side of the deal between her and her husband with being tasked with playing mother to a robot carrying her deceased daughter's face (mind you "Liana" is implied to not look even remotely human). Understandbly she's upset by that and even horrified/unnerved by the robot. And she has to interact with it every week with the same routine. I fully understand how she feels and why she does what she does. She doesnt owe motherly or friendly behaviour to a being that's not her own kid. But OMFG don't fucking treat said being that has ABSOLUTELY NO FAULT in the situation like SHIT. Feeding it dirt while telling it that it is it's fav meal, making sleep outside that one time. Again, i understand why she did that - to test whether really Liana is in it. But what about that one time in saturday evening when she indirectly insults the robot itself by comparing it to rotten apples without cores. Ok, "Liana" wasn't sentient throughout these instances, but for the apples thing Liana was "awake" to also hear that little comment, but was in denial abt it.

This sort of treatment towards the robot totally lead to the mother's own almost possible last-minute demise when "Liana" almost stabbed her with a kitchen knife as instructed by Liana herself. Ofc the android hands the knife to Evelyn as both it and Liana are confined in complience. To say that mother's behaviour plus the stress by the predicament the girl is in taking a toll on Liana is an understatement as she must've felt so confused and hurt to be so ready to kill her own mother. Enough said, let's move on.

The "birth" of Red

To get the true ending you need to interact with father's record player on Wednesday afternoon afternoon AFTER you pick all the apples and did not interact with mother. This unlocks a door which was locked to u before. Head into the door and down and ur good to go.

"Liana" is not supposed to go there, so in order to continue they progressively get more and more contaminated as Liana is overriding the interface. The two entities actually start to communicate with eachother and later on they reach a terminal which triggers lots of memory leaks. They learn the truth and remember all their previous failed attempts even if they were following the path that was set out for them via programming. The two decide to carve their own path, the interface and Liana merging into what is a new entity. They get out of the basement and leave with father who gives this new sentient being a name - Red. Happily ever after, right?

Part 2: The Enigma Machine - yikes

With the ending in the previous game you'd think that Red has really gone her own path without any problems? That she's living her life the way she wants it to? lol no. The thing is that the dad wasnt supposed to be doing what he was doing and the androids made at Enigma Corp arent really supposed to be contaminated i.e. become sentient.

Eitherway Red got tracked down by Enigma employees, her conciousness got taken out of her body and she got reduced into a training AI to be further studied as she's the very first of their androids to become sentient. With that sentience you'd think that she would be treated with equal respect and with her having her feelings being taken into consideration? Nope, bc for the moneyz and bc for the "citizens of tomorrow".

Red, now called demOS ( Defective Enigma Machine Operating System) serves as a training AI that is used to teach RAD engineers how to deal with "contaminated" AIs like her via a program called Dreamscape that explores an AI's mindscape a. Basically decontaminating the contaminated AI from the inside ie getting rid of it's sentience. So what happens is that everytime a new simulation is being ran a new copy of Red is made that ends up being killed over and over. And she remembers each instance of that during gameplay. She is fully aware of her situation.

Part 3: Events between TEM and Mothered: Home - repurpoced again and out for revenge

After a few years later the Dreamscape program is outlawed and Enigma Corp make a new one where virtual realities are made for people for them to escape to called "Echos". And who is in charge of creating said Echos? None other than our Red who has been repurpoced again into an algorithm called "HER". So she is now in a position where she has power and ofc she's going to use said power for revenge after what's been done to her. She seems to be recognized as a big threat and is shut down by "Angel" (more into this character in a another post).

Now let me take the time to point out sth. Is it just me or is Red giving off Rei Ayanami energy? Like both are vessels to souls that aren't theirs and both are mistreated by parental figures in some ways. Red also bears some similarities to Phos's life developement (of course i have to bring HnK into this post) - both face torture throughout their lives and later are changed into godlike beings, otherwise all similiarities between end here. Honestly I wouldn't be suprised if the dev took inspiration from Evangelion.

