u/Sleepy_C

I put off playing this for a really long time. Not because I wasn't interested in the story, but mostly because: a) I have way too many games on my steam list to get through, and b) I absolutely hate "run and hide" stealth horror. I don't need to be Leon Kennedy with an entire arsenal of weapons and round house kicking dudes, but I need some sort of weapon, the ability to takedown things, or push, or anything! Ahhhh! But I did love this. So, here are some thoughts into good & bad, ignoring anything technical (it is an older game at this point, so there's some technical jank that's expected).

Loved:

Okay, obviously, the main thing is the story. This is basically tailor made for me. An intelligent sci-fi about the existential questions of being human, purpose and value in the wake of a horrifying event. I really liked the way it unfolded from Simon in Canada, waking up at Upsilon, meeting Catherine and so on. The way new people were introduced through the notes, blackboxes, intercoms etc. was really cool as you progressed & experienced new things.

I've always been a huge fan of these games where there's sort of "parallel" narratives; the Simon & Catherine story of the present, and the "what happened to everyone at each site" of the past that you learn and witness in hindsight. That Planescape: Torment "starting in the middle" kind of storytelling is really endearing to me. I think the build-up of the Akers mystery & madness was well-done (the writing on the walls at various stations, all the intercom messages about him, and his cutscene where he traps you) and similarly the continued mystery of what happened to the team in the Abyss.

Having just read The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed (all about mind-connection over the net, entering other bodies, impersonal boundaries and mind uploads) this was an amazing chaser this week. And the revelation that the scans are copies, not transfers, was a really intense moment. In fact, all the moments of choosing whether to delete data, turn off the battery, the life support etc. were really well done. They weren't overplayed or forced on you, more of a single line of dialogue and then left to you. It made those choices feel more intense and thoughtful. Personally, I didn't delete Brandon or any of the scans, but I did turn off Omicron-Simon and the life support of the human. Phi-Simon being left there and reacted so poorly in anger at Catherine was a real gutpunch, and then him being left alone in the dark... ugh, it hurt!

I really loved the way there were numerous threads too: Simon & his past life (why is he here at all?), the late-crews decision and experiences with the ARK and scans, Akers and his madness, the WAU and it's intentions, Johan and his goals to destroy it. It felt like lots of realised characters, with different experiences and desires, all intersecting to make it really rich.

Outside were mostly my favourite sections. When you're encountering the friendly working robots, or the happy little door-opener guy. When you go off into the murk and the CURIE appears, that drone of music? Oh, sooooo good. Similarly exiting Omicron to begin the descent, seeing nothing but blackness around the stairs and the music kicks in. So very good.

Seeing all the facilities are very cool, especially the different levels of corruption and decay (especially Aker's more bloody red stuff vs. the WAU elsewhere). But they did get a little "oh another underwater bunker facility lol" compared to outside. But I did appreciate the deliberate level design; everywhere felt logical and clear, where to go, which rooms to find puzzles or solutions in. I didn't need a guide, walkthrough or hints. It just made sense.

If I had one gripe about the story, tonally there was a sort of weird transition from "scared & confused Simon" at Upsilon to "oh ok" Simon as soon as Catherine mentioned the brain scan stuff. He has an existential spiral on the zeppelin (briefly), but before that he's told they're robots with brain scans and he sort of just "oh nice, what now?" It felt kind of goofy in the moment.

I also think Jin, for how threatening he is, had no real buildup when compared to Akers, which just felt a little lacking.

Did NOT love:

The controls on a lot of the turn, push, pull, lift etc. is whack. I know this is old-game jank I said I'd ignore, but goddamn some of those moments felt like trying to charm a snake and doing weird interpretive dance with the controller. The one that was particularly bad was the electrical panel you remove, then the plunger thing you pump to restore power to escape Akers.

As I said, I hate this kind of gameplay* where your options are: run, hide, throw stuff to make noise. But it was okay 99.9% of the time because they're one-and-done. You get past the first enemy, it's over. You get past the Proxy, it's over. But I did have a few "I'm stuck in a corner, the thing is just standing right there and refusing to move" moments which I classically hate; game AI nonsense.

