I do all my research using turrets! Let's Play E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy

Screenshots courtesy of my Steam screenshots folder, circa 2011 and two computers ago. Later screenshots will be higher-quality. Higher-quality as EYE can get, anyway. Additionally, there are a couple isolated conversations with some rather tasteless topics. We will be avoiding these in the LP.

In Space Year 2004 A.D., a group of twelve French fledgling developers, released Syndicate Black Ops. It was a nightmarishly difficult first-person shooter, and largely a love letter to The Matrix and over-the-top violence. It has a bizarre fixation on photo-shopping guns that look like they were drawn by a teenager into photographs of babies and women - likely found on Google image search.


In 2011, the developer became Streum On Studios, and released E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, a nightmarishly difficult first-person shooter, that's a love letter to Ghost in the Shell, Warhammer 40,000, and over-the-top violence. It also happens to have a bizarre fixation on photo-shopping women posing with fictional guns. It's a mess of horrible bugs, non-existent AI, a weirdly dissonant tone, an abysmal translation, a surprising amount of lore, surrealist imagery, and a plot that leaves a lot to interpretation. This game is awful. And wonderful. By the end of the first update with actual content, it will be my most played Steam game.



We're gonna be playing with a mod that makes my life slightly easier by allowing me to hotkey weapons. I'll uh, just let that sink in for a minute.

I'll be refraining from installing the nigh-necessary text revamp mod, however. If you play along and want to actually understand what you're looking at, I highly suggest you grab it here. This is also going to be a screenshot LP -- much of EYE is identical gunfights, crawling corridors, and grinding -- we're going for a highlights reel approach. I'll likely make a couple videos of the worst offending sections of the game, just to show you what a nightmare it can be to play.



Oh, and I suppose I should tell you that we play as a katana-toting, marksman wizard with cyborg implants who can explode people by hacking into their brain. And he needs a name. Seems he forgot it. Must've been a crazy weekend.

It's obviously Hiro Protagonist.

Alright. Yeah, we have a winner. I'm not even going to pretend I'm not using this.

“The wise in its regular course does nothing, and so there is nothing which it does not do.” -Laozi, as recorded in the Codex Scientia.

We launch a solo campaign, name ourselves Hiro Protago thanks to character limits, and are promptly greeted with this nightmare of a screen, completely sans any context or explanation:



This is our character creation screen. It has a bunch of numbers on it, a bunch of random words in drop-down boxes, and a font that clashes with the background. Neat. Now let me actually explain what's going on here: We're a super soldier of some sort, built to task on the genetic level by the Secreta Secretorum as a member of E.Y.E. Essentially, we're equivalent to Inquisitors from Warhammer 40K. We're even made the same way Space Marines are made – we're constructed out of the DNA of legendary warriors. There's a bunch of different DNA choices that have different effects on our stats, and we can even double or triple up to be super ultra good at one thing and garbage at everything else. Yellow means we're as good as any given member of E.Y.E., red means we suck, and green means we're awesome.

None of that matters. Because, if you'll note, we've picked MetaStreum three times. And as you can tell, we're almost 100% awesome. That's because MetaStreum works in a completely different way from the DNA choices. Whereas most give a bonus to a couple stats, and a malus to a couple other stats, MetaStreum flips a coin for every single stat and gives us either a bonus or a malus to it. Theoretically, we could end up with a triple bonus to every single stat by doing this. More frequently, we'd be complete garbage, or all-around above average like this.

You can make a specialist build work, especially if you're focused on stealth and hacking, but I want to show off a bit of everything with Hiro Protago.



We awaken in a monolithic ruin, initially confused, but then recognizing it as our recurring dream. I'm not sure how Hiro knows this, seeing as he's currently suffering from amnesia, but hey. I'm pretty sure the intent here is to have the character be just as confused as we are, introducing new concepts to both Hiro and us as we go, but uh, they kind of botched it royally. A lot of the ideas they should be introducing to us over time are needed to survive or even just play the game almost immediately. If it seems like I'm ignoring important things, this is why. If I explained everything as it came up, 90% of the LP would be the tutorial level. Heck, not only has the game not yet told us we have amnesia, it's dropped right away, with it only popping up when an NPC needs to hold our hand through the most basic explanations of why we're doing what we're doing.



