You awaken somewhere in a darkly lit space. You look around and see that the walls in on you are lined with wires and metal pipes while the floor beneath you is covered in garbage covering rows of bricks. You move towards the nearest door out of this room and find yourself moving through tunnels entirely built of cement, stone, and metal as far as the eye can see. After even more exploration you manage to find a ladder towards a hatch that seems to be the exit from this artificial space. You climb it, open the seal and… nothing. You stare out in what’s supposed to be nature and find nothing worth seeing. There are no plants or animals, no bacteria present, and no indication that there was anything around you that was ever alive. All you can see on the surface is a barren lifeless rock while the sky above you has an atmosphere so thin that you can easily see the stars above.
What I’m describing is what a space entirely devoid of the biosphere looks like. I find the idea of ecumenopolis or even spaces entirely deprived of life interesting in games. I think what sparked this weird interest was from a book I read called “the one straw revolution” where the author criticized that people where living lives horribly disconnected from their natural origins. There’s something uniquely disturbing about seeing a mechanized food factory in real life when you realize that all the crushed gunk you’re seeing get processed is something you’ll inevitably feed off of. Similarly, there’s something uniquely horrifying about walking through artificial and or dead spaces.
Dead space, star citizen, scorn, naissance, to some extent rain world, all these games I’ve played feature environments entirely disconnected from the nature people used to be used to. Walking through those worlds genuinely makes me feel like alien. I think that feeling of “you genuinely don’t belong here” that’s created by the way these environments are designed is what made these games so scary. Actually, I think this is what made the FNAF games in particular so scary when you consider that the environments were both artificial and strangely familiar to the places real people have been in.
It wasn’t the jump scares or the body horror, but the continuous and obvious reality that the player is immersing themselves in an environment that they obviously do not belong in. Even if the player does end up gaining some spatial awareness over the game’s world, it’s unlikely that the player will ever feel truly comfortable with where they are at all, because the mechanisms of those worlds are simply not the same as the ones we have spent the most amount of time evolving in.
Anyways, sorry for the long post. This has just been on my mind for a while now.
>>40325>le human naturenot how it works, we have adapted to pretty much al biomes on earth, there is no innate hardcoding regarding on which environment the brain is supposed to work. there are physical limitations, in the sense that if it is too hot or too cold or not enough air or pressure you will die, but those aren't mental limitations
with your liberal nonsense out of the way, I don't think modern sci-fi can successfully convey a sense of desolation and despair because it has become too strong of a genre, it is hard to take it seriously. check that part of the time machine by wells when the guy accidentally travels millions of years into a future where there is no more life on earth