Video Game / Ixion

In DOLOS We Trust

"We set sail on this new sea because there is hope to be found, horizons to explore, and because our very existence depends on it. I give you the stars! I give you the VOHLE engine!"

— Vanir Dolos

IXION is a colony management/city-builder survival game by Bulwark Studios, the developers behind Crowntakers and Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus, released for PC on December 7, 2022.

By the year 2049, a series of ecological disasters have prompted increased focus on space exploration and the potential colonization of other planets. Leading the charge is the DOLOS Corporation, who together with the new-age "Ashtangite" religion have formed a committee known as the Marduk Council to send the mobile Space Station Tiqqun on humanity's first-ever extrasolar expedition, via an Extradimensional Shortcut through "self-similar space."

Naturally, it goes horribly wrong.

As the administrator of the Tiqqun, you emerge from a test run of the VOHLE engine in lunar orbit to find that its FTL jump has not only destroyed the moon, but has flung you an unknown amount of time into the future, where humanity has been rendered all but extinct. Following emergency protocols and some cryptic logs from your long-dead superiors, you set out with the remnants of humanity in search of a habitable planet to colonize, wary of the dangers that have emerged in your absence...

The game focuses heavily on resource management, with players scavenging and mining for resources to repair the Tiqqun's constantly deteriorating hull and expand the station. The game also features a morale mechanic inspired by 11 Bit Studios' Frostpunk, where players must juggle the needs and requests of the station's occupants. The game also has a strong narrative focus for a city-builder, with a definite goal and endgame for your journey, and frequent storylets that fill in the gaps of what happened to humanity between the station's past and its present.

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IXION contains examples of these tropes:

• Absent Aliens: There is some weird stuff you can find amidst the stars, but none of it is explicitely originating from alien civilisations, leaving humans as the only sapient species seen.
• After the End: The entire game after the prologue takes place in the wake of the Earth's devastation and the near-extinction of humanity.
• Alternate Universe: There are many implications that the VOHLE and later IXION engine don't actually allow you to travel at light speed, but rather that they shift you into another universe. The idea of "Self-Similar Drive", and the fact that you keep running into people that are similar to your own, but not quite the same, implies that you're not even remotely close to your own universe by the end.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • After a patch, research items that are mandatory to the main story path cost no Research points.
  • Advanced buildings that process a resource to create usable materials, like Polymer and Electronics, do not cost of any of that material to build in case you're completely out at the time.
  • Your science, mining and cargo ships can travel through ice fields with no problems - it's only the electrical storms that require careful navigation to avoid.
• Apocalypse How: Class 3a, or close to it. The Earth is destroyed after the Moon is ripped apart in the "Lunaclysm", as a side effect of the VOHLE drive firing for the first time.
• Applied Phlebotinum. The Fraus tachyons, usually present and emitted from the self-similar space. At the minimum, they can be used to add some boost to your ships engines. At the maximum, they can be used to make the known laws of physics go stand in a corner.
• Asteroid Miners: This is your main means of gaining raw materials (iron, carbon, silicon, hydrogen and ice), all of which need to be processed before they can be turned into useful materials.
• The Ark: The Tiqqun ends up being this by accident, even though it was only a prototype that was meant to test interstellar flight, paving the way for later vessels.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • Roads cost no resources, and can be freely deleted without requiring the worker bots to drive up to them.
  • All of your workers are multi-skilled, able to handle any job from researching science to working a steel mill to farming insects.
  • The Tiqqun and your space fleet — clearly using reaction engines — doesn't need to be refueled. Otherwise, it would be very easy to get stranded in the void.
  • Water is consumed by some food-producing buildings, but not by your crew. Similarily, you don't need to worry about maintaining breathable air.
• All There in the Manual: You'll miss out on a lot of plot details if you haven't thoroughly explored the game's promotional website and engaged in some cryptography with the lines that flash over the screen during a "Naomi Protocol" decision.