Ok, that's all for now. There will be a part 2 to this post. Overall a really awesome trilogy of games. I can feel the wave of brain rot that's approaching in two months.

[vectorworm]

big fan of this one

[princess-pengy]

Strange Gaming Diaries: THE ENIGMA MACHINE, by ENIGMA STUDIO

so, bit of context for this one: a few years ago I bought itch.io's Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, all of the games from which proceeded to sit tragically unexplored in my library until very recently. more recently, I decided to scroll through each and every single one of the hundreds of games included, find the ones that seemed interesting, and give them a shot! it seemed like a great way to get introduced to games on the fringe, and I've been very happy with the results.

THE ENIGMA MACHINE (which, yes, I will be capitalizing exclusively like that throughout this post, because I'm not about to enforce sensible typography on a game that so consistently refers to itself in all-caps) was one of these games, and holds the distinction of being the very, very first horror game I've ever played. not for lack of interest—I've always loved horror to bits, but for someone easily panicked and incredibly noise-sensitive like me, engaging with the genre is like russian roulette with about as much risk for damage to my brain.

however, the premise of this was an incredibly alluring one, with THE ENIGMA MACHINE (I warned you!) promising a trip into the murky, ambiguous, low-poly worlds within the mind of an artificial intelligence. mindscapes and synthetic life have always been some of my favorite narrative concepts, and it's clear that this game was made with its own love for these ideas. it's a bold and passionate opening statement from this developer, and the game that truly solidified how much I wanted to keep playing these kinds of abstract, heartfelt experiments.

in its opening minutes, the game did a nice job of setting up everything it needed to with its narrative: the player is taking part in a training exercise for the ENIGMA corporation's DREAMSCAPE software, which allows users to enter the minds of artificial intelligences—which ENIGMA is also the leading producers of, alongside the lifelike android bodies that house them.

and speaking of AIs, the chipper companion called demOS responsible for delivering most of this information is an incredibly well-written character! their constraints as an artificial being and lack of understanding of humans is consistent and sometimes charmingly awkward, but the dialogue still felt alive in a gripping way.

of course, this is a horror game, and once you actually enter the simulation, that fact becomes immediately apparent!

to be clear, another first that this game gave me was my first experience with the whole psx low-poly Thing that's been sweeping the indie horror scene these past few years. and y'know what? I get it now. the environments had me more unnerved than I've been in a while. with how slow your walking speed is and how frequently your surroundings plunge into inscrutable darkness, you spend a lot of time in this game staring into empty, silent space. each ring of dimming light is starkly visible along the walls, and there's a subtle flickering to both the framerate and the way the polygons catch the light at a distance that not only draws unavoidable attention to the artificiality of these settings, but gives an impression that they're only barely held together. it's wonderful. I fucking loved it and it made every single corner I turned into a surreal nightmare.

ultimately, though, the gameplay and relatively simplistic puzzle solving are vehicles for the impactful little plotline the game has going on, wherein you're given all sorts of cryptic talk about "decontamination" and AI sapience. but to talk more about that, we need to…

⚠ ENTER THE SPOILERZONE ⚠

"decontamination" is a word the game likes to throw around without explaining what it means. it's apparently what you're meant to be doing to AI by accessing their minds, but the game leaves the identity of what exactly is contaminating them enticingly vague.

and perhaps counterintuitively enough, things start getting MORE fucked up the less contaminated the testing AI is. the menu interface starts glitching out, demOS starts diverting from its programming, and the worlds you explore start changing. in one particular sequence that still sticks with me, the sky is replaced by a distorted view of the menu screen. it's haunting.

not only that, though, but the levels start merging. through various passageways and corridors, you start finding old levels, and thus the lie of these being individually simulated environments is revealed.

the game's final scenes (wherein you get a gun, only for there to be a stress-inducing lack of any enemies) contains many of these kinds of revelations: not only is the "contamination" you're tasked with cleaning out the essence of an AI's sapience, but you're also poking around in the brain of your friend demOS--or Red, as they're otherwise called. you and all the other agents like you are constantly lobotomizing this AI right as they realize what's happening to them.

