Saw this mission via a recommendation from a friend and gave it a whirl....my graveyard shift hours and weird sleep schedule meant I was playing it in the dead of the night.
This was, perhaps, a fortuitous result, as this arc would be atmospheric enough in broad daylight.
Mission 1: This one's rather straightforward. Interestingly, was the Council a planned rather subtle indication of things to come? The fact they're attacking anything nearby in order to get out of Astoria (though this doesn't become obvious until hindsight becomes 20/20). I note that the smaller zombies we encounter here don't seem to recur anywhere else, though.
Mission 2: I both loved and loathed this one. Mother Meyai's asylum is just....required for this arc, and Schism was both creepy to look at, but also I had to wonder what Event Horizon was getting at. The fact I've run a few characters that're rather casual about body counts myself made Schism seem...mostly normal. The fact I've, IC, made the "the wonderful thing about zombies is no one cares how many you kill" line or variants thereof only lured me into more of a false sense of security. The use of Tsoo as civilians made me do a double take, but less so than the rather irritating tendency of the map to put the dead bodies in hard to find locations. I ended up ramping up my speakers and /walk ing through the map so I wouldn't miss the tell tale SFX that indicated them. They blend in a little too well, but there's nothing much you can do about it. Interestingly, this mission works really, really well for melee types from a thematic standpoint. My first runthrough was on a Claws/Invul scrapper who's in standard power armor with the Talsorian energy blades. Comparing her side by side with Schism, who's stripped to the waist and using metal blades....it's an interesting dynamic. The dualism isn't always there, but when it is, it adds to it.
Mission 3: This one was interesting due to my experience more than anything else. It could be either really fast or really long, and due to random clue placement, I got the latter. I ended up literally purging the cemetery to the ground of every BP mob I could find (after headhunting the masks initially and ignoring the LTs and minions), and eventually found the body...after a half hour of searching an empty cemetery *twitch*. Schism's seeming "mostly normal" facade from the previous mission really kept the surprise...surprising. And the "I'm saving them from fate!" line ties into the overall theme, if I've got it right, which I'll address a bit lower on.
Mission 4: Into The Mouth of Madness Go I.
^)#(%_#(!@#_@$(@_))_)
This mission I mostly skimmed through because the plot was compelling me onwards and with my 50 exemped down, the mobs were more distraction than challenge. I didn't really have trouble navigating the place and the fog was an excellent choice. The phone booth clue was kind of hilarious....I'm attacking a phone booth. I'm attacking a phone booth. From a purely IC standpoint, this makes no sense at all, yet given the visions of the Heralds(who worked out better in the fog, as the vague outlines and their glowy bits made them more distinctive than they would be in full light) and the ongoing, seemingly endless traverse into the depths....somehow attacking a phone booth made sense. The fact that it made sense was worrying....
Mission 5: Hello Me, Meet The Real Me.
This one threw me for a loop. Between the normal looking enemies(who nonetheless attack you on sight) and the damn freaking brilliant use of NPC dialogue, my sense of what was going on was completely blown by this point. We hear the...BP zombies? Telling each other to get the children behind barricades. The normal people are attacking and making groaning noises. Is the hotel messing with my head? Is this time travel? There's not enough people in Astoria to justify this any more. Did I go back to when the zombies first invaded. Am I reliving the perspective of one of the zombies? Is time twisted so that I am or was one of the zombies, with my mind controlling its actions? Are my actions my own, or am I trapped into what the framework of Astoria is forcing me into? Is this the fate that Schism was freeing the others from through death? To be free of this encroaching insanity and Mot's grip on them? Or was Schism seeing what I am now, and his insanity his brain trying to come to grips with what he's seeing? Am I killing innocents wandering Astoria right now? What the hell is going on?
By comparison, dropping Event Horizon was almost a relief. Stepping out of that brought me back to the real world. But...well, this arc is part of that alt's personal canon, as Silicon is very much a sci-fi/hard tech personality, and the mind-warp that this arc induces(and canonically is very much viable in Astoria) would leave her very shaken and unsure of her actions there.
Oh, and that bumper text at the end was just damn creepy after everything else.