• Always a Bigger Fish: A narrative in-retrospect example. You find the Protagoras barely hanging on after being brutalized by the United Nations ship Etemenaki and are told to prepare yourself and the Tiqqun to face it - only by the time you catch up to it in the next chapter the Etemenaki has been utterly destroyed by the Black Market Society ship Piranesi.
• Apocalyptic Log: You will encounter several of these in abandoned/destroyed ships and research stations.
• Awesome, but Impractical. The Piranesi's main weapon. It is capable of destroying a planet and knocking it off its orbit to the edge of its star system in one discharge, but using it puts an enormous strain on its platform. The Piranesi spends an indeterminable amount of time recovering after firing once, and even when the Tiqqun wakes it up again it thankfully still hasn't recovered fully, so the weapon is never seen firing within the game itself.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Ashtagnites believe that the structure of human society as it evolved on Earth is irreparably flawed, seeking to instead emulate ant colonies in order to create a more enlightened one wherein there's no distinction between the individual and society and mankind is holistically integrated into the ecosystem. This involves casting behind them the three great "illusions" of traditional human society: self-worth (as everyone is actually equally valuable), common sense (which they regard simply as a justification for making irrational, emotion-based decisions where logic is required) and free will (as each individual's decision at any given juncture is the end result of too many factors beyond their control for free will to matter).
• Boss Battle: The devs actually worked one into a city builder! Because your city is a starship, your city can have space battles!
• Brain Uploading: It's how AIs are created. You can tell which of the ones you encounter over the game were created using the brain of which character based on their use of characteristic catchphrases and mannerisms.
  • Olympia is based on Barjaville, with his distinctive French accent, long-winded manner of speech and catchprase of "trust in genetic conatus".
  • Valhalla is Dolos, with his sombre, gentle tone and even repeating his final speech to mankind as its last words.
  • Naraka is Battista — greedy, gluttonous and arrogant, making the same chewing sounds as it speaks to you and repeating his line about "opportunity".
  • Finally, Edden is Naomi, the woman who developed the process and used to be a member of the Marduk Council, until the others had her killed and forcibly uploaded onto the ship when she started questioning the extremity of their methods.
• Bread and Circuses: Like Frostpunk, you can build fighting arenas to give your people entertainment and emotional release to increase a sector's Stability.
• Canine Companion: Throughout your travels you may discover a dog frozen in a cryopod, whose master put it there in his own stead. Thawing it and keeping it on the station would be a breach of the station's sanitary protocols, but if you do so anyway it will become the canine companion to the entire crew, giving the whole station a permanent stability boost. Notably, it is the only event that permanently buffs your stability. Keeping the dog alive until the ending will earn you an achievement and the dog will even feature in the ending cutscenes.
• Cargo Cult: Eventually a cult worshipping the Tiqqun's hull itself will emerge amidst your crew. Going along and building temples to the cult will improve stability in the sectors where a temple is present, and with research add even more benefits.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Science ships are white, mining ships are yellow, and cargo ships are red.
  • Each sector has its own colour, as does each group of buildings for specialisation, though there's no need to match the building group colours to the sectors unless you want to.
• Detonation Moon: The launch of the Tiqqun rips a huge chunk of the Moon into Earth orbit, and rapidly accelerates the collapse of the Earth's already-degrading biosphere.
• Dramatic Space Drifting: When parked next to a derelict arkship, your crew does not like seeing floating corpses outside the window!
