User blog:Sadelyrate/The Lost Archive

Due to an image request, I played through The Lost Archive DLC (again).

Far as I've been able to gather, said DLC's not exactly popular amongst fans of the AC franchise, for whatever reason. If that's truly the case, it's a pity, imo.

You see, for me, TLA's probably the piece I've most enjoyed in this franchise.

Last night, while finishing up with it, I began to think about the reasons for that.

It's a first-person platformer, the format of which seems to at first make me nauseous before my body adjusts to the visuals. Despite that, and partially because of it, I love the DLC.

Why?

Because it reminds me of cyberpunk and jacking in.

Because it's visualized hacking and telling a story via how it seemed like versus photorealism.

Because it's symbolic and metaphorical and because of that so much more visceral and realer than they could've shown, had we ‘lived' through it. Prime example of this is the end of Memory four, The Mole. Forced into repetition, into doing the same thing over and over and over again, Clay's mental processes falter and fail until he's plunged into a... no-man's land, wherein his eyes are opened as he sees “what has been, what will be”, and he regains some semblance of sanity, reëngages reality enough to be able to survive, keep to his mission. And enough to have the capacity to plan and plant a message for his follower, recreate a variant of himself in the depths of his captors' computer when he learns there is no way out but death.

The pieces of it fit together, even the first-person part of it, forming a sum that's wonderfully meta, as well as resonating deeply within a person who's grown up dreaming of ghosts in the machine.