A funny moment though, with all his build-up, Akers felt hugely underwhelming. I legitimately didn't realise he was the guy trying to catch me with the elevator stuff in the labs. The only reason I did was I did the elevator thing, and stood in that corner against the panel and this sort of screen thing. He ran up, stared at me and just stood there for ages. I swung the panel closed and that somehow reset him and he walked off? After all the build up he was mostly an idiot you couldn't see me standing in a corner.

*Not a negative but an amused realisation too: after Akers, you can just cheese all the enemies anyway. The robot lady? Just run at her, grab the battery before she hits you. She then moves to the other side of the room, so you can just sprint out. Jin? Just run to the second door, open it, run to the corner. He hit me, I waited, then sprinted to the ladder. Just getting knocked down in the right place actually circumvented most of the need to do sneaky things. But that's more on me than anything haha.

My big "world building" dislike was the screen interference. I get that when injured it adds to things, but in sections with other effects (the sea storm, the Johan interference), it got really irritating. Johan especially, I found myself wishing he would stfu when I was trying to get the ARK and on the path to Alpha.

Conclusion:

Anyway, not to drone on, but it was an amazing experience. I'd give it a solid 9/10 overall, with the screen interference & the interaction controls being the only real detriment. I can overlook my dislike for this gameplay style because the story was so incredibly engaging. I played Amnesia: The Dark Descent many, many years ago but never played any of the sequels. I am looking forward to ONTOS though because it seems, at least setting wise, more my style like SOMA. I do hope they include the "story mode" again; I realise in hindsight I should've gone that route, but I didn't have any actual issues (Jin killed me once, Akers killed me once at the window-breaking in Theta because I ran the wrong way).

TL;DR: This was the greatest 6/10 game ever made. The story is fantastic but the actual *game* is massively clunky!

Thoughts:

I started Alan Wake years ago, but never actually finished it because the console went with my ex.. In the summer sale, I decided to pick up AW1 (the original, not remaster) and Control Ultimate Edition on Steam. I spent the last 2 days playing through AW1 (not the DLCs) and I finished a few hours ago. I loved it, from a story perspective, but god was it rough in some of the polish.

Things I loved:

The story is catnip to me. I love Twin Peaks, Stephen King, In the Mouth of Madness, Silent Hill, all things metafictional. It was like it was tailor made for me. The manuscripts as a mechanic & narrative device really were fantastic too; hints for gameplay elements (thank you tornado tip) and an additional layer of the weird multi-threaded timeline of the story? So good. Some of the scenes were a little corny but I appreciated that too in a small town Americana pastiche kind of way. Back and forth, flashbacks, dreams, the Cauldron Lake "ideas to objects" sequence, radio shows, tv shows... It was so rich and full in every way. While the episodes actual lengths varied wildly, I felt that they followed really clear "episode thriller" arcs and felt natural (Episode 3 was a bit long though).

Most of the set pieces are really great climaxes or just exciting moments. The rock show at the Anderson farm is a 10/10 gaming moment, I loved the combine harvester fight too. The spinning bridge on the way to the dam was a really cool moment.

My favourite characters were Nightingale for all his writer names (the Dan Brown call out made me laugh out loud), and Weaver (love a Log Lady reference). Especially because Weaver came across as a not-particularly-happy-helper too. She was fulfilling her role and took it very seriously, but some of the yellow writing & her comments about being used made me tense there was a betrayal coming in that tunnel...

Music is 10/10. Both the in game ambient music, the random bits of Poets of the Fall or Old Gods to appear, and the episode credit songs. The TV structure in general lent itself really well to the use of full tracks, so I loved that.

What didn't I love?

The enemies were incredibly shallow. The variety over all was pretty disappointing, but I think made worse by their frequency. A lot of the forest sections are just "run 50m, aha! 3 more guys!" over and over. And I didn't personally mind the gameplay but "torch -> bang" on a loop for the same enemies gets a little tiring. Although maybe playing RE4:Remake recently with rambo Leon and his 40 weapons against hundreds of different enemies tainted my mind a little here.

Anything with the birds kind of sucked. They weren't difficult but a lot of the sequences on mine carts, cable cars, or narrow bridges felt far more annoying than anything tense, especially with the slow-mo "Oh look!" moment for birds constantly.