• Early Game Hell: You can make things a lot harder on yourself by not prioritizing branches of research that give bonuses to the entire playthrough, like faster passive research or cheaper solar panel construction. Losing too many people to early accidents or story events can also make it difficult to get enough buildings manned to replenish your losses.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Following the Lunaclysm the UN had turned into an extremely authoritarian world dictatorship in their own way to save what's left of the humanity (while purging the designated scapegoats along with other undesirables in the process). They've got a lot of manpower but this did not help them with breaching the technological gap - while the Etemenanki managed to cripple the Protagoras and was implied to be more technological advanced than Tiqqun, examining its remains reveals it was running on the most barebones unreliable systems and technologies which put extreme pressure and attrition on its crew. As a result, the more technically advanced Piranesi literally and figuratively tore it into pieces.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: This is what the VOHLE jumps allow you to do. At least, they do once you replace the faulty VOHLE engine with the prototype IXION one.
• FTL Test Blunder: The final cutscene of the Justified Tutorial shows this trope in action, when the Moon is destroyed. Moreover, when the Tiqqun encounters the survivors in the Protagoras, it is revealed that every usage of the VOHLE drive results in the destruction of the nearest celestial body.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: In chapter 5, should you choose to disconnect Edden, any alerts or announcements normally voiced by her will be silent instead.
• Great Offscreen War: A three-way example fought between DOLOS, the United Nations of Earth, and the Black Market Society. By the time the Tiqqun passes through the area, the only known survivors are the DOLOS-aligned station Protagoras, the AI-controlled Black Market Society ship Piranesi, the Ashtagnites on Remus, and anyone who managed to bail out into a cryopod.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Since the game ends with the Tiqqun ramming the Piranesi to finally defeat it after the entire crew has been evacuated, somebody has to stay behind to guide its final approach. Normally, that would be your trusty AI, Edden. If you've deactivated Edden in order to detect Romulus, it'll be you, the Administrator... unless you had the foresight to keep a copy of Valhalla, which could be used to pilot the ship into the Piranesi instead while Everyone Lives.
• Homeworld Evacuation: Even before the disaster, the Earth was reaching the point where it could no longer support humanity. However, the DOLOS administration staff will admit that there was no chance of transporting all of humanity to a new home, and that most people would be left behind on the dying Earth.
• Hurl It into the Sun: During your initial encounter with the Piranesi, the only way to stop it and leave the system you're currently in is by detonating the system's pulsar. Emphasis on "stop" since the ''Piranesi'' returns damaged, but otherwise operational, in the next system.
• Humanoid Abomination: The ZY6073 specimen. If you let it out of its cryopod it will kill your entire science ship crew and somehow assimilate their bodies into itself, turning all six bodies into a singular organism. If you let it board the Tiqqun and attempt to capture it intact it will kill 12 more crewmembers before going down. We don't get any detailed text descriptions of what it looks like, but if the event art is any indication then the thing is Body Horror incarnate.
• Human Popsicle: Discovering human bodies preserved in cryogenic pods and reviving them with cryo stations is your primary means of increasing the station's population.
• Human Resources: While you have the option to turn corpses into waste products to be recycled, this policy takes a hit on sector morale.
• Hyper Space Is A Scary Place: Some of the anomalies you encounter depict the mind-bending horrors that can result from messing around with Self-Similar Space. Dimensions, time and causality are wonky over there. Some of the highlights include:
  • Your scientists being driven insane by the indescribable horrors they encounter inside a structure larger on the inside.
  • A scientist disappearing into a mysterious, mirrorlike sphere, only to be found hundreds of light years away, on a completely different planet... as a colossal, kilometers long corpse.
  • A "maze" of mysterious, mirrored crystals large enough for a Science Ship to fly through. Shatter the crystals, and the last you'll see of the scientists is their own corpses, perfectly sliced into pieces as if was themselves physically shattered. Don't, and the last surviving scientist will return a few hours later... decades older and having spent said time going insane in the maze.
• Konami Code: Entering the code during gameplay grants you a hidden message from Naomi, further explaining her feelings towards DOLOS and the Marduk Council.
