Right at this moment I am watching a stream of Resident Evil: Requiem and started to think about science (or pseudoscience) in video games. I always love whenever there are lore bits to find about whatever explanations the devs have for the themes, events, powers, etc. in games, especially when they are related to medical fields.
Some examples for this that come to mind are Resident Evil, Bioshock, Prey (2018), Control, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Trauma Center, The Last of Us or The Division.
I don’t know what it is that fascinates me about it. Maybe my affinity for scientifiv topics in real life, maybe it relates a bit to conspiracy theories, which always entertain me in media.
How about you, anyone else here fascinated by those games? Can you recommend others that do that extremely well? Or are there games where the supposed science of it all is just too ridiculous to be taken seriously? Would love to get some thoughts on this
My favorite examples of this are in the Zero Escape games, but especially 999. The game strikes a really fun balance between a fantastical sci-fi story and something that feels grounded, despite being overall really ridiculous (I think the inclusion of a lot of real escape room-type puzzles and the Nonary Game itself just being a logic puzzle helps here).
The use of Morphogenetic Fields, ICE-9, urban legends about a cursed mummy on the Titanic - it’s all based on real concepts (except ICE-9 I think) and the game feels a bit like a conspiracy theorist’s field day.
Some spoilers about a specific real-world element below
Admittedly I’ve never really researched whether or not its use of prosopagnosia is accurate/harmful so can’t really say if the game deserves praise or not for it, but it did add to that “close to reality” feeling.
This is also something I like about the science adventure series, though I couldn’t get through Chaos;Head and prefer the show adaptations of Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes to their VN source material.
Oh the Nonary games have been on my list for ages, I need to play them finally! Knowing this it intrigues me even more. And this is the first time I heard about the cursed mummy on the Titanic, fascinating
I don’t know anything about the science adventure series yet. What do you like about it so much? :)
This has always been in the Super Robot Wars series to some degree because a lot of mech shows included have some science jargon tossed in for one reason or another, and you can often tell how old a given show is based on the science included. I still giggle that the big thing going on with the Combattler and Volts V machines is electromagnatism.
Special mention to Super Robot Wars Y, because that’s the entry that bases its entire plot around theoretical scientific theories from Godzilla: Singular Point and Getter Robo Arc, and it gets fucking wacky at point while using a lot of big scientific words that actually do come from scientific fields. The big thing going on here is time travel, probability, evolution, and artificial intelligence reaching singularity, and they get real fast and loose with just how much implication that all brings. That Godzilla anime’s plot was already bug nut crazy, but you toss in the crazy out there stuff going on with getter rays and the made up stuff Macross introduces with fold wave DNA or whatever and I don’t even know where to begin describing key plot points.
I’m only really familiar with the first three entries in the series (Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate, and Robotics;Notes) and I have strongly mixed feelings about Chaos;Head, but the pseudoscience used in these stories is a big part of the appeal. The first two also lean pretty heavily into horror elements without full-on becoming “horror.”
Chaos;Head is pretty out there. I didn’t finish it but it has a lot of pseudoscience around people able to manifest their own delusions as reality by accessing the Dirac Sea and essentially overriding reality with their own perception (people who can do this are dubbed “Gigalomaniacs,” which is pretty endearing to me). There’s a lot of pseudoscientific jargon used to explain this, but I don’t really remember it. Chaos;Head uses this to great effect to create tense horror sections where you (and the protagonist) don’t know if what you’re seeing is reality or a delusion, and it really starts to eat at you and make for great moments in the game. For me this was offset by a lot of content that I really didn’t enjoy so I put the game down after its first route.
Steins;Gate is all about time travel and also utilizes a lot of real scientific concepts with pseudoscientific applications (major plot points include the Large Hadron Collider, Kerr Black Holes, and real-world organizations and events like CERN and the John Titor messages). Steins;Gate is a very well-done time travel story to me, not necessarily because it is a perfectly airtight time travel story, but because time travel is used so effective narratively imo. Like Chaos;Head it includes a lot of horror elements (the protagonist has to experience the more unpleasant implications of time travel) but it also includes a fair amount of focus on romance, and I think that balance of pseudosci-fi, horror, and romance is really fantastic. The cast is also pretty unique, being mostly made up of a bunch of 2010 4chan dorks who live in Akihabara.
Robotics;Notes is on the surface all about building giant robots, but it focused a little bit more on emerging tech like smartphones, AR, and social media. It’s a bit unique that way because the previous entries are about really out-there concepts. I don’t think it’s quite as memorable but it shares a lot of the strengths and weaknesses of the previous entries.
Those are the only science adventure games I’ve played/watched. I rewatch Steins;Gate about once a year; it’s a comfort show for me.
There’s an interesting game called Observation which is about being on a space station.
I mention it because it might be the only accurate depiction of a space station I’ve seen in a game, you get a good feel for how life might be out there.
It does unfortunately fall into my least favourite narrative device at the end but it’s worth a shot
I have an entire bit in my Jagged Alliance 2 video where I talk about the scientific feasability of the Regen Boost item, obviously likening it to Fallout’s Stimpaks but also referencing some very promising recent research into something that could pave the way towards something like it
Oh that’s a good one, too. I think it’s interesting how media reacted to advances in genetics in the 90s/2000s. For example, when they created the Ultimate series in Marvel they changed Spider-Man’s origin from being bitten by a radioactive spider to being bitten by a genetically modified spider.
Oh that’s interesting! I already put your video on Fallout and communism on my watchlist, I’ll have to find the other one, too ^^
