The whisper of the unknown, or the thrill of discovery in gaming

A vast, almost incomprehensible -and apparently Vex made- unnatural cave, seemingly sprawling kilometers below the landscape of Io, extends before your eyes. You reached the cave through a mysterious portal and found a hidden passage, obfuscated by one of those creepy, odd-looking Taken blight hearts, which drops you deep from a regular yellow tinted Ionian cavern into an angular shaped, dark and bleak space.
Your journey takes you through a perilous quest, in a hostile environment, something that does not seem like you were meant to enter and explore. Yet you keep moving, through claustrophobic spaces and dangerous jumps that seem more like leaps of faith, with the occasional Taken monster attacking from afar while a terrible but still familiar voice resonates, maybe just inside your head, taunting you. Traveling deeper into the location, you find yourself crawling through a tight passage until you are greeted by waves of Taken troops, forcing you to push forward via sheer firepower and cunning, meeting old enemies, now transformed by the darkness aligned Taken into erratic shadows of themselves, and dispatching them once again.

Your quest has a handsome reward. A sniper rifle now rests in your hands and the voice is now recognizable. It is the voice of Xol, the Worm God you presumed dead after your encounter in Mars, a gigantic, terrible entity of the darkness. And now you will feed him, to some loathsome purpose.
The Whisper is one of the latest additions to Destiny 2, the often controversial sequel to the original Destiny, one of the most discussed and argued about games itself in video games short history. While the game definitely has issues and has been rightly criticized, Bungie has been taking big steps toward transforming it into something greater, more engaging, and certainly more interesting. This mission probably is that intent incarnated; discovered by accident by a user on Reddit two weeks ago, the quest requires the player to engage a particular public event on Io on a specific area (Lost Oasis), and to spot a special miniboss enemy, kill it and then find a portal that spawns on the other side of the area. This quest currently only spawns on weekends, and there was no clue or anything that it existed, not even crawling through the API the community uses to catalog the heaps of information, items, and quests the game has to offer. This spawned a frenzy on the fanbase, which raced to see what was hiding in there.

There has been some concern that the game is probably too easy, too cheerful, too funny. The Whisper, though, is anything but that: while it was eventually solved within a couple of hours, people who went in there without a clue were greeted with a brutal mission: the platforming is hostile and requires precise movement and planning, and also quick reflexes to avoid the various death traps in there. And even if you survive these complicated jumps, the path is tricky and often hidden, requiring you to figure it out by careful observation and exploration. And, after that exhausting puzzle, there is no time to rest: a massive contingent on variously shielded enemies are waiting for you, plus three tough as nails bosses in an open area with very little cover.
You will die. A lot. But death in Destiny is cheap for Guardians. All you lose is time.
Except the mission is timed. And twenty minutes is not a lot of time.
The Whisper is probably my favorite part of Destiny 2. It’s a combination of difficulty, excitement, a powerful weapon as a reward, and setting and atmosphere, which is something that I really wanted from Destiny 2. I didn’t play Destiny 1, so I’m missing a lot of what made the game the IP the juggernaut that it’s nowadays, but I’ve played a lot of Destiny 2 and while I love the game, I felt like there is a lot of potential in there to make you actually feel like you’re an immortal warrior facing huge odds to save humanity. After all, you are exploring not only familiar places on Earth, Mars, and Mercury, but also new and intriguing unknown places: Nessus, a previously inhabited centaur, now terraformed by the Vex and in the middle of a three-way war between the alien robots, the militaristic Cabal and the scavenging Fallen while a monstrous, enormous ship is threatening to eat it. Io, a moon teeming with mystery, with a city-like structure visible from afar, which houses the Pyramidion, a Vex structure with an unknown purpose. Even Titan, with its parasitic Hive infestation, has an entire abandoned structure that contains the remains of the human civilization before it all was torn to pieces by the silent war between the Traveler and the Darkness. These were my favorite locations due to how much it seemed to be hiding in there. Looking into the methadone seas of Titan, and even ignoring the giant sea monsters in there, there is a whole world we can’t reach, yet.