and this is all paired with visuals that are haunting on a physical level as well as a glitchy metaphysical one. you find yourself in a courtyard with a beautiful starry sky with rain falling down, but everything's wrong. the vertices of the level geometry are mutilated in a way that constantly leaps out at you and obscures your vision. the rain is frozen in place. and, all the while, Red is recounting to you the experience of being torn from one's body and made to die over and over again, forever.

then a horrible humanoid figure walks towards you from behind one of the many , you shoot it, and the game crashes.

honestly, part of me almost wishes the game ended there. sure, the following sequence where the courtyard becomes a swirling hellstorm and you have to go through all the past environments while avoiding shrieking manifestations of an AI that wants to live is kickass, and far from unearned!

but THE ENIGMA MACHINE was so affecting for me because of how slow of a burn it was, and how gradually the tension and dread escalated. the crazy explosion of action at the end was almost a release of tension more than anything else, and while that wasn't unwelcome, it makes me wanna see the version of this game that stuck to that slow-paced dread all the way through to the end.

isn't that the best part about small little games like this, though? they set the mind ablaze and propose neat little ideas that, even if they aren't seen all the way through or have some quirks about them, are presented in an exciting enough way to get you thinking. the lived experience of an AI and how their senses operate so differently from ours despite having the same level of sapience is such a fascinating thing to dig into, and the way this game does that is so visceral that I found it utterly inspiring. can't wait to play the other games from the studio!!

Support the Developers! Buy the game on itch.io! Buy the game on Steam! Buy the soundtrack on Bandcamp! Keep up with Daniel on Twitter!

☆ Return to the Masterpost? ☆

[hindbodes]

[veguinsky]

At least there's cake (~￣³￣)~

WebToon: "Walpurgis Night ☾"

[saw-tistic]

saw vi is like edging for ppl with competence kinks because hoffman will pull off some of the hottest, most mouth-watering and brutal quick thinking i've ever seen in my life and then, just to shake it up, just to keep me humble, he'll make some utterly incomprehensible decision like using strahm's fingerprints to cover his tracks again, despite the fact it clearly didn't work the first time. and he does it in a room he was gonna set fire to anyway. the money i would pay for a single glimpse into his mind

[wombrion]

is there any way we can take a peek thru ur comic making process like a bunch of gnomes on top of each other by the door looking at idfk.. snow white cooking food in the kitchen.....

picks you up by the scruff ok. but just because you called me snow white got it

kinda long btw!! also flashing images

[basketcase1982]

a brother, a father, and their creature families

little bonus hehe

[capricioussun]

Monday

[eluminium]

I find it hilarious how both Imp and Skizz express their love for each other in different kinds of unethical ways

like if Impulse betrays you that's actually a sign he likes you because he trusts you enough that this betrayal won't hurt your feelings too hard. very people pleaser of him.

and skizz punches and wrestles people he likes. very cishet man of him.

they both subject each other to their respective immoral love actions at alarming (?) rates.

[sleipliir]

Here’s a scrunkly before I collapse from exhaustion

[lesserafimz]

TWINKLING WATERMELON (2023) | Ep. 10 "If you push a wall, it becomes a bridge. If you fall somewhere, there will be a hidden treasure. That's what my grandma always says."

[littlestarsprite]

Justice deserves a raise for being so patient with this man❤️

[queen-of-hawkins-why-ler]

Deadass y'all in my dream last night, s5 was split into two half seasons, and we learned at the midway point that Mike was supposed to marry El as some contrived way to save her and defeat Vecna that doesn't make a lot of sense lmao but my dream was the mid-season interview between Finn, Millie, and Noah and Millie kept asking Finn, "So Mike knows he can save El by marrying her. Then why doesn't he? WHY DOESN'T HE??" and Finn kept looking into the camera like he was on the office and shrugging and doing this weirdass smile and Noah just sat there with his hands folded over his mouth like a disappointed parent. 😭 😭 💀