Is it just me, or does there seem be an anti-evolutionist tone to Primordia's writing? I first noticed this in the almost satirical "Progress" concept you learn of in Metropol proper. However when I finished the game and started going through the commentary, the writer started talking about the Bible being a great inspiration and, well, generally I can't shake the feeling that he is trying to have a swipe against evolutionists.

Thoughts?

I felt a bit of anti-atheism and anti-evolution right from the start of the game actually. I haven't finished it yet, but to me the message is lingering throughout the game.

Hi, writer on the game here: the game speaks for itself, but since I certainly believe fervently in evolution and haven't been to a religious service in decades, I can say that *I* wasn't trying to have a swipe at anybody. My affection for the Bible is as a beautiful work of writing that a cornerstone of Western culture.

That said, the game does play with a lot of "reversals" -- a humanism that is religious; a watchmaker theory of existence that is actually empirical, etc. That's just because I think these are interesting issues, and I wanted to present them in an engaging fashion!

It's so great to actually have the writer of the game respond. Thank you!
The thing that really got me thinking along these lines was the sense that the religious protagonist was being ridiculed by others with no real arguments. It felt like a world where history and the truth had been oppressed and taken the form of a religion, as if it's arguing that religion is a truth that has been lost in time.

I'm noticing that my English is working against me here so I'll stop. But, it's a great game! I've been enjoying myself immensely so far.

Thank you for your reply to this question. Indeed, when I first started playing the game learning about the Gospel of Man, Humanism etc. I found it an amusing role reversal. However when the big bad being an adamant proponent of "Progressiveism" and the commentary track started to make me wonder. Glad to hear any anti-evolution message was merely inference on my part and not intentional.

P.s. The "sticky bomb" joke/puzzle was awful, and I did think the pocket was more logical :P

P.p.s. I found the story and specific dialogue both very well written.

Glad you liked it! The "Progress" thing is just about the way in which noble sentiments are appropriated by the powerful and power-hungry to justify their causes. To the extent there is a specific historical concept I might have been thinking of (it would have been subconscious), it would probably be the 1920s-30s "progressives" who advocated eugenics and Social Darwinism based on a terribly misguided view of evolution and its implications. But I can't even say that was the message I was trying to send because I didn't have some specific axe to grind here!

Speaking of power-hungry... seems like MetroMind more subscribed to the school of Wheatley-ism, really, or Portal 2 fame. Complete failure all across the board with no self-awareness of any of this. >_>

Her shouting "For progress!" had zero meaning/strength, really, and i kinda wonder just how she managed to convince the council (and Mercy) that this is a good idea. (Or why she wanted to do so in the first place. Run your damn trains, woman!)

"Hey, Factory, you should stop making machines and hand all power over to me."
"Uh, no."
"C'mooonnn!"
"Alright, alright..."

Didn't jive with me, but i enjoyed the game nontheless. :)

I didn't think it was particularly anti-evolution or anti-atheistic.

Even if it was (unintentionally) would it really matter? At the end of the day it's a story, and a damn well written one too.

It's kind of nice to see a game to explore this sort of issues from a different slant - so even if its final message isn't necessarily to your liking does it matter?
It's an interesting and engaging piece, which I personally have already lost about a day of my life exploring. :)

Doesn't matter to me. And the OP just pointed it out. It's a sci-fi story. And yes; a good one, too!

Factor was the smartest one though. He knew exactly what metromind was up to, and that she would fail. If horus hadn't have turned up, he would have taken over at some point

Not to overtake the post but ZarkonDrule brings up an interesting point. I myself and torn between whether Factor actually plotted his own shutdown or he is egotistically saying that he did while in fact the city was running out of power and he was forced to.

Factor is a robot. He doesn't need to run at full power making stuff every single waking moment.

MetroMind cannot / doesn't want to shut down law-abiding "morally righteous" robots. However, she has no problems completely destroying personalities of oil addicts or setting up a cycle-based system of commerce designed to drain said cycles from the economy and add to her "personal" power base. Meanwhile, there are thousands - millions? - of energy-wasting robots wandering around doing nothing (which is not immediately reprehensible - robot happiness has no reason to be assigned to resemble human outputs; robots may feel happy when working and miserable when slacking off). For all her talk of progress, she's not efficient at all, and she's not willing to throw this categorical imperative under the metaphorical trolley. "Humans are behind us. Far, far behind us." As if.

Now, Factor doesn't subscribe to that. While Factor's glorious future won't be the macroscopic gray goo horror Factotum describes (because Factor has personality of his own and appreciates personality in others), it's clear he will be messing with software and hardware, moving, editing and deleting AIs at an industrial scale (which might be good for all I know, but it will be the end of the existing posthuman civilization).

MM threatened Charity with civil war (that Arbiter would lose); she, and presumably every other Council member, could decide to ignore the constitution. Now consider the Rex case: to Horatio, it's all about a name, but Oswald and Cornelius think a fabrinymic grants certain rights to the builder. Imagine what Factor and his army of Factorbuilt robots could have done if push came to shove.

So I think Factor just took his ball and went home, taking "the best and the brightest" with him and leaving everyone who disagreed to rust in the acid rain.

Starmaker, I think you make a great point. It does make sense that Factor would have that kind of power given the circumstances- and especially since he not only is physically larger than the entire city but built most of its population.

My perception of Factor really hinges on the way you view Metropol. If you view Metropol as a large city with tens of thousands of inhabitants I think your explanation is the most logical. The way I saw Metropol on my play through was a little different.