Traveling into the innards of Io — and, considering the bits and pieces of metal, probably the Pyramidion basement — it’s an intriguing trip. There is no obvious path, and it alternates between asphyxiating tight spaces to wide, almost agoraphobic scenes. The floor just isn’t there. We’re jumping to small platforms situated at almost impossible heights. Pieces of machines stick out from the darkness, but there isn’t a visible end to the fall. Looking into the distance, there isn’t a wall or anything that tells you how far are you from your objective. Platforms have anomalies that push you off. The machine works like clockwork to make your advance harder. Sometimes advancing takes you jumping several hundred meters into a small opening. And reaching the end takes some serious spelunking into something that feels ancient and undiscovered. It feels truly unknown.
And all the while, Xol repeats the words he used to taunt you back in Mars before you put him down with the help of Rasputin, the Warmind. There is no light here. It’s a bit scary, to be honest, once you separate your mind from the competitive mindset that takes over you with this kind of video games, but your visit here, canon-wise, it’s probably the first time something that’s not Taken has set foot in this place.
But that’s exactly what makes it so intriguing: it’s the unknown. The curiosity of what lies beyond, the push to explore and find out what’s going on there. The desire to discover what is hidden within this inscrutable place, where, clearly something is going on.
This sensation is something I’ve craved and very few games have given me: Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, the insides of the Machine frightened me with the sheer scale of it, as you slowly traveled to the belly of the monster, and your own personal battle with the machine and the struggles that make up the plot of the game, but there is something deeply unsettling in walking through places that seem abnormally huge, almost impossible, until the final set piece, where you find an apparently Central American pyramid, the purpose of which is almost impossible to imagine. SOMA’s final level too made me feel overwhelmed with dread for the unknown, trapped in the bottom of the sea, as giant, mutated sea life threatens you if you dare stray off the path, and fighting against the underwater currents, alone with your fears and the very premise of death in the middle of the pitch black darkness. SOMA is much more than its final level, of course, but it’s a memorable and unexpected experience in the descent to madness the game manages to achieve.


Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is an impressive game by any kind of metric, but there is a special mention to the apparent hell you reach upon entering Helheim, where The Beast, a colossal boar-like monster stalks you the moment you leave the safety of the light, subjecting Senua to a disturbing collage of the abuse and pain she has endured in her life, up until the battle against the creature itself, deep into the bowels of hell. Hellblade excels into dragging the player into unknown, sometimes wild, sometimes unnatural, environments, and as a result, you push forward, not nothing what lies beyond, but that being the only way: a one way trip into the underworld with the hope of saving your beloved as the only motivation.

Other games, like La Mulana, have awakened in me this sense of awe, as I entered the Tower of the Goddess and the lights went on, uncovering a place where time was something irrelevant in the middle of an ancient body of ruins. Recently, >OBSERVER_ includes such a section, the nightmarish final scenes of the game when you trek through the apparently ravaged corridors of some sort of giant lab, finding only the occasional dead body and a few monsters looking for more blood as the only signs of life, in a place where all of that equipment seems to only serve to make the place a bit more oppressive. Even a game like Marathon back in the nineties made me spend a few seconds admiring a bunch of underwater pillars and convinced me it was an incomprehensible computer housing an alien AI.



In the case of Destiny 2’s The Worm, I feel like the final battles, while exciting, fun and challenging, kinda lessen the impact of the mission, but people will disagree (and I do often). I even took it to myself to go to alone into this limbo and just look around, find the secrets, just stare in wonder at the place and curiously peek into every nook and crane. I will probably find nothing new, but that won’t stop me from trying, from living my very own discovery trek.
Maybe it was the general hopeless idea of the mission. Or the Marathon-like impossibly tall levels. Or simply the silence from our generally very chatty ghost, some sort of talking phylactery that allows the Guardians to heal and revive endlessly that plot-wise acts as an exposition radio station. This mission was special, and it’s one of gaming’s biggest strengths: the ability to put the player inside of the unknown and to let the player walk into it and discover what lies beyond.
This is something that movies can’t do (at least not yet, but in that case, would they be interactive movies? Would it even matter?), and books can’t either unless you’re reading House of Leaves. Can’t think of any other book that could put you in that situation. But games can -and do-. you don’t just play the character, you live the game, the plot is you, the discoveries lie on you, and it’s up to you, the player to make the decisions. To take your own steps. To see what you want to see.
Truth be told, many games I’m not mentioning here probably have had this effect on you. Maybe it did have that effect on you and not on me, but I like to imagine games affect every one of us differently, and what works for me, might or might not work for you. Feel free to drop me a line or tagging me on twitter, I’ll be more than happy to discuss it and discover new gems that will make me, once again, feel in wonder.