Leaning against the green portal lies the corpse of our mentor. Hiro Protago spouts some arbitrary and potentially outright wrong foreshadowing as we approach. Notably, this is what we're going to look like for most of the game. There are three levels of armor, light, medium, and heavy. Our thus far unnamed mentor here is in heavy armor, which happens to be the only sensible choice for a solo player like us. We never actually see any member of E.Y.E.'s face - even our mentor's face is actually part of his armor. Most of the time, the weight of an E.Y.E. member's armor indicates their standing within the order. We have access to all three armor classes from the beginning of the game, which implies we're a fairly high-ranking officer.

As we pass through the gate and awaken, we find ourselves in the non-specific new era Year 015, standing in a flare-lit cavern, strewn with corpses. I don't think flares are anywhere else in the game, and we'll never have access to them. Tucked away in a corner is a large tablet covered in illegible inscriptions.



I'm sure it isn't important, and that we'll never see it again.



Commander Rimanah shouts at us, presumably through some kind of cybernetic implant, and we do some tutorial level-ing. You know the type, crouch under this, add flashlight to your radial menu, use the radial menu to turn your flashlight on, jump over this, press crouch and jump at the same time to cyber jump, pick up this gun, go down this hallway. After some weak tension building, a cave wall explodes, revealing our first enemy:



A couple body-shots with the Black Crow handgun we picked up earlier drops it. These guys will never be a threat alone, but trust me, the only reason this one's alone is because it's scripted to be. This is a Manduco, and it's pretty much a slightly more chargey version of the imps from DooM. They can claw you, they can run at you, and they can throw fireballs if you feel like getting cheeky with hit-and-run tactics. More importantly, it's our first encounter with a MetaStreumonic-Force creature.

The MetaStreumonic-Force is pretty much ambient magic-fuel, and is speculated to be the universe desperately attempting to set nature back on course after humanity punched it in the face. With space lasers. For thousands of years. MetaStreum causes arbitrary bullshit to happen -- for instance, if you happen to be the unlucky group of miners who first found the stuff, it could turn you into the incarnation of cannibalism, a Manduco.

By the way, instead of DNA, we decided that our test tube should be pumped full of this stuff. I'm sure that's probably fine.

Past our glowy, dead, ex-human friend, we find ourselves a massive elevator shaft.



This little guy with a yellow triangle above his head is a turret. Universally, yellow triangles mean "friend." Not having having a yellow triangle doesn't mean enemy, though. I'll grab a better shot of a group of 'em once we start stuffing a couple down our pants later in the game.



Naturally, we ignore the fully functional elevator and instead climb the adjacent ladder for a good two minutes straight, achieving the same effect, much, much more slowly. Because, you know, E.Y.E. is the kind of game that lets you do stuff like that. At the top of the ladder we meet an old war buddy, Dutch. Naturally, we still can't remember that, but we pretend we actually know what's going on anyway.



He informs us that after our botched mission, the FedCops are on our tail, and we need an evac immediately. He'd come back us up, but he needs to collect evidence of … something in the cave we just came from. He probably just wants those flares, due to the apparent flare shortage. They didn't really code competent AI for anything other than snipers, so we're probably better off alone anyway. As an aside, Dutch is wearing medium armor.

wait, hold on a second...



Normally, we would be advancing into the game's first gun fight, but I spotted this vent I'd never seen in my four or so prior playthroughs, and decided to investigate.



It goes on for quite a while, as vents in this game tend to do, thanks to the game's absurdly massive maps. At the end, of the shaft, we come out into a generic industrial, grim-dark future-hole so quickly that I couldn't screenshot it until I had already fallen a couple hundred feet into a pool of what's hopefully water, but probably sewage. It's the grim-dark future, after all.



I got a pretty good shot of it from the bottom, right before discovering I was stuck. With no way to get out of the pool other than drowning to death painfully slowly, I pop open the menu and disconnect from the (single player) server. Upon reconnecting, I'm greeted with a familiar sight.



This is gonna be a long LP, isn't it?