• Laser-Guided Karma:After repeated failed attempts to find habitable planets, the UN leadership lost all hope on survival and instead focus on directing Etemenanki and UN Forces to brutalize Dolos survivors. In the process, they abandoned fellow UN ship Huizinga, robbed and left dismantled Dolos ship Protagoras for dead. It can only be described as poetic justice when Piranesi tore Etemenanki apart and cast its debris adrift.
• Mad Scientist: The most prominent members of the Marduk Council represent rare examples of Mad Sociologists, seeking to use big data-based algorithmic predictions of public trends, constant surveillance and applied memetics in order to control and shape society (the "mad" part being that, in the process, they've come to view individuals as nothing more than mathematical variants, have no concern for how many people must die for their changes to stick, and have never asked anyone whether they'd like society changed like that). Also like a typical mad scientist, it's suggested that at least part of the extremity of their actions namely, knowingly causing the Lunaclysm and killing off most of humanity just so a few thousands could resettle a planet on their terms was driven by insane bitterness over their ideas being dismissed and willingness to go to any length to prove they were right.
  • Of course, other members of the Council, like Munchi and Battista, are plain-old traditional Mad Scientists who performed unethical human experiments at great cost of life.
• Made a Slave:The reward for associating with Dolos or being unsightly in the eyes of UN leadership is to become fodder in Etemenanki's notoriously dangerous reactor.
• Made of Iron: Near the tail end of the campaign, the Piranesi, the BLS' hyper-advanced, self-sustaining, AI-driven starship, survives being lured into an exploding star well enough that it's still a planet-ending threat until rammed with the Tiqqun!
  • Etemenanki is a Down Played Trope, as the text claims it is made of strong material on multiple occasions. The planet-destroying Piranesi was exhausted and broken into a slumber after destroying it, but Etemenanki still managed to leeave behind a system's worth of somewhat intact debris (with some individual modules like the reactor keeps its shape altoghether) that Tiqqun's crew can analyze.
• Mechanical Abomination: The Piranesi. It's interior is so advanced it seems almost organic, it bleeds when badly injured, it generates a seemingly endless swarm of hunter-killer drones to "digest" anything it takes offense to and it is controlled by a mad AI hell-bent on consuming all in its path. Most disturbingly of all there is no mention of a crew and, if the tank full of the decaying bodies of the Etemenaki's crew are any indication, it might literally be an Eating Machine.
• Meaningful Name: Tiqqun might be a reference to the idea of Tiqqun Olam (although it's mispronounced by the game's characters), a concept in Jewish philosophy referring to the duty to improve the world of those who have the means to do so — a spot-on representation of the Marduk Council's intentions.
• Mêlée à Trois: After the Tiqqun's shakedown flight causes the moon to explode, spacefaring humanity devolves into three warring factions: the vengeful United Nations, the "enemies of humanity" DOLOS corporation, and the opportunistic Black Market Society.
• Mile-Long Ship: The Tiqqun is a toroid space station approximately 4km in diameter, and it's capable of self-propelled movement. It's still dwarfed by the Protagoras, and especially by the Etemenanki and the Piranesi. The diameter of Piranesi is similar to Tiqqun's, but the former was several times longer than the latter, while the individual modules (like the reactor) of Etemenanki are roughly Piranesi-sized. There is also the UN ship in The Immensity event, which left behind a debris field several thousand kilometers wide, making it more of a Planet Spaceship.
• Morale Mechanic: As the story progresses, the crew has increasing reasons to fall into despair, and you have to find ways to counteract the growing 'Dead Earth Sickness' and prevent them from losing trust in your leadership. Angry and overworked people are also more likely to have accidents or go on strike.
• Negative Space Wedgie: Your science ships encounter a lot of these. Some are survivable...
• N.G.O. Superpower: DOLOS Aerospace Engineering Corporation, a private company that unqestionably leads the space race and bails out space installations of the failing UN. Following the Lunaclysm it still musters enough strength to finish its second star-travelling space station and make a good headway into their journey to Remus, even after they've been declared enemies of humanity and the whole world, led by the regalvanised and radicalised UN, turned against them.
• Noone Could Survive That: A non-human example with the Piranesi. After you make it eat a pulsar emission and your crew boards its insides again to find the Remus coordinates they notice that its structure is ruptured and decaying, and conclude that its going to collapse on itself soon. In the next chapter the Piranesi comes back with a vengeance, not exactly in the top shape but still dangerous enough to destroy a planet or two.
• No Full Name Given: Naomi's first name is never revealed, likely due to her defection from the Marduk Council and subsequently becoming an Unperson amongst them.
• No Recycling: Averted. Every time you deconstruct a building or ship, you get all of the resources back that was used to originally create it. Also, a major part of the interconnected industries is taking waste products from factories, farms and homes and recycling them into something else.
• Organic Technology:
  • The Ashtangites use it as part of their transhumanist, eco-societal agenda. On Remus, this involves such things as buildings grown out of rocks by introducing engineered, microscopic fungi into them (which hollow out the insides while secreting enzymes which strengthen the "walls"), fields plowed by oxen whose tails were modified into farm tools, and long-range communication via birds with organic radio and ultrasonic capabilities. They also possess incredible genetic engineering abilities, going so far as to, in one of the endings, be able to modify the entire population of the Tiqqun into green-skinned posthumans like them simply by introducing retrovirii into the atmosphere.
  • The starship Piranesi, while never explicitly stated to be organic, is said to look from the inside more like a living creature than a machine, in order to highlight just how alien and impossibly advanced is the technology used to build it.
• Planet Destroyer: The Piranesi is capable of this.
• Propaganda Machine: One of the functions of the DLS Centre is to use propaganda to keep morale up.
• Punny Name: Tiqqun is pronounced like "Tycoon", essentially making the game Space Station Tycoon.
• Ramming Always Works: The only way to permanently defeat the Piranesi is to ram the Tiqqun into it after turning the latter into an Action Bomb for good measure.
• Recycled IN SPACE!: Frostpunk... IN SPACE! The coolest thing about a city that's a spaceship is that it can move... and fight!
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The Piranesi is dark steely gray with orange highlights, and its The Dreaded flagship of the amoral Black Market Society.
• Reduced to Ratburgers: Your first available food source is the Insect Farm. Another effective but questionable food source is the Mushroom Wall, which turns waste products into edible fungi.
• Refining Resources: Almost all of the resources you can collect need to be refined into a usable resource with a specialised building. This includes people due to having to thaw out cryopods.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: The fifth chapter brings you a system chock-full of Roman theme names. Most prominent of these is Remus, the only inhabitable world, named after one of the two mythological twin children of Numitor (another planet). In the Roman founding myth, he quarreled with his brother over whether to found a city on the Palatine Hill over the Lupercal caves or the Aventine Hill, all of which received namesake planets as well. The presence of all of these worlds and particularly one named after the dead brother Remus, combined with the apparent absence of his elder brother Romulus, founder of Rome and culprit of fratricide, is also a massive clue that your own computer systems are systematically lying to you - there is an uninhabited inhabitable world named Romulus, twin to Remus.
  • Several of the ships and many engines pick up their names from religion and myth. A tiqqun/tikkun is a book used to prepare for reading (tiqqun qor'im) or writing (tiqqun soferim) a Torah scroll, as well as Tiqqun Olam, a concept in Jewish philosophy referring to the duty to improve the world of those who have the means to do so — a spot-on representation of the Marduk Council's intentions. Its replacement engine Ixion is named after a figure in Greek myth was not only the father of the centaurs (apropos for an engine), but also the reputed first kin-slayer of Greek myth and a grievous repeat offender of xenia, the fundamental concept of Greek hospitality and guest-rights, hinting that DOLOS may have known more about the engine design's fundamental instabilities than they let on). Etemenanki was a great ziggurat dedicated to the god Marduk and ultimately destroyed, eventually promoted to head of the Babylonian pantheon and patron of Babylon, which is simultaneously apropos for the great ruin you find and terribly ironic for a UN ship with an absolute hatred for the destruction visited on Earth by DOLOS and the Marduk Council, and so ruled by that hate that they would destroy the first other ark of humans - the last other surviving humans in the galaxy they knew - they found for no other reason than because it was launched by DOLOS.
  • AI names are taken from mythological realms where gods or departed souls reside. This is a case of a Meaningful Name as well, as the benevolent and helpful Edden, Olympia and Valhalla are named after places where good gods dwell, along with souls of righteous men, while the villainous Naraka is named after a Buddhist hell.
• Resources Management Gameplay: As is standard for the genre, but is especially true for Alloy (which you need to repair the hull) and Food (which stops your people from committing mutiny due to starvation).
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Due to the power loaders that come standard with the workshop.
• Run or Die: Dealing with the Piranesi in Chapter 4 amounts to this. The Tiqqun has no weaponry and no way to engage the Piranesi, which had previously destroyed the UN's ark ship the Etemenanki, in an open fight. So the chapter consists of fleeing the Piranesi as it pursues you throughout the system until you find a way to deal with it.
• Scenery Porn: The outside view of the Tiqqun is accurate to its position within the system, with each of the stellar bodies it can orbit viewable in this mode. The movements between locations are especially good eye-candy if you switch to the exterior view during the journeys.
• Secret Test of Character: In each of the three Ashtagnite temples you can explore to prove your worth to them. Deciding to explore any further than you have to after having already found your goal results in the entire science team being killed, inevitably in an ironic fashion that implies a misunderstanding of the temple's "lesson" (which may well be the work of the Ashtangites' Sufficiently Advanced Technology somehow "punishing" their ignorance):
  • In the Temple of Merit (where they're supposed to cast away the illusion of self-worth), the entire team ends up killing each other over a valuable Ashtangite artifact, as they each become convinced it is vitally important to their status in one fashion or other.
  • In the Temple of Free Will (where they're supposed to cast away the illusion thereof), the entire team ends up getting killed because they start acting rebelliously for the sake of it even when it makes no sense.
  • In the Temple of Common Sense (where they're supposed to cast away the illusion of it in favor of true rationality), the entire team is killed because they collectively decide to perform some form of Violation of Common Sense because they suddenly decide the situation is hopeless.
• Shout-Out: Celestial bodies in the second chapter reference characters as well as cars seen in the Mad Max franchise.
• Space Clouds: There are two types of "space cloud" that can prove hazardous to your crew: ice-cold fields which can kill anyone doing EVA work while inside it, and electrical storms that can destroy ships passing through it.
• Space Station: The Tiqqun is a toroidal space station with a slow rotation that allows for the creation of its Artificial Gravity, while also being able to travel through space. This is also true of the Protagoras, or at least, it was.
• Space Isolation Horror: The only surviving humans are crammed into a mothership that is constantly running out of food and about to fall apart. For the first few chapters, the only signs of human life are derelicts full of corpses...
• Super Prototype: Averted: the Tiqqun was never supposed to be the savior of humanity, but rather a testing platform for the VOHLE engine and idea of interstellar travel. It's only due to a malfunction of the engine, as well as a Time Skip, that you end up having to basically write your own mission objectives; the Protagoras was supposed to be the completed version based on your testing. This means that a lot of your systems were never meant to be used long term.
• Timed Mission:
  • Staying in a system for too long adds a hit to station morale that stays until you move out. In addition, you will eventually run out of mineable resources, requiring you to move on in order to not run out of essential hull-repairing alloy.
  • In chapter 4, the Piranesi will begin to flood the system you're in with clouds of drones which are programmed to disassemble the Tiqqun. While you can buy yourself some time by researching a special technology which slows down the drones when the Tiqqun stops in a cloud of them, if you don't find a way to stop the Piranesi, between all you have to do to avoid its attacks and having nowhere in the system to stop which isn't infested by drones, your ability to repair the Tiqqun will eventually be outpaced by the drones' damage, resulting in the station's destruction.
  • In chapter 5, when the Piranesi enters the final system, it will proceed to glass and consume both habitable planets in the system, starting with the planet you chose not to colonize. If you can't complete the colonization steps for your chosen planet and turning the Tiqqun into a bomb once all personnel are evacuated before the Piranesi completes its meal, you get a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • In general, after your first jump (from the Prologue into Chapter 1), the Tiqqun is constantly degrading. The VOHLE/IXION engine stresses the ship to desperate degrees, reducing the maximum integrity of the Tiqqun each time it's used and allowing you to see that there's a maximum of 5 chapters, since another jump would destroy the ship outright. In addition, opening new sectors, which is required, will cause the ship to start falling apart without regular maintenance using alloys, which are created from iron, of which there is a limited amount in the game^note Even turning waste into iron, which is not an efficient use of resources anyway, will eventually run out, as waste isn't infinite. Opening all six sectors without the ability to pay for the upkeep will eventually result in the Tiqqun falling apart no matter what you do.
• Transhuman: The Ashtangites are radical transhumanists who seek to not only change themselves biologically but socially, psychologically and philosophically in a grand redefinition of "humanity" — seeking to cast aside what they see as the great "illusions" of self-worth, common-sense and free will in order to become a holistic part of the ecosystem. On the physical side, this involves becoming tall, spindly humanoids with green skin (so they can save food by photosynthesizing), massive lungs (so they don't waste oxygen), enormous eyes and Electronic Telepathy that lets them share thoughts and feelings as a society.
• United Nations Is a Superpower: The prologue establishes that the United Nations in 2049 has apparently developed its own space exploration initiatives, possessing a research station on Mars and an abandoned lunar outpost, and is in competition with DOLOS Corporation due to the latter's unwillingness to share the secrets of its spaceflight advances. In the Time Skip between the prologue and Chapter 1 they become an outright ecofascist One World Order to deal with the global catastrophe caused by the Tiqqun's disastrous test launch, becoming embroiled in a bitter interstellar war against DOLOS and the Black Market Society before collapsing entirely.
• Villainous Glutton: The very first conversation you have with Battista, he's audibly chewing over the comms, instantly characterizing him as a selfish, gluttonous person who places his own instant gratification over others' respect. Sure enough, he ends up taking advantage of the Lunaclysm to become the leader of the Black Market Society, living in unimaginable luxury in space while humanity goes extinct. Even further adding to the symbolism, it's his consciousness that becomes the basis for Naraka, the Piranesi's AI, whose sole purpose in existence is to endlessly devour.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The members of the Marduk Council legitimately, honestly all believe that they're the only ones who know what's best for mankind and may even be right in that it wouldn't survive without their guidance. However, they're so arrogantly convinced that they're willing to possibly deliberately trigger the Lunaclysm, triggering a slow and horrible end for the vast majority of human civilization, just so they have the opportunity to realize their own vision of a perfect society on some distant planet where there'd be nobody questioning their ideas. This callousness is what had Naomi, the human used as the basis for Edden, doubting them to the point of sabotaging the project in the first place.
• What Did You Expect When You Named It ____?: Edden insists that planet Romulus is nothing more than a hallucination, despite the presence of another planet Remus in the same system. Theme naming means that one should expect the former when the latter has been known about since chapter 1, and the player is tipped off that this planet is as important as Remus..
• You Lose at Zero Trust: If trust in the administrator (increased or decreased by station stability and various events) drops to zero, the people mutiny and oust you from your position, causing a game over. This is reflected in the demise of Protagoras, as UN agents successfully agitated its crew into uprising, and the rebels collaborated with Etemenanki to bring down Protagoras from within.

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