Isaac Jones’s belief (who’s the pre-imminent Breach researcher in the game – and I’ll paraphrase his answer so his neural lag s-s-stuttering isn’t p-p-present) is at some point in the “future” or “a future”, the first Breach caused an explosion of tachyons that went both forward and backward in time. Does ITB have multiple timelines because a new timeline is created every time the mechs go back in time, or because a (presumably infinite) number of other timelines already exist and they are trying to save humanity in as many of them as possible? Or something else entirely?Ĭhris Avellone: The pilots have different theories. The pilots have their own readings on the game's multiple timelines, and as such there is no definitive answer. Note - for the first portion of this interview, Chris Avellone presents his answers as reported speech from the Mech pilots themselves - "because I’m an unreliable narrator, I thought I’d complicate the issue of Into the Breach’s background by presenting several unreliable narrators", as he puts it. It was pretty clear to me that there was a vast spider-web of careful fiction behind the minimalist facade, and Avellone's expansive answers about where and when the Mechs come from and exactly what happens when they breach only confirm that.īut, for every question they answer, they open up a dozen more. Though Into The Breach very much considers brevity to be a virtue when it comes to dialogue, its short lines drip with implication about the rules of time travel, parallel realities and the motivations and peccadilloes of its pilots. Time to go the source, then, that being Into The Breach writer - and writer, designer or both on a long list of revered games including Planescape: Torment, Fallout: New Vegas, KOTOR 2, Pillars of Eternity, Prey and ITB predecessor FTL - Chris Avellone. I've already espoused one possible and particularly fatalistic reading of what's going on - the idea that every time your team of time-travelling Mechs wins, loses or otherwise begins a new campaign, they spawn a new timeline full of human suffering - but without definitive answers from the game itself, that's little more than a guilt-stricken guess. If there's one thing that grips me more about Into The Breach than the razor-sharp tactics of its death-chess scenarios, it's trying to wrap my flabby brain about the dark possibilities and implications of its terse but tantalising plot.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |