THE STORY
A chapter per mission, in the order they are played. Each one carries the whole of that chapter — the scenes, the monologues, the arrival speeches, the last words and the lore.
Everything below the covers is a spoiler and stays covered until you ask for it, so arriving cold costs you nothing and reading on costs you the ending.
The premise
A man's girlfriend, Ada, goes out for chips and soda on movie night and never comes back. He is a spaceship builder who once assembled engines at the GENUINELY GOOD COMPANY — GOODCO to everyone who ever worked there — until an AI learned his job and walked him out the door — the same way the whole block lost its work, so now everyone lives on welfare and movie nights. The tracking beacon he sewed into Ada's jacket pings from off-planet. He has been building a ship in his garage for years; it needs one engine part he could never get, and GOODCO keeps it in their vault. So he takes the weapon off his living-room wall, raids his old employer for the part, and follows the beacon — to the moon, to Mars, through a rift between universes, and into a knockoff western — chasing the coward who sold her and the machine that gives the orders, all the way to the AI that took his job in the first place. Ada is never on screen, but she is never passive: at every stop she leaves a trace behind (Ada's Trail) — scared at first, then defiant, then actively sabotaging — so the hero (and the player) follows a person fighting her way forward, not a beacon. The one other person who cannot stop following her is RUTH, Ada's mother, who lets herself into the hero's garage with her own key and waits there between his voyages — because waiting at home means staring at the phone. His own impatience is the counter-melody to that urgency: whenever he lingers on a place long enough to outgrow it — the enemies turned pathetic, the fights teaching him nothing — he catches himself grinding and mutters that he should stop wasting time and go find Ada. It is the game's one recurring inner line, played in several moods whenever he over-farms a map.
The chapters
- 1GOODCO HQ6 WHO SPEAK · 8 FINDS
- 2THE MOON5 WHO SPEAK · 4 FINDS · 2 SCENES
- 3MARS5 WHO SPEAK · 7 FINDS · 2 SCENES
- 4THE RIFT8 WHO SPEAK · 4 FINDS · 1 SCENE
- 5BOOT HILL7 WHO SPEAK · 3 FINDS · 1 SCENE
- 6THE GARAGE1 SCENE
- 7THE BUNKER5 WHO SPEAK · 2 FINDS
- —THE HELLBORN12 OF THEM
- 9THE SEVERANCE
The line he keeps saying
One monologue belongs to no chapter. Farm a map past the level it was tuned for — the kills stop paying, the monsters stop mattering — and he catches himself at it. The game rotates through 5 moods of the same two beats.
THE HEROTHESE THINGS BARELY SLOW ME DOWN ANYMORE. I'M NOT LEARNING A THING OUT HERE.
QUIT FARMING SCRAP, BUILDER. ADA'S STILL OUT THERE.
THE HEROPATHETIC. THEY LINE UP AND FALL OVER. I COULD DO THIS IN MY SLEEP.
EVERY MINUTE HERE IS A MINUTE ADA DOESN'T HAVE. MOVE.
THE HEROI'VE WRUNG THIS PLACE DRY. NOTHING LEFT TO PROVE HERE.
STOP CIRCLING. THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS FINDING HER. GO.
THE HEROWHEN DID THIS GET EASY? THEY DON'T EVEN REGISTER. JUST NOISE ON THE WAY.
ENOUGH WARMUP. ADA FIRST. ALWAYS ADA.
THE HEROI'M SWATTING FLIES AND CALLING IT PROGRESS. THIS ISN'T GETTING ME CLOSER.
SHE NEEDS ME MOVING, NOT GRINDING. FIND THE WAY OUT. FIND ADA.