Granted, we only get to see a small part of the city during the game, but I thought that the city was on the brink of death. While the rest of the city could be relatively large- the fact that transportation is all but breaking down, the infrastructure is crumbling, most robots seem to be broken down into simpler machines (due to MM's cycle harvesting)- seems to indicate that Metropol doesn't have much longer to survive.

If this is the case than Factor would be shut-down and/or deactivated strictly from an energy conservation standpoint. If the world itself is running so low that they can barely power the city anymore than how is a city-sized robot going to be active?

Memorious (along with Arbiter it seems) believed that Metromind was essentially unstoppable. Factor could have somehow protected himself from the attacks of a machine that was essentially integrated into every robot in the city (even some Factorbuilts)- but I find it odd that he couldn't convince his apparently favorite robot, Laurence, to enter the slumber with him. Why would he not just sleep with his master if there wasn't some inherent danger involved?

I also found it interesting how Factor, while slumbering, basically "communicates" much like the other dead members of the council. He has his "Factotum", but so does Arbiter, Memorious, and Steeple.

That, along with the apparent energy crisis- lead my playthrough to believe Factor was posturing. Even if he waits for the city to die where is he getting his energy from? He could have always hid some but it seems MM could circumvent his protections and get to it somehow. She is desperate enough to go scraping through their garbage dumps (the dunes).

That all being said I think both explanations work depending on how you view the game. Of course, you could view the game the way I did and still say that Factor had his own powerplants and protections and is the real sleeping giant that needs to be addressed in another game :D

ADDENDUM

Initially, I decided to not post in the thread, because I emphatically disagree with the premise and some of the replies - there's nothing anti-evolution in the game, and yes it does matter what a work of fiction promotes. "Fantasy is not factual, and because it is not factual it must remain true, and the truth is that the real world matters, and that real people are amazing, and a Hero who doesn't return is no hero at all." "It matters if Man with a capital M keeps going. There's nothing better than Man with a capital M in my books." And all that stuff. Here, I'll even link the Cracked article. But whatever. Blame Hardace.

While I'm reasonably sure the devs set out to make a good game, not Utilitarian propaganda, it just happens that reality (and, consequently, "what makes a good game") has a noticeable Utilitarian bias.

So the game is set in a fantastical world. It's not winking at you, or snickering into the sleeve, or preaching from the soapbox. It's not a possible future scaremongering scam, it's not an oh-do-you-see secret world setting, it's not creepy wish-fulfillment. If the characters were humans from an "alternate" universe who have been created but deny it, then, well, the alarm wouldn't probably have gone off immediately, but a couple of bells would've been gently jingling (there are more components to an offensive setting, and my favorite practice target consistently wins offensive setting bingo, ask him more about it). Primordia is openly, in-your-face fantastical, and the characters are b'sodding robots.

So there's no "oh do you see", the question is what you should do with the facts. That's the all-important question; that's the target of every "message" ever. (Real-life creation cults are not spinning the tale just because, they want you - yes, you! - to do something about it, usually to discard the output of your own thought processes and obey them.) And the correct answer will always be "think, and choose the course of action that will make the world a better place", not "have a kneejerk reaction and press the panic button".

The setting is post-apocalyptic, but one step from awesomesauce posthuman utopia; it has magical energy and immortality, what else do you need? The ancestors are not godlike beings but puny warmongering idiots who couldn't cooperate in the face of a global disaster. Are they, or those who claim to speak in their name, worthy of obedience? EMPHATICALLY NO! MetroMind talks about Progress while everything is breaking down under her leadership, is it a condemnation of progress? EMPHATICALLY NO, it's a condemnation of insane blabberers out of touch with reality. Factor stands for both evil collectivism and its self-proclaimed polar opposite randroid nonsense. Don't even get me started on "trying to be a worthy inheritor earns you a googleplex microseconds in the robot hell" Steeple.

Finally, the first actual humanist and pacifist in the setting is a warmachine that overrides her core imperative by means of logic, not by some wtf supernatural awakening. While in just about any other work of fiction featuring robots they try to become more human-like, this is EMPHATICALLY NOT THE CASE here: they have to be better than humans, they should ignore the limitations their ancestors' monkey brains imposed, overcome human failings. This is what brings victory and ultimately restoration and "endless Primordia".

On a related meta-note, it pisses me to no end when reviewers rate the game on the basis of how well it upholds some nebulous "retro ideals". WAY TO MISS THE POINT.

For what it's worth -- and my views are in no way "canonical" on this (as Starmaker rightly insists, the game is what it is, my views notwithstanding) -- another reading that I intended to be in the game is that Factotum is no more speaking for Factor than a witchdoctor speaks for the volcano or Hargrimm in PS:T speaks for the Silent King. In this view, Factor shut down (for inscrutable reasons -- the game really doesn't reveal anything about his manner of thinking other than that he was MetroMind's yes-bot except for what you hear from Factotum, who has an incentive to spin things his own way) and his creations were distraught. Factotum invented the king-under-the-mountain myth about Factotum returning one day to remake the world (a distorted mirror, incidentally, of Horatio's own reboot-by-Man belief) as a way of creating his own authority as a high priest. Everything Factotum tells you is an invention with just enough truth sprinkled in to give it an air of falsifiability.

Anyway, like I said, this isn't "canon"; there are any number of legitimate ways to interpret things, but I figured I'd throw it out.

[EDIT: And, yes, it annoys me too how people try to view the game in terms of the message of, particularly, Beneath a Steel Sky. At a minimum, view it through the lens of PS:T, which actually have a significant influence on the story! Alas, that's what happens when we market it as a BaSS clone, I guess. :/ ]