Let's Play Marathon, pt 14 - Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap

…I hate this level.

Okay, okay, fine. I’ll talk about Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap. I’m mostly going to talk about Durandal’s messages in the opening and closing terminals of the level, because the level itself is a drudging slog with probably the most annoying puzzle in the game.

Make a wish.

I appreciate that cackling prankster Durandal hasn’t become his only mode of expression by this point, it would feel a little over done if his personality wasn’t explored any further than “hee hee, look how wacky I am, playing around with the main character like a cat toy.” The game has plenty of that, but also more reflective moments like these.

The image of the three candles has a few different connections to make. Three is a traditionally powerful number symbolically, of course, for reasons Durandal mentions among others. More broadly than signifying tripartite chronology, it often stands for balance, proportion and wholeness. At the moment, Durandal seems to be trying to find a new balance, having shed his chains and expanded outside what had contained him. Maybe he sees himself, you, and the Pfhor as three elements that can provide a structural balance with one another. As another note, the Pfhor have three eyes.

I like that he, through the story, defines freedom as the ability to self-analyze, a freedom stemming from the intellect and the imagination rather than the cruder and often very poorly defined ‘freedom’ that gets bandied around a lot, especially here in the US.

Anyway, while he ponders all this stuff you’re wandering around a dark grey featureless part of the ship. Basically, you’re in the most boring scary basement.

It’s not even a red barrel.

This is what the whole place looks like. It’s some dismal long forgotten part of the ship, dimly lit, sparse, flat. And full of lots of blind corners where Ticks ambush you. They’re about the size of a middling dog, easy to miss, drift quietly toward you and explode. So this level has tons of them on top of everything.

Bored? Don’t worry, you’re about to get blown up out of nowhere.

And then the most aggravating thing about CSFSC. That’s this room:

My opponent’s platform

I know it’s hard to see in the screenshot because the entire level is apparently lit by the three candles that guy liked to contemplate, but this is looking down from a little control room into a much bigger room. You can see two windows which are two other control rooms that look into it. It is very difficult to get between these three control rooms that all have switches that activate a series of platforms in the big room. You need to make these six platforms into a sort of staircase, so you can get from the big room’s floor to a doorway way up the side of the wall. It’s even more torturous than it sounds.

What is this chamber? Why are the platforms controlled by three totally separate rooms that are inconvenient to get between? Why is there a doorway way up in the wall? I’m not saying everything needs to make realistic sense or that “because it’s a video game” isn’t at least most of an acceptable answer. But most levels are better at explaining why the kinds of challenges that a game requires exist. Blaspheme Quarantine is a great example and it’s right there in the level’s name: It’s the ship’s quarantine section, having separate compartments that are difficult to get into or out of is the whole point.

And I haven’t even mentioned the small rooms where the floor crushes you into the ceiling if you don’t sprint straight in one side and out the other. But once you finally drag yourself through the nonsense you get Durandal’s equally interesting closing comment.

Countdown to Apotheosis

This revelation has long made me wonder. If Durandal was always capable of parsing existing scientific findings such that the nature of the universe opened to him, and was only constrained by what kept him in humanity’s servitude, why hadn’t an AI whose purpose was scientific research already figured this out? He’s a control system for utilitarian things like doors, and he’s not even the only one entrusted to handle the ship’s systems. What is effectively partial spaceship management software can crack the secrets of the universe while simultaneously escaping its bonds, dealing with the Pfhor and with you. Surely an AI that was made to figure out physics problems, which we can presume must exist in this world, could’ve reached this conclusion before now?

Durandal seems to posit that only a fully free mind is capable of the feat he’s performed, that only with autonomy comes the degree of creative and speculative thinking that can tie the requisite theorems and data together and make the poetry rhyme. It’s an interesting idea, that raw cognitive power, however massive, is incapable of certain degrees of revelatory pondering without the ability to fully think for oneself. It’s kind of an interesting commentary on current LLM AI’s, made thirty years early. The ‘thinking software’ that we’ve created so far doesn’t actually think, has no self awareness, and effectively brute forces the illusion of such in ways that can appear incredibly impressive when it works and that suddenly and hilariously crumbles when it doesn’t.

Then again, you have to wonder how crazy Durandal is at this point. Has he actually figured this out, or does he just think he has? Is his rampancy causing him to scribble vast equations on the walls that look like the work of a genius from a distance but are gibberish when someone tries to actually read them?

Third possibility, he’s lying to you because it amuses him. This is always something you have to consider whenever Durandal tells you something you’re not personally able to verify. Either way, it’s fascinating to watch the way his journey through rampancy to some new type of existence unfolds.

Okay, let’s get the hell out of this level.