LANCER'S FUN FACT ZONE
If you turn the shaders too far down, all Manducos will inexplicably appear neon shades of green or pink. Nothing else in the game does this, so it totally isn't incredibly jarring while trekking down otherwise atmospheric grim-dark future-corridors. Totally!

Brouzouf is money in this game. Any time you see "You gain Brouzouf" in the corner of a screenshot, it means I killed a thing. The text revamp mod replaces this with a much more sensible "Kill confirmed." Either way, there are more than a few enemies capable of cloaking or extreme long-distance combat, so getting a notification that whatever we just shot has died is actually fairly useful.

You can play this game in up to 32 player co-op, and the game allows for enemy AI and spawning adjustment to compensate for that many players. It does not, however, play very fair against a single player no matter how much adjusting you do.




The Black Crow is a handgun manufactured by FKO to counter Croon's line of high-performance heavy pistols. While sporting impressive .50mm rounds that are capable of piercing thin walls, it has subpar stopping power against anything wearing the kind of heavy armor E.Y.E. is supplied with. It still finds use among gun enthusiasts as a sidearm thanks to its light weight and small profile. More recently, special forces and shock troops engaging with MetaStreumonic creatures frequently receive these as standard issue, in part due to cheap ammunition for its performance when dealing with unarmored targets. Also, despite being a handgun, you can't dual wield with it.

As soon as we get to an armory, we will never see this gun again. Don't get me wrong, in any other FPS, this would be one of my favorite sidearms of all time. Here, it's merely average.

Nope, shit, I fucked up. The game handed Brouzouf Manduco to us on a silver platter.

And of course we can respect glorious Nihongo culture and name him ManBro for short.

They named the currency after a term of endearment between bros?


This game IS even more bizarre than I thought!

We know little of the time before 2116 AD, as much of our history was lost in the initial wars between the consortium of Megacorporations. We do know, however, that we founded our first Martian colony during this “Dark Age.”



Okay, so, maybe I was being a bit facetious last update. I totally knew that this was what I was going to see when I started the game back up. You might note that we've currently got the Black Crow equipped, which we didn't pick up until after we left here.

You see, in a neat touch that helps us connect with our character ever-so-slightly, we will see this every single time we start the game up, just like Hiro Protago sees it every night. Same deja vu dialog and everything. Walking through the portal pops us out at our last check point. Also, in multiplayer, it serves as a kind of pre-game lobby. Since you can drag a whole thirty-one people to your last checkpoint, it might be a good idea to let them know if, say, a cyberdemon Deus Ex will be right around the corner or some such.

Plus, the atmosphere here is fantastic. It reminds me of the Kiln of the First Flame from Dark Souls. Not to say that this game is anywhere near as good as Dark Souls, but it has its moments.



Anyway, after we hop through the portal, we're plopped unceremoniously staring at Dutch.



I have no idea if the game remembers us talking to him or not, but I'm pretty sure you can just straight-up ignore him, and it won't effect the game at all. After giving Dutch the cold shoulder for stealing those flares, we round the corner to see our best friend in the whole game:



This puppy is a mobile armory. It is full of infinite copies of all the goodies we have access to, from ammunition, weapons, and grenades, to medkits, our Scrab – more on him later –, and auto-turrets. By the way, all equipment in the game not only has weight, it also takes up space on our armor:



Did you think I was joking about stuffing auto-turrets down our pants? No, our pants are literally the best place to put them. There's even one mission where having cargo pants full of auto-turrets is borderline necessary, and a couple more where it's crazy helpful. As an aside, we don't have a weight limit, but the more we're carrying, the slower we move. Strength helps mitigate weight penalties to our speed.

While we're at it, lets take a look at all these other menus. Well, the confusing ones, at least.


Our version of the heavy armor has a less fancy helmet. I think our mentor is a priest or some such, so he gets a special one. Otherwise, this is fairly standard stuff, even though I couldn't tell you what most of it does off the top of my head. The important ones are Accuracy, Hacking, Mental Balance, Medicine, Health, and Karma. Oh, and Ressurectors, but we'll talk about those when we inevitably kick the bucket.


CyberTech here more or less means money never stops being useful – once you've bought everything, you can effectively throw money at your stats in addition to experience points.