The constant removal of your stuff got kind of silly. Some made obvious sense: being arrested, Hartman's clinic. But some felt like a weird way to just thin out your resources for difficulty. You fall out of the helicopter, get a revolver and torch, survive 10 seconds in front of a door, then immediately get a rifle, flares, tons of ammo etc.? Why not just let him have his stuff and make the door moment more enemy-intense? Or even worse, you take the gun off the Sheriff from the dam, and you set off on your own. You're telling me you only take that gun??? Not even a torch Alan!? You drive 300m down the road and get a few random things, drive into the tunnel and get fully re-equipped anyway! I couldn't decide if it was a poor attempt at balance (you load up to defend the helicopter, have to lose it all so you're not OP after) or it was something weird about how the levels were made hah.

And there's some 2010 jank. A few segments had serious lag issues on my pretty serious computer. Especially when the enemy fog + lightning effects (esp. around the transformer station) and spawns all lined up things got real 1 fps a couple of times. I also had to set the game to Windowed before closing every time, or it'd black-screen forever. There are some online fixes for these and obviously the game got remastered. But it has real "first big ambitious project in years" energy.

Overall opinion:

If this was taken just for its story: this is a 10/10 gaming experience, one of the great examples of storytelling in the medium.

Stripped of its story: this is not tolerable in my opinion.

Together: it's a solid 6/10 that I thoroughly enjoyed. Like a poorly made indie film with the best acting you've ever seen and an experimental screenplay.

I want more.

What's next?

I vaguely know the setting & idea of Control. A friend told me that since I loved Fringe (tv) that I'll also really love that. And I know a fair bit about AW2 (seen a lot of clips, the song sequence, some of the cooler tech moments of forest transitions etc.). I'm very excited and I get the impression that the roughness of AW1 wasn't really carried over. But:

What do I play next after the two AW1 DLC?

I know Control shares the universe but is it important narratively to AW2? My plan is to play both DLCs of AW1 --> whatever should come next. Can I AW1 -> AW2? Or is Control an important stepping stone?

So, I just wrapped up my first full-playthrough. I played on Normal difficulty and finished at just shy of 11 hours. As someone who has loved survival horrors my entire life, and also loved franchises like Blame!, Dead Space, Ghost in the Shell, Ergo Proxy this felt like it was tailor made for me every second of the game.

I loved the grungy German-Chinese tech aesthetics. I loved the haunting and uncomfortable music. I didn't really love those two shockingly loud sounds at the save terminal each time (anxiety to the max!). I found it challenging but not oppressive. I thought the bosses were fun, especially being able to approach them in slightly cheesy ways. I thought the puzzles were difficult but not ridiculous, although Nowhere really tested my patience (and needed help more than once). I tried to explore everything I could, and read everything I could; not sure I missed anything noteworthy although I know some memories are locked behind subsequent playthroughs, and there's multiple endings.

I really felt this game was like Twin Peaks all over again; something so amazingly singular, but clearly inspired and a love letter to its influences. It was just so fantastic. But I want to make sure I made "sense" of what was going on.

What I think is happening:

Ariane Yeong is dying from some sort of radiation poisoning caused by Penrose-512's shields failing or bioresonance feedback poisoning(?) and her incredibly powerful bioresonant psychic powers, are mixing with the power of the Flesh (or the Dreamer?) below the facility, and are influencing the reality around her à la Silent Hill.

Ariane's partner, Elster (player character), is a Replika (previously Gestalt soldier, whose mind was copied into the Replika, she met Ariane on the ship as a Replika) who is trying to traverse this influenced space, to fulfill a promise to kill Ariane to end her suffering. But because of Ariane's influence or the Flesh below the mining facility, the story is being looped repeatedly.

What we experience & work through is actually multiple loops & iterations of Elster & Ariane's (maybe also Alina? Who might be a previous version of Elster or another soldier who fought alongside Elster?) life's smashed together into an amalgam. Some of the characters come to think they are, or are influenced by, these memories & lives (Falke because of her bioresonance sort of antenna picks up these looped lives) because of their exposure to the Flesh. Adler is stuck in the loop too, but is unable to escape it or pursue his love (Falke) so he just keeps trying to end the loop by killing Elster somehow. He is seemingly the only one aware of the loop occurring due to his diaries.

In the ending I got (Memory): For whatever reason, Ariane does not recognise Elster (too sick, too long, too many loops degrading her mind?) and therefore remember the promise. Elster dies from her wounds beside Ariane, who places a hand on her head, possibly remembering her in the last moments, or simply feeling a compassionate need to comfort her?