Here's a menu that initially looks superflous, letting us open our menu – which does not pause the game – just to do things like turn our flashlight on, or reload our gun. Most of these things have hotkeys or can be configured to have hotkeys. Some of them, like the 100% required to progress through the tutorial level Hacking action, can't be hotkeyed.

By right-clicking any action on this screen, we can add it to our shortcut menu – kind of like Crysis' radial menu, but customizable. I usually put all the PSI Force AWESOME WIZARD POWERS and Cyber Control SUPER COOL ROBOT PARTS I use on my shortcut menu, alongside Hacking.

For now, we're gonna be rocking Alchemy and Ghost. Cyber Run and Cyber Jump already have hotkeys/key combos to do on the fly, and we don't need Clone just yet. We will though. Oh cybergods, we will.



Here's the research screen. Sometimes enemies will drop briefcases full of documents, rare Earth metals, corpses, highly radioactive materials, or shoes. You know, normal briefcase stuff. In this menu, you can throw money at these things to research them. The more researchers you allocate to a thing, the less time it will take, and the more money it will cost. It is almost never worth assigning more than one researcher, though. Most research topics give you a minor permanent buff or unlock other research topics. Some give you game-changing permanent buffs, and one – Medkit – gives you access to new, practically mandatory equipment.

Now, uh... Didn't this game have like, shooting dudes in it or something?

Let's try some of that. We follow the path leading up to my single favorite moment in the whole game. It's the one moment where the gem this game could have been shines through the brightest:





It's an brief, exhilarating gunfight. It's basically impossible to die here, but the combination of descending into the waterway from above, the fantastic music, and the trains running above you, silhouetted against the sky made me fall in love with this game. It's just a fantastic moment that lets you charge into battle feeling just as invincible as a super soldier should, smoothly transitioning from long range sniping to close quarters combat as you slide down into the water way. If you only watch one video segment in this Let's Play, this is the one to watch.

It also shows us something else – the reason why the Black Crow isn't worth keeping around. Most of the guns in this game, even the starting equipment, are absolutely lethal. Even the weakest assault rifle can drop a human target in a couple of shots, and the off-brand Mac-10 we're sporting here spews an astounding number of rounds in very little time. This game lets you know right away that it is not messing around when it comes to the kind of damage you can do.

While we're at it, let's show off Alchemy.


All the ammunition enemies drop in this game has to be picked up manually, but will generally be for weapons you currently have. If you're really desperate, you can pick up enemy weapons, too. For our purposes, at the moment, either will do. We've taken a tiny bit of damage, and don't really need any more bullets, so we use our AWESOME WIZARD POWERS and...



… turn it into health. This isn't going to be our main source of healing, but when we're pinned down, this tiny little boost of health can save our lives. Plus, even though I did it point-blank here, it has an impressive range, letting us grab a quick pick-me-up from behind cover and across the street.



After we get done playing in the waterway, we hop down into some sewers in what may be the best unintentional analogy for playing this game.



We shoot a couple guys that are just kind of standing there, fall into the sewage a couple time because the bridges have Havoc physics applied to them for inexplicable reasons, and generally do nothing of note.

Sadly, we're gonna be spending a lot more time in the metaphorical sewers than the waterway.



We find ourselves another grim-dark future-hole, but this one we're supposed to find. Other than looking kind of impressive in scale, it's just a straight path with a door at the end. Granted, it's a very important door, but it doesn't deserve any build-up.



Approaching it, the game helpfully tells us we need to hack it. It doesn't tell us how to do that. Nor is hacking anywhere in the control configuration menu because, remember, you can't actually hotkey it. Instead, you have to figure out on your own that you need to open you action menu, find Hacking, and click it. Alternatively, if you figured out that you can add things to the shortcut menu, and that a shortcut menu exists, you can use it through that.



It doesn't stop there, either folks. It unceremoniously dumps you into another unexplained menu with options like “Me,” “Door,” Possess,” and “Steal.” Obviously, we need to click on the Secured Door, so that's a start. It's blocking our way, so we probably need to pick Destroy, right?

{sad trombone noises}
Wrong. While you can totally do that, and it will let you go through the entire hacking process, it doesn't actually do anything. I'm fairly certain the Possess and Steal also do nothing. The full process for what you need to do to start hacking the door is: Launch the Hacking menu, pick Secured Door so you aren't hacking yourself, and then pick specifically Hack.



While this next menu it brings you to is equally baffling, it's actually pretty simple. Have you played a Final Fantasy game with an ATB before? Have you played a Pokemon game before? Yes to both? Good. This is Pokemon with an ATB. You want to drop your target's CYBER HP to zero before they drop your CYBER HP to zero. There are only two stats involved – Attack and Defense, and the target's firewall immediately starts fighting back the second you pick an option.

Attack is pretty straight-forward. You apply your Attack power plus a tenth of your hacking skill to the target's defense, and any leftover points take a chunk out of their CYBER HP. Mask and Scan are debuffs that target the opponent's Attack and Defense respectively. Shield is a defensive buff, and Overflow transfers some of your Defense into Attack.

It doesn't sound like much, but it can get intense, fast. Like, hacking a target that's at your level or above is an ordeal, and rougher than most of the game's actual combat. It turns into this tug-of-war where both parties are trying to debuff eachother while also turn defense buffs into more attack power until they can land a one-shot victory. And if you fail to win, you can have your stamina bar completely emptied, take massive amounts of damage, take instantly lethal damage, or even get hacked, plastering your screen with 90s movie-hacking-style smiley faces. How do you fix that last one? By hacking yourself, of course, which (surprise, surprise) is always at your level of hacking skill.



You can hack virtually anything in the game, and with a stealthy build, you could potentially beat the entire game without ever personally firing a bullet. Hacking has absurd range, and can (in order of difficulty) see through your target's eyes with Possess, steal money from ATMs or turn an enemy into an ally with Hack, refill your stamina bar by taking a target's with Steal, and finally just explode a dude with Destroy.

I'm honestly not sure how you're expected to beat the final boss without three or four friends along or hacking. It's a super-important part of the game, and gets virtually no explanation. I mean, they did do the Metroidvania thing of not letting your progress until you prove you understand, but they did it in the worst way possible.



Beyond the door we find our level-end trigger – Jang Shui. Aside from being vaguely rude to us if we offer to back him up, he only tells us things we already know. FedCops are here, you need to leave, we brought in the cavalry to get you an evac LZ extraction tango down copter.



Once the conversation ends, we get to stand there. For like, a weird amount of time before the level actually ends. We'll find this to be par for the course. Lots of awkward staring at NPCs like we're not sure what to do next.

LANCER'S FUN FACT ZONE
So, you know that fight in the waterway, what with the sliding down and the music and the shining example of what could have been and the love at first sight? Well, it's still a mess. You see, for that entire section where you're sliding down, you need to be holding back so that you don't take massive amounts of falling damage when you get to the bottom. And cybergods help you if you decide to sprint down the slope. They'll be peeling you off the bottom of that waterway for weeks.

We totally could have picked up that friendly turret way back at the elevator and carried it to the end of the stage. While held, it acts like an auto-targeting and firing gatling gun with obscene recoil and infinite ammo. It's not a good strategy, but hey, you can do it. We'll be exploiting how willing turrets are to be carted around later on.




The HS 010 features a similar weight and profile to FKO's Black Crow with far greater performance. Developed by Croon for one purpose, and one purpose only – to make as many bullets as possible go in whatever direction you aim it as fast as possible. Its design dates back to the Dark Ages, featuring a rotating-three barrel design and only two firing modes: as fast as safely possible and faster than safely possible. Even while in its slower firing mode, it can tear through its hundred round clip in seconds, making it one of the deadliest close-range weapons available. Users with high-grade targeting cyberware have reported that it can be used as an effective sniping weapon as well.

This game sure is brown.

Er, realistic, I mean. Gritty and realistic.

Don't worry, sometimes it's blue. Or green. Or red!

but never at the same time

This is one of those games I've had an interest in trying for a long time. I'm so glad someone else is playing it so I don't have to!

Well, heck, might be a while longer before another update. E.Y.E. isn't playing nice with Windows 10.

on hiatus

abandoned