Am I missing anything major? I think that feels "right" but I'm sort of unsure on specific little details like Alina, or Falke's exact role in things.

I am a bit stuck. I have reached the trio of rooms from HELL in Nowhere. Y'know, the unholy abomination trio of rooms.

You pass through the Penrose keypad door ↑ and you enter ↓ the room with the Mynah, Storch, and 2(3?) other enemies with the small wooden doll. I got the doll, got the 2 other loot pickups, and killed 1 enemy + the storch (flare gun ftw).

You then ← and enter room from Hell no.2 with 2 storchs, dark as hell, and go for the serpent ring. I got this purely by panic sprinting and using a stun-gun to clear a path. Both of these rooms took me a few attempts to get cleanly (ish) through.

Now I'm really stuck though. You go → from the Mynah room and enter the corridor with the storch + the radio frequency Kolibri. As soon as I enter the Storch is on me and with the Kolibri stuff flashing and distorting, I keep getting overwhelmed and headbutted to death.

What do I do in here? I know I need to go through here for the Incense (I looked at the wiki walkthrough after getting really really really stuck on where I was trying to go through the hell rooms) but I'm sort of stumped.

Also: this trio of rooms is horrible (not in a bad way but like oh god why did you do this to me? kind of way).

I have been looking at this game for a long time but picked it up during the steam summer sale and finally found time to commit to it. I'm having so much fun, I've only played 2 nights so far (in little chunks because my stressed heart can't take survival horror in big doses!). I just defeated Mynah and saved after getting elevator-sparta'd.

Some things I'm loving:

• The aesthetic mix of kind of cartoony-anime scenes, the grungy industrial German-Chinese cyberpunk fusion, the incredibly cool pixel-3D models & design is just a treat to look at. Especially on character introductions (like Mynah) the shift from their face & name card, to the various German bits, computer & company info, and from "cutscene to gameplay" shift is so cool.
• The music is insane. Especially in the Mynah fight but during some of the more panicky moments too; it's so intense and rhythmic, like a drum beat of insanity going on.
• It's tough but not insane. I'm not exactly a survival-horror, resource-management god. But I've enjoyed how I've run out of ammo & resources a few times, but managed to sneak & evade my way through. When a boss arrived, the game was generous & plentiful for me. The fight took a little bit of scurrying in circles to identify what I was meant to do but then it was clean & clear.
• The memory/dream(?) sequences are super cool. All the different parts where you sort of go into first-person vision mode are so interesting; the snowy rooftop, the train, and the school(?) bullying scene. It makes the lore so rich and interesting. I'm taking all sorts of notes, screenshotting all the quotes & passages in the cutscenes and trying to piece it all together.
• The puzzles are so cool; some of them are a little unclear (the lock-picking thing was visually just difficult! The Incinerator was a little difficult to "decode") but the cyphers & radio frequency stuff, especially that it's randomized so you can't just cheat the solutions, is really cool. It feels like a brain-teaser without being insanely obtuse.

I'm having a lot of fun so far. I'm 3.5 hours in to beating Mynah which I think is okay progress? 2 deaths so far: one because I got caught between two enemies in a room and realised I was trying to reload, and another because I didn't realise I had used my last stun and got slapped to death hah. Both on silly little things. I'm not sure how long this is supposed to be, but I'm also going very slowly and stealthily, trying to read everything & make little notes of things.

My only two complaints:

• Sometimes when you shoot and enemy and they stumble back and fall over, they're so close to doors I can't stomp on them without entering the door
• The use of thermite on downed enemies is kind of weirdly inconsistent. Sometimes I have to be right on top, sometimes I can be a little bit away from them.

I love it though. 10/10.

Something I was wondering today because there's a big discussion about Brandon Sanderson going on over on X. Basically, Sanderson is known for very simple, kind of dumbed-down prose and he releases at stupidly fast speeds. He makes good worlds, and he's the magic systems guy. But opinion overall is divided. Sanderson is, at my count, 75 books deep right now (split between novels, novellas, short story collections etc.). His debut was in 2005.

In the sci fi space, Tchaikovsky is known for being incredibly prolific too, but not quite to the same level. He's a few years older, his debut was 2008, and (at my count) he's at 43 novels and 14 novellas. But I've never seen the same criticisms of Tchaikovsky, that I see of Sanderson (very simple prose, kind of dumbed down, scared of adjectives etc.). In fact, he gets award noms & wins left, right & center, he gets critical attention, he gets strong reviews. Sanderson moves units, but every time he comes up online there seems to be this ragging on him as "basic commercial man" which I never see with Tchaikovsky.

What separates Tchaikovsky from Sanderson? Is he just a better prose stylist across the board? Does he fluctuate massively in quality and there's just so many books that it still looks like he's drowning awards?

I've only read 2 Tchaikovsky novels, he's been a blindspot for me these last few years. But looking at his enormous backlog, I was curious what kind of thing I'm getting myself into if I start committing to chunks of it.

My play through summary:

Saw some people during post mortems on their gameplay and thought I might do the same! I just finished, clocking in around 35 hours in the end. I only reloaded one aspect to fix something (I dumped a ton of meds right before a moment that cleansed a bunch of status', so reloaded 5 mins earlier to save them lol). Lost 2 Yellow points throughout the game from anxiety limits (phone call in the bedroom at the start with Melita and during the interrogation under the poetry magazine). In the latter case I thought to myself "something big is going to happen, I should slam some drugs" and then didn't. Peaked my anxiety and was 1 point off delirium!

I went for a sort of middle-of-the-road build setup. Early customised setup was very yellow + purple heavy, but noticed so many good uses for red later on (Shadowplay, Instincts & Doppelgang felt everywhere) I semi-shifted into that space. In terms of thoughts, I went quite intellect + shadowplay heavy (umbral host is GOAT'd); memories of the crew, umbral host, jar of faces etc. I also took the searching for 'it' thing and it was locked 99% of my entire playthrough from failing checks, hah.

Didn't finish everything. Didn't find all 6 cups (got 5), didn't finish off every quest. Didn't bother with certain checks (some of the really low % chance ones, that you kept peaking at throughout the game I ended up forgetting). I purchased a gun instead of making it.

But I had an absolute blast. I really think this is a 9/10, or 9.5/10 experience. My only negatives were: some of the issues with voice acting, which at first did not bother me but later in the game became a tiny bit more noticeable. And that I hit a few points where I felt I had to run in circles till I could sleep again, because I had failed 1 too many things and didn't want to slam my entire inventory of drugs to fix it. I felt a few more "ah fuck you're stuck waiting" moments than I remember in Disco.

Lots of complaints about the difficulties of the rolls. I'll just add:

• Failed a 92% on Estoc's attack
• Passed a 10% on Oskar's train
• Anything 50-75% = fail
• Anything else 85+% = passed
• Everything <5% = passed.

Some very weird variety!

Thoughts on the game & writing itself

I am going to stake my position as this: This is a better game than Disco Elysium in terms of mechanics & design of the investigation. I personally think the writing is better on an individual scene-to-scene level, and I also prefer the setting overall (the clear Operation Condor & post-70s Western interference in Latin-America parallels are hnngg so good). I however think Disco Elysium is more well-rounded as an artistic piece. The emotional & narrative resonance felt more cohesive there; Harry's journey was the journey of him, Revachol & those around him, Cascade's journey felt like her own parallel to Portofiro's in a way. Maybe that's a personal preference but I think the emotional notes within Disco feel more impactful as a result. Whereas here was two threads dancing around each other, sometimes pulling away from the moments for the other.

Mechanically I much prefer this game over DE. Things felt tighter, more responsive, generally just better oiled as a machine. I also think clarity over things going on (status effects, upgrades etc.) was clearer. But that latter point might just be from experience with DE informing my play here. The investigation here felt far more engaging though, 100%. It sometimes felt like Harry & Kim were on rails in DE, go here, do this, go there, do that. With very little variety in exactly how to approach or discover things. There was a lot going on around you (and within you) but those felt more like separate narrative threads while you followed the route of the investigation. Zero Parades felt way more mysterious, multi-threaded & vast in its approach. I could bounce all over the show gathering clues, hints, different ideas. I could find things myself, learn all about it, then have a reveal from another character I could surprise with my info. The loose ends journal was really helpful with this, but also so many things that were clearly "loose ends" which weren't recorded; when you remembered something character X said, when talking to character Y, it was a real "A ha! I've got it!" moment.

Three specific narrative aspects I loved

So, the specifics of this story & its inspirations are going to be dug through and written about for ages. But I have two little contributions, half baked, at this point:

1. Cascade's self-perception and the "mistake" 5 years ago

No matter how you approach Cascade's relationship with her past, it feels like it trends very negative. Obviously you got put in the freezer but even the dismissive or "I had to do it" options felt tinged with regret & sadness. A lot of Cascade's perceptions of the crew, memories around it, engagements with them, feel like Cascade is beating herself up endlessly.

It felt really good to see the little hints that Cascade's perception of herself didn't really align with the perceptions of other people. Boatman early-on kind of hints about how Tempo trusted and spoke-up Cascade; this can be brushed off as a trap or a misinterpretation. But hearing Yana's explanation, after the Bazaar escape, where she insists Tempo spoke defensively of Cascade and the decisions in the past felt really good. The other crew all had varying views & relations to the past but overall it felt like Cascade's view (self-loathing, regret, guilt) didn't necessarily parallel reality. Beyond any redemption or justifications, there was also interpretation that mattered.

2. The games focus on bootlegs, copies, mimicry.

I think this will be the big obvious discussion point for many. But the way this game focuses its world around the idea of bootlegs, copies, facsimiles, artifices, masks and the like is so interesting. There's the obvious meta-analysis of Zero Parades as a shadow of Disco Elysium, the new studio in relation to the old. But throughout the narrative itself there are so many interesting ideas about authenticity, the value of uniqueness, the purpose of derivatives. Photos, recordings,

Not to just go list-mode but the areas I thought were interesting that i know I'll be stewing on over the next few weeks:

• Cascade now & Cascade 5 years ago: Is she the same Cascade, does she even want to be? Is successfully fulfilling the role of the super-spy going to be anything more than a parody of her past?
• Is the Tempo bootlegged by the device really "Tempo"? Is there more to something than its copied & reproduced self? (This goes for the supposedly-copied Luzian ministers too, as well as their reproduced, distributed & bootlegged culture flooding into Portofiro for the Réunion).
• And is the experience or emotions from the Miracle Line authentic, or are they a pale shadow of real connection? Does the fact the Duchess knows so much make a difference?

And lastly:

3) The use of French in this game

As someone who speaks French (fluently) as a second language, the way the za/um games have utilised French has always fascinated me. This is obviously not our world but the differences don't extend down to entirely fictitious languages (despite names sometimes being made up).

In Disco Elysium, French signals the old cosmopolitan world & prestige of the states that once were. It's the language of theory and ideology. All that real-world baggage of revolution, Enlightenment, existentialism and structuralism drips through the worlds own engagement with these ideas, the failed revolutions or forgotten losses. It also does so while feeling, in many cases, like a parody of pretentious academia. It's not so much that French felt mocked but more than it felt a little ironic throughout the game.

In Zero Parades, French in general feels a lot more hostile. It's not that it's the language of evil or anything but it is more strongly directed in the story as the language of the expanding neoliberal world. The agents of EMTERR, L'empire sans territoire (aka coolest evil institution name ever), speak the most French in the game. The interrogatrix (god, that's a good word) herself slipping in and out during her flirting with Cascade feels like the mask slipping between her role within the expanding bank & her personal eroticism in the moment.

Anyway...

I loved this. I think it's going to be, like Disco Elysium, one of my all-time favourite games. It's funny though: i'm really not big on wordy games mostly. I love giant dense novels (the American postmodernists kind of thing) but for games I've always been very stealth, horror, survival focused. But something about these games gets really deep into the grey matter & scratches an itch for me I didn't know I had.

Any recommendations for future games would be appreciated too 😄 I've seen some threads I now need to go back & dig through. Esoteric Ebb is on the watchlist but that's about it.

English for those who need.

The video is available on X here. So far there is no official YouTube release (lots of YouTube accounts uploading the tease clip in their own languages though).

A first clip before we even have a trailer is crazy work imo. But it premiers at Cannes next week (May 17th), so hopefully we learn a bit more / get a proper trailer soon. It's his first feature in 8 years!

Premise:

>In the remote village of Hope Harbor, near the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), when a tiger is suspected to have appeared and local police chief Bum-seok is alerted, it throws the community into chaos. But what begins as a local emergency soon spirals into a deeper, more terrifying mystery, one that forces the town's residents to confront the